Hangzhou - ~1.5 hrs SSW of Shanghai by train

Hangzhou is pretty well-known in China (I just learned about a folk tale set there), primarily for West Lake (left), a large lake just west of downtown, and Longjing (Dragon Well) tea. Foodwise, it's most famous for its pork belly dish and beggar's chicken, so with multiple meals scheduled there, clearly those would have to be on the slate.
(BTW, a warning for the squeamish: some pictures below feature food looking like the animal it is. Don't say I didn't warn you.)
Pork belly

This is the first dish most Hangzhou tourist guides talk about. It's supposed to be a red cube of pork belly, slow-braised in wine. It's reputed to be smooth, so tender that it falls apart on your chopsticks, and allows the fat to melt in your mouth without tasting oily.
The pork belly we tried did not live up to these expectations. Here's the view from above. Hmm, looks like it's a little overdone, perhaps.

Not falling off any chopsticks, either. Check out that layer of fat, or rather, the thin layer of meat between the small and large layers of fat. I mean, I'm a big fan of bacon, but that seemed a little daunting. Still, I was ready to try it. Only my aunts had by this time noticed that the meat was not at all warm, so they sent all of our portions back to be reheated (or exchanged for something fresher).

Apparently the kitchen chose to shove the pork in the microwave, because when it came back the pot was hot, and it looked like this. In case you can't tell from the photo, there's a clear layer of oil (the missing layer of fat) on top of the wine sauce. Mmmmm. Needless to say, my one nibble was not enough to persuade me to keep testing this dish. Sadly, we tried this again at another restaurant the same day, with only slightly better results. One of my uncles insists that if you eat at the right place, it's delicious, but I am thus far not impressed.
Beggar's chicken

We fared a lot better with the beggar's chicken. It's a chicken stuffed with herbs and spices and wrapped in lotus leaf (or cellophane), which is then packed in mud/clay and baked at low temperature. Our chicken was brought out to be broken in front of us. I thought the big ball of clay looked like a cocoon, or one of those eggs from Alien. I'm sure my lunch companions were glad that I kept those thoughts to myself. Here comes the mallet (and disembodied hand) to release the chicken.

Brush off the clay and undo the string...

Off with the lotus leaves...
At this point, I felt like I was watching someone open one of those presents that features a box inside a box, inside a box, etc.

Even under all those layers, it doesn't really look that great. Might be something about being trussed up and packed in clay for hours. It was yummy, though -- tender, juicy, nice light flavor. These are all good things in a cooked chicken, IMHO.
Other dishes (not specific to Hangzhou, but eaten there)

We did eat other stuff. In fact, we ate a lot of other stuff -- sometimes my family overorders. In one instance, we had ten (10!) dishes for four people. And none of us is Shaq. As it turned out in that case, at least four of the dishes weren't very good, so it worked out, more or less (and dishes here aren't generally the size of US portions; when I say 10 dishes, probably half of those are appetizers, but still) -- I don't know whether that was the intention behind the overordering, or just coincidence. Either way, more pictures for all of you.

Above, lotus root with sticky rice. It's not my favorite. I found the red sauce to be too sweet, and the lotus root, while not bad-tasting, not interesting enough to warrant a whole plate. As far as cold appetizers go, I far prefer pickled jellyfish (left). Jellyfish is actually pretty easy to get in the US, but if you've never had it, it's kind of noodly-smooth on the outside, with a cartilage-crunchiness in the middle when you bite into it. I used to describe it to people as crunchy gummy bears, but that's not actually accurate -- jellyfish is not nearly as chewy, and it's sour/vinegary rather than sweet.

This dish definitely won best presentation (well, maybe tied with the chicken, since that involved action). It's strips of winter melon, delivered in a vase of ice. Nifty. Tastes pretty good, too.

This dish is called squirrel fish in English. I'm not really sure why, but someone recently conjectured (when I had it again in Shanghai) that it's because it's a dish with pine nuts (and is known as such in Chinese). The fish is flayed, breaded, and deep-fried, and is probably the closest thing to American-Chinese sweet-and-sour-X that I've had here. All of those curls coming from the mid-section are the bits of flayed fish -- kind of like fishsticks, but resembling that Chili's onion-ring dish (I can't remember what it's called -- onion rose? onion cactus? Do they still do that? I think the last time I had one was in 1994). This one is topped with sauteed shrimp and peas; other places I've had it, it's been accompanied by bell pepper, onion, and pineapple. In general, I think it's pretty good (this particular one was not that great -- overdone), but I like fish pretty much any way it's cooked, so to me it seems like an awful lot of trouble for not that much increased return. I bet it would go over well in the US, though. So there you have it. I have to say that Hangzhou was pretty disappointing to me foodwise, but them's the breaks. I would be open to trying "good" pork belly again... just not the stuff I actually had while there.