Chinese New Year

As mentioned in the last post, our house sale hit a few road bumps that affected our travel plans.   We had given power of attorney to a family member, that the title company decided wasn’t good enough. So we had to scramble in China during the busiest holiday, where 5 million people are traveling home and businesses are closed, some times for weeks at a time.  This involved embassy appointments, that couldn’t be kept because there was no available way to travel to the embassy.  Panic that we would have to travel home for the closing, which would cost us thousands of dollars.

We were given a suggestion to try a new concept, Notarize.com, an online notary company that is authorized to notarize documents over the internet that are legal and valid in the state of Virginia and any state that will accept other states notarizations.

We decided to take our weekend trip anyway, because we could all use a break and not counting trips to visit family or business trips for Mark’s conferences that we tag along on, we haven’t had a family vacation in years.  So we picked up Alex at school on his last day before break, and took a cab to Wuzhen again. We had such a great time the first time, we wanted to see it at night, when it is the most beautiful.

I found us a cute little boutique hotel just outside the park, with the nicest owner ever. She offered to pick us up at the train station, drove us into the park, picked us up,  went above and beyond to make it a good trip.

It started off beautifully, we waited for a ferry to take us across to the fun area of the park- and while one the ferry, we got our first view of the lights.

Alex stopped at the same corn stand that we had gone to last time, and this time he also got some tea boiled eggs.  He enjoyed them more than I thought he would.

 

We walked straight in and made a beeline for the Full Moon Restaurant that we had gone to the first time.

We had the same delicious fish (that we were too excited eating to take a picture of) , green xiaolongbao that Alex ate most of, something called Shanghai soup, a duck and rice dish, and crab cake sticks.  It was a phenomenal meal.

After that huge meal, we had to walk it all off around the park. There were lots of people around, and all the lights were lit. It had such a fun atmosphere.

We even managed to find a Caffe Bene, a coffee shop we used to go to in Illinois.

It was time to start heading out of the park and back to the hotel, with plans to come back the next day and do some more exploring.

Unfortunately, the next day didn’t happen. Because we had to run around trying to find witnesses that spoke English we had to come back to the university a day early.  The plus side is that we ended up getting all the paperwork signed and turned in through notarize.com. They were a great company to do business with and we will use them again if we ever need to.

We did make it back it to Wuzhen (to collect our stuff from the hotel and check out) and had a really wonderful dinner in a local restaurant.  We walked over there and found them on the Chinese yelp Dianping.

We ordered things by pictures and by what we could translate on the phone app. Alex informed us afterwards that one thing we had ordered was Stinky Tofu, because he had learned that at school.

After dinner we walked around an old town area that was really neat to see. Lots of little stores and restaurants.

 

The next post is going to be about our trip to Shanghai, it’ll be in two parts. 🙂