Well, Toni said it best – “I don’t miss being able to do something until it’s not longer an option”. Well, being able to go out and buy a few books is one of those things. English fiction is a particularly rare breed of book in HangZhou, and what can be found is scarcely an abundance of choice – which is quite normal in a non-English speaking country (naturally).
On Sunday we took a taxi ride out to the MIXC centre – we’ve previously been earlier in the year – and made our way to the recently opened Page One bookstore. I’d heard that in Shanghai, the Page One has a good selection of the aforementioned English literature. Not so at MIXC in HangZhou. Whilst the store had a – literal – abundance of English books on art, design, marketing, self help and other non-fiction topics, we couldn’t locate any novels.
Despite this minor setback, I decided to buy a really good (and thick/heavy) glossy book on the art and architecture of Rome (from ancient to modern day). It covers all of the sights you’d expect and more. I’m almost 100% sure it would have cost a fair few pennies back at home, but here in HZ, I was less than AU $40 which seemed quite fair. Some of the books on digital SLR photography were far in excess of that price range, and were half the size.
With the ice skating rink closed (reason: unknown) and with a fairly blasé session in Ole supermarket we had a quick lunch/afternoon tea at the local Japanese Ramen (service was appallingly slow, our “hot pots” came out as a mild “warm”) and then decided to return to the lake.
We had ourselves dropped off at Nanshan Lu (lake side; home to dealerships for Rolls Royce, Ferrari, Maserati, Mercedes and Porche to name but a few) where we tried to buy a second bike card for the series of community bikes which can be rented across the city for an unbelievably cheap price. A woman at the bike area tried to rip us off 20 Yuan (we even enquired about the card in passable Mandarin, to boot!), so we decided to pursue a second bike card another time.
So we ended up at the newly opened 18-hole mini putt putt golf, which is upstairs and indoors a short walk from lake side. The course was quite imaginative given the limited space they had to work with. There were a number of holes featuring animated obstacles, and many which required a good strategy and decent touch with the putter. We played a round each before breaking and reading the latest copy of That’s Zhejiang magazine. Our friend from trivia, John, had a bit of a short feature in this months’ edition.
I found the location of the “Foreign Language Bookstore” on Fengqi lu (lu kou Yan’an Lu) so we hopped a cab up there to check it out. My, what an excellent range of English fiction! We were amazed at the great range and variety. The prices varied, but most of the books were in the 40-80 Yuan per book range (except for hardbacks and glossies). There was also a comprehensive range of language books (in English) and guide books for HangZhou, Shanghai and Zhejiang. The place is a real find!
Toni picked up four new novels, and I walked out with two new books, plus the aforementioned book on Rome from MIXC/PageOne. We jumped a cab back to home and retired for the night with a nice bowl of minestrone and toast 🙂