Sunday - Heidi had a lot of homework assignments to grade so we bike back to the Foreign Bookstore and she settled into a booth in the coffee shop and I roamed the streets looking for Photo opportunities. I only had mild success, The area where the bookstore is is a very upscale area, I had a feeling that the good shots were down the alleys but I wasn't comfortable going down the alleys on my own so I stuck to the main streets. I uploaded those photos the other day already so you'll have seen my partial success. I did, however, manage to get a photo of the setup of the mechanic who freed our bikes the other day! After about an hour of roaming, I joined Heidi in the coffee shop and read my book and wrote some for the blog (good thing to because apparently it rained during this time).
We opted to take the long way around the lake to get home and since we were biking right past it anyway, why not go up the Leifeng Pagoda (it was on my to do list). Turned out to be perfect timing, it was not stupid busy and the weather was perfect - we even had blue skies! We had great views from the pagoda and the history and the legends were all very interesting as well.
After the pagoda we stopped for a bowl of fresh fruit and then biked along the causeway which is THE thing to do at West Lake. Heidi remembers it being very busy and full of vendors but instead it was busy but not too busy and there were no vendors so it was a rather nice, quiet ride, very tranquil. And then you get to the end of the causeway and you are thrown into full blown mayhem - traffic, people, souvenir stalls, restaurants, flashing lights...
Monday - Our big adventure on Monday was to find where to catch the shuttle bus to the airport for our trip to Xi'an on Thursday. Our original plan was to bike to the shuttle bus but seeing it on Monday we realized that there wasn't really a good place to leave our bikes so we decided to see if we could sort out which city bus to take. So most of the day was spent researching transportation for Thursday. When I downloaded the photos just now I discovered the only photo I have of the day is Heidi eating lunch :-D
Tuesday - Tuesday was a non-day. The students had an exam Tuesday morning and Heidi spent the rest of the day marking the exam with breaks for food and coffee runs. I went on a couple of photo walks but nothing very inspiring. We had storms all morning and the humidity is very high so my camera lens was fogging up again. We joined the other prof and her family for dinner. It was a nice restaurant, close to campus, it had pictures on the menu so you would have thought we would have been more successful than other times but the food that came didn't exactly look like the photos. Oh well, it all tasted good and it made for good entertainment!
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