Day Two: Suzhou

For the second day of our Shanghai weekend, we decided to take a day trip to nearby Suzhou.  Suzhou is one of the oldest cities in a country of very old cities, and it's famous for its canals and classical gardens.  It's also easy to get to by train from Shanghai--just an hour away.  I'd been twice before, and considered visiting another water town nearby, but that would have necessitated taking a tourist bus, and I much prefer trains.

We got to the train station in the morning, and went to buy tickets before looking for breakfast.  I was pleasantly surprised to discover they've replaced the long wall of ticket windows with a room full of automated ticket machines.  (The last time I went to Suzhou, with Daniel, getting tickets was more work.  I wrote about it here.)  I was disappointed, however, that all of the soft-seat tickets for the train we wanted were sold out.  Our options were to buy a "seatless" ticket--for the hard-seat cars where more tickets are sold than there are seats, or hard-sleeper tickets.  We went with the hard-sleeper tickets.  We grabbed some breakfast from a dumpling restaurant, and headed for the train.  I was glad everyone was sitting on the bottom bunks rather than being territorial about which tickets were for the upper bunks.

It was a quick and comfortable train ride.  When we got to Suzhou, we waded through the throngs of people trying to sell us tours and souvenirs, grabbed a map, and decided to head first to one of the more famous gardens--the Master of the Nets Garden.  

The small lake in the center of the garden is the highlight, but there are all kinds of smaller spaces tucked away in between different rooms and buildings that surround this area; each new turn reveals a new landscape.  It's one of the goals of classic Chinese gardens--to make a small space seem much larger than it is through clever placement of rooms, rocks, windows, and walls.

After walking through the garden, and bargaining for a backpack for Mike in the tourist market outside the gate, we headed off to visit another garden, one I'd never seen before.  We were enjoying the gorgeous weather, and wanted to see a bit of Suzhou along the way.  It's an interesting city.

We stopped on the way for a quick lunch--one of my brother Daniel's favorite treats (and the only street food  he would eat), what he called "Muslim bread."  It's a specialty of the Uigher ethnic group from northwest China.  Mike and I also had a lamb skewer with a spice mix from that region.  Yummy!

After our lunch, we visited the Blue Wave Pavilion garden.  

After walking around the grounds and enjoying the scenery for a while, we headed for the bus stop, to catch a bus for Tiger Hill.  I'd never been here either, and I'm really glad we went--it turned out to be a beautiful place.  The road leading up to the park (called the "tourist zone" on local maps) was lined with vendors and street food.  And people.  It was Saturday, and crowded.  The pedi-cab drivers were out drumming up business; one saw my foreign face and headed straight for us.  He must have been really eager for the work (or else he thought he'd get top dollar for the ride, since everyone knows foreigners pay more) because he followed us for a few minutes, poking a confused Mike in the arm and trying, in Chinese, to get us to accept a ride.  "Hey, hey, I'll take you up to the pagoda.  It's a long walk, you know--you should let me just drive you. It's really comfortable, just get in.  Come on!"  We ignored him and kept walking.  "Hey, do you even understand what I'm saying?  [speaking to Mike]  You don't understand me?  Really?  What kind of Chinese person doesn't speak Chinese?!"  At this point, I was almost doubled over laughing, and I told the guy in Chinese that my husband doesn't speak Chinese because he isn't Chinese.  Hehe.

I spotted more than one bare baby bottom.  (For more on baby bottoms, see this blog post by Daniel from our 2006 trip.  Click on the title for the picture.  I also wrote about the phenomenon here.)

We couldn't walk down a whole street of street food without partaking of course.  I picked out a dish I'd been craving--cold hand-cut noodles with cucumbers and spicy sauce.  Mmmmmmm.

The park was crowded, but really beautiful.  The weather was, as I mentioned, gorgeous, and it we had a great time walking around and taking in the sights.

The park's main attraction is the 150 ft. Yunyan Pagoda.  My photograph isn't crooked--in the thousand years since it was built, the foundation of the pagoda has apparently shifted, and two of the internal support columns have cracked, causing the whole thing to tilt a few degrees.

I thought the bonsai garden was pretty too.  It reminded me of the Potted Plant Garden in Yangzhou, where I did part of my research in 2006.  Daniel missed out on that one--he was too busy watching DVDs in the room.  I wrote about it here.

Back from a day of wandering, we were happy to get into our new room at the hotel and relax.