Chinese New Year, Suzhou, and some fantastic weather

So we had the Chinese New Year on February 14th, and this was like nothing I've ever seen before. After being fairly disappointed with the fact that our trip to South (and North, if we had it our way) Korea was canceled, we at least had this to look forward to. Like I said before, there are fireworks everywhere in this city. Like serious, display style fireworks, ridiculously large and loud and explosive. These people are literally lighting them off at all times during the day, in the middle of the street. It's completely ridiculous, they are incredibly loud and dangerous and there are just firework scraps flying around everywhere. On the eve of the New Year, we were at a fairly crowded bar, and there was a torrential snow storm going on outside. This didn't stop anyone from lighting fireworks off though, and as the hour counted down we went outside and had a huge snowball fight, along with more fireworks.

A couple days after this, a group of 8 of us decided to get out of Hangzhou and do a little traveling. We went to Suzhou, about and hour and a half west of here, and basically just walked around the city and saw some cool gardens. Stayed at a pretty cool hostel, and had a wizard battle with roman candles outside of it at around 3 in the morning. The people at the hostel thought we were mental. After debating for a while over where we would go next, we decided to head to Shanghai. Only problem was that when we got to the hostel we couldn't stay because Pat and I didn't have our passports, so we hung out around the city and took a late train back to Hangzhou.

Since last Thursday we've been having some great weather. It was really getting to me, these past few months, the weather's been straight out of a cold war propaganda movie, just miserable. So having the sun out and it being around 75 was a great breath of fresh air. We've just been going down to the lake and walking around, hiked up a couple mountains as well. Definitely makes me realize why I like it here