WHO BRINGS A CHICKEN ON A TRAIN???

Woke up a bit early for my liking, ate a fairly strange breakfast at the hotel and headed for the train station. Got ourselves some tickets to hangzhou, a city 2 hours away from shanghai, rumoured to be one of China’s most scenic spots. The boys had big hopes of continuing on to suzhou, which is famous for producing(?) beautiful women. The train was pretty good, took about two hours. Dennis had a window seat and proceeded to take a nap as soon as he sat down. Rodrigo and I were chatting away, when I heard an odd sound. I was pretty sure it was a chicken. Now, this was an express train – a pretty nice train – albeit humid. WHO BRINGS A CHICKEN ON A TRAIN? The people in front me, that’s who! I was freaked out for the rest of the ride, cause the girl was coughing a lot and I really didn’t want to catch the avian flu! We tried really hard to see the chicken before getting off, to no avail. Seriously though, you can’t bring a chicken on a train.
Hangzhou is really beautiful and has a giant lake called XiHu (west Lake) in the middle. We walked around quite a bit of it, saw some turtle, ate some dumplings, got approached by little kids who wanted to speak English…nice place. Went to the tomb of general yue.
On the way back, our train wasn’t as nice as the morning one, and turned out 3 hours later that it was not the express. We were soooo hungry and grumpy when we arrived in Shanghai, that we went out for Turkish food, had a couple of beers and hit the sack. Best sleep ever!