Pictures linked at bottom.
This weekend CEA had a trip to Suzhou planned for us. We left Shanghai Normal at 7:30ish and took a taxi to East China Normal University where we met with the other CEA students to get on a bus to Suzhou. It was about a 2-3 hour ride before we reached our first tourist attraction site.
First up was the Suzhou Museum, which was ok. I’m not really one of those people who spend a good 5-10 minutes at each object on display reading all the descriptions so I got bored kind of quick. It mainly consisted of old relics and stuff from Suzhou. The jade section was pretty cool though.
After that we went to get lunch. We were suppose to do a group lunch but couldn’t find a restaurant big enough for our party so the director dude just told us to go get lunch ourselves and meet back in half an hour. We went to a noodle place which was pretty good. They gave us a lot of noodles for such a small price and we got a pretty sweet table right in front of the AC.
We went to the Humble Administrator’s Garden after lunch. The tour guide and our director dude was telling us about different parts and plants of the garden but I stopped paying attention pretty quick. I don’t think I have a very large attention span for chinglish in this heat lol. And after awhile all parts of the garden looked pretty much the same anyways. I have to say it was a very pretty garden. Though the huge crowd kind of ruins it. It’s hard to enjoy the scenery with a hundred sweaty people pushing up on you.
The whole tour was about an hour long which was a pretty long walk and not entirely pleasant in the heat. If I wasn’t on a tour with a group I would have liked to just sit in a nice shaded area for a bit and enjoy the view.
I felt bad for Zhu Ge Laoshi, the grad student who helps us out with daily living on campus. One of the students from East China wasn’t feeling well and she had to take her to the hotel and wasn’t able to go on the tour in the gardens with us. I really didn’t feel like that was her responsibility. This other lady from East China is suppose to be in charge of them and Zhu Ge is in charge of us from Shanghai Normal so I didn’t really think it was fair for her to miss out on the garden to bring that girl back.
After the gardens we went on a boat tour on the City Moat or I think it was the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal. I’m not really sure (just looking at the trip description packet they gave us right now). By that time I had a pretty big headache and the boat ride just kind of made me nauseous, which sucks because I usually like boat rides and this one would have been cool. We got to see all the houses and stuff built on the canal – it was a bit like Venice I guess, but Chinese.
We finally went to the hotel after that and had dinner. We were on our own for dinner so us students from Shanghai Normal walked down the street to find a place. Can’t say there was much that looked too promising. We ended up at this noodle/dumpling place. Zhu Ge ordered for us and at this point in time my head was hurting and I was tired so I wasn’t going to try to speak Mandarin or anything. I was speaking to her in English the whole time and I heard the guy at the register asked what I was and as we walked up the stairs everyone in the restaurant was muttering and going, “Ying wen, ying wen” (English).
After dinner Zhu Ge kind of got into an accident walking back to the hotel. Out front some cars had parked really close to the front and there was a bus parked right behind them so we were trying to squeeze between a plant and a car. Well the plant was pretty strong and sort of pushed Zhu Ge over when she tried to get through it and she ended up hurting her ankle and wasn’t able to make it to the next event either. It wasn’t broken or sprained (I think) but she couldn’t walk very well. Can’t say the trip went all that great for her.
Around 7 we went on a tour of the Master of Nets Garden which was in this traditional Chinese house/compound where we walked through several rooms to watch different acts. The traditional music was nice but the plays were just kind of eh since we couldn’t really understand them anyways lol. The director was trying to translate as it went but it was only some parts he did so it still didn’t make a ton of sense lol.
After we finally got to go back to the hotel. It was a pretty nice hotel I guess. The bathroom was a bit odd. It was all glass lol. Most parts had sort of.. what is it? Fuzzed up glass so you can’t see through it and the part that was clear had a curtain (on the outside so people can still push it aside to peek) to hide you from view. No lock on the door either lol. Oh, but they did have a soap and shampoo dispenser which was cool. Other than that it was a pretty standard hotel. We had a hard time figuring out the AC controls (all in Chinese) but after pressing random buttons we eventually got it to work.
In the morning we had breakfast at the hotel. It was a Chinese breakfast which I don’t think the others really enjoyed. I have to admit I kind of just wanted something plain as well. I would have had more of the congee but I didn’t want to pee a ton later. It was funny – they had one area closed off only to foreigners. They had other foods there like toast and eggs (but cold) and stuff. It was all pretty oily though and I didn’t really want that much oil in the morning.
We went to the silk factory after check out. It was pretty cool. They showed us the silk mulberry trees, the silk works eating the mulberry leaves, the cocoons, the cooking of the cocoons (felt a bit sorry for the worms here) and the unraveling of the silk. Then there was an area where they show how they prepare the bigger cocoons (when two silk worms spin one cocoon around both of them) to make silk quilts.
There was a shop at the end after (of course) where you could buy silk products. Laurel bought like 3 quilts but those are pretty expensive. And real silk or not, all the bags and clothes and stuff just looked too touristy for me (and also really expensive).
Our final stop was Luzhi water town. It’s a pretty nice little town (though also touristy) and I liked looking around it but the bathrooms where raunchy. Anna and Caroline went to the one outside of the museums and told us that it was pretty much a crack in the ground with short walls in front and behind of you (none on the sides) and that the crack/ditch was just filled with poop and pads and stuff people dropped. No wonder you could smell them from the outside. I was too scared to use it after that and waited to see if there was one in the first museum we went to. Lucky me there was.
The first museum we visited was a compound that used to be a rice factory place back in the day. I found a bathroom there that still smelled pretty raunchy but was just a normal squatty potty. I think it only smelled so bad because it wasn’t ventilated at all and in that heat I’m sure the stink just magnified. I didn’t think I’d find better so I just stuffed tissue up my nose and went lol.
The next museum we went to was the main house compound which was pretty big. I love these old compound houses and would love to live in something like that (but more modern of course). I just think its kind of cool to have different apartments and stuff. Though I suppose spatially it’s not really possible nowadays unless you buy land somewhere in the middle of nowhere.
Anyways, it turns out Margaret’s great grandma used to live in that house (whose family also owned the rice factory place) years ago. It must have been pretty cool for her to go see it.
After that we got some freetime to shop a bit. I got this embroidered portrait for 50 yuan. I almost feel bad getting it that cheap (under 10 bucks USD) since its really nicely done and its a pretty good size. I mean if you bought something like that online or at a fancy store it’d probably cost a ton. One of the guys asked the store dude who made it and he pointed to his wife, which made me feel more bad for bargaining since they were so nice lol. This is why I suck at bargaining.