2nd day in China:
2. 杭州 靈隱寺 doctor (致遠) (14th)
TAXI
We woke up the next day, getting ready to check out, and found out that we were uninformed of the fact that internet costs. It costed us an extra $90 RMB which is actually quite a lot, for one night of connection. Unimpressed we were, we took a Taxi to our 2nd hotel. Taxi here isn’t too bad, and is considered a high-profile job. It’s a serious one and they’re among higher-ranked earners. They could loose their license if they do anything against the rules. We arrived in the 2nd hotel, 4 stars but $300-ish RMB. It seemed a much better room and we were sure the broadband was free.
THE TEMPLE (LING-IN TEMPLE)
We went to a temple which is famous for a monk who apparently did so much good deeds that he was made a god. (in case you don’t know much about Asian religions, if you act like a saint your whole life then you may become a god after you die). It’s actually a confined area of old buildings and arts etc, and we saw lots of religious stone carvings on natural caves with poems written by famous ppl also carved into the stones. The temple itself is just layers and layers of buildings built on a slope, and unfortunately, again, one of the buildings was closed for maintenance - maybe it’s coz it’s winter so they try to do all these during the low seasons.
RESTAURANT AT HOTEL
The interesting thing about food here, as I’ve come to realise, is that they’re cheap and big - very big. You usually order about 3 dishes and that’s already too much for 3 ppl. (Anyone don’t know what Asian styled cooking’s like?) For 3-4 dishes with rice and drink is about $73 RMB, which is say...about $12 NZD. That’s for 3 ppl’s dinner. We couldn’t even finish it.
We had lunch and dinner at the restaurant provided by the hotel. It’s actually quite nice, and cheap, for a hotel like this.
BROTHER’S SICKNESS
By this stage, brother has come down with this crazy sickness. It seemed like he felt bloated all the time and sometimes with vomiting feeling but never really vomited. He couldn’t eat anything much, we had to bring him just boiled porridge with nothing but a little salt in it everytime while father and I had dishes after dishes. We suspected that it’s from the water he drank from the first so-called 5-star hotel. You can drink water straight out of the tap here, so you have to drink bottled water. Obviously, there are more than one brand of water here, and it seemed that the brand that hotel provided wasn’t particularly clean. It apparently tasted a little salty, like it’s from the sea, but he didn’t think much of it as he assumed that that’s the way it should taste, so he had half a bottle at once. By night, we thought it was best that we took him to the doctor’s to make sure, as we already prepared some medicine from our Pharmacist friend in Taiwan but wasn’t too sure if that’s what we should feed him.
THE HOSPITAL
We walked for about 15 min before we got there, at around 7:30pm at night, 0 degrees outside, and thousands of ppl just walking around - something you’d never see in NZ. When we finally got to the hospital, the place looked like a market place. It was packed with hundreds of ppl, and although it says no smoking in there with the sign and everything, ppl still walk around smoking and I had to walk elsewhere several times to avoid the unbearable smell. Father registered first, with our passport, then he was referred to a room. There’s a alley and down it has several rooms, a room for internal problems, external problems, kids room, it’s like a mini hospital and each level is reduced to one room. He was sent to the internal room, and we queue up ”inside” the room, well it’s more like crammed in and you have to go ”me next me next!” and shove yourself forward to the doctor to be looked at next. There are 2 doctors per room/section, and although it doesn’t look very orderly, the doctors are very detailed and careful. They spend a good amount of time making sure he’s got everything down and he didn’t miss anything, then you get blood tested in the testing room down the alley way, which you only need to pay in advance and you’d get your result in 5 min (unlike NZ where you have to call back the next day to find out!) and then you take your result back to the doctor you saw, and he will diagnose you.
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