Click on images below to enlarge:
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| Breakfast at Zhiweiguan
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| Good soup dumplings with pork and crab. Although it's hard to tell from
the picture, these are the size of a fist -- so big that they're hard to
eat, and I'm experienced with eating soup dumplings that sometimes need two
or three bites. These needed more.
| An movie showing (if you look carefully) the liquid sloshing around inside
a dumpling as I jiggled it.
| Boring wontons in a boring broth. Inexplicably, Di Yin thought they were
excellent.
Incidentally, this restaurant started as a wonton shop.
| Snails. The liquid (barely visible at the bottom of the bowl, but it
resided within each shell as well) infused them with some heat/spiciness.
However, I wasn't into them.
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| West Lake
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| A big showy fountain in the West Lake. The sprays turned and changed in
time to music.
| | A movie showing the fountains in action. Play it with sound to see that
the spray gets higher as the music gets more excited.
| A movie (again with sound) of the central fountain (not visible in any of
the previous pictures). It does some pretty cool things; I'd probably
have rated this video excellent if I hadn't made the mistaken of taking it
at a low resolution. :(
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| The boat we took to Three Pools Mirroring the Moon island. Riding on the
lake felt like we were coasting, no waves or anything.
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| Three Pools Mirroring the Moon Island / Xiaoying Island
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| One of the pools on Three Pools Mirroring the Moon island / Xiaoying
Island.
| Many small fish in the pool.
| An attractive building by the same pool.
| Boats on the West Lake, along with two pagodas in the lake that are
traditionally lit by candles on the Mid-Autumn Festival.
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| A typically beautiful walkway around the island.
| A bridge that crosses one of the ponds.
| Looking across another pond on the island. Lots of willow trees on the
other side.
| I loved the red on these trees when viewed through my sunglasses. Sadly,
this picture didn't quite capture it.
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| Another sample walkway on the island. I realized I was missing a shot
of walking paths so grabbed this literally as I walked in the line to
get on the boat. I didn't have time to stop and aim because there
were people behind me. It truly is a random picture of an arbitrary
path on the island.
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| Gushan Island / Zhongshan Park
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| Yue Fei Temple.
| The main entrance to Zhongshan Park on Gushan Island.
| From atop a hill in Zhongshan Park, looking down steps toward another part
of the West Lake.
| A cute set of zig-zag stone steps.
Incidentally, the man in the distance was fun and friendly and took a good
picture of Di Yin and I.
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Near here, we saw many people playing cards. I wish I was one.
| One of the two mid-lake pavilions (islands), and, beyond that, Three Pools
Mirroring the Moon island (which we previously visited), and, finally, the
far side of the lake and the Leifeng Pagoda.
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| North-West of Lake
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| Yours truly with a statue of a Chinese scholar. High resolution.
Excellent.
| Ditto, which I guess makes it also excellent?
Like the
previous picture, the angle of my head doesn't mirror the statue's as I
had intended, but the picture is nevertheless good.
| Colorful flowers. I took this mainly to show that not everything by the
lake was green.
| A portrait of gardens.
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| Yet another pathway, this one along west side of the West Lake.
| An inlet. Sure, it's no Tarrytown
reservoir during fall, but it's still pretty.
| Lots of flowers and landscaping in this large traffic island. Yes, I
captioned this correctly: it's a traffic island.
| A series of bridges, seen as we looked east toward the lake.
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