Suzhou Part III

Thursday in Suzhou– another beautiful day

The Humble Administrators Garden was first stop on our tour. It was built in the 1500’s, by a retired imperial inspector Wang Xianchen. He got the name for the garden from an essay called "To cultivate my garden and sell my vegetable crop is the policy of humble man". It covers about 13 acres with a large pond in the middle occupying a fifth of it. Besides the many flowers, plants and people, there were lots of mosaic sidewalks, rockeries, bridges and framing windows (interesting openings in walls that ‘frame’ the outside scenery).

It was hard taking pictures because of the crowds of people, but even with the mob you can get an idea of the beauty, planning and the amazing attention to detail. One section contained a large selection of bonsai plants. I admire them but would never have the patience to cultivate them. One of the many ponds contained some mandarin ducks that were very pretty. My photograph does not capture the colors on the male. The link below has some great pictures of the garden that I found on the Internet. They are worth the time to look. http://www.hpmuseum.org/china/trip3/suzhou.htm

Tracy told me a neat story about how the son of one of the owners lost the whole garden betting on a game of Mahjong. I am determined to learn how to play. I will see if I can con one of my students into teaching me. They told me it is a game that old people play, and I guess I qualify. I promise I won’t bet the homestead in Georgia on a game of Mahjong.

Ouyuan or Classical garden was the next stop our tour. Besides the bonsai, flowers, water, and zig-zag bridges it had a very large man-made yellow stone rockery that was full of kids. Its’ history was a neat little love story of how the husband built it for his wife. To leave the area you took a very short Venice-like boat ride. There was a paddler but no singing. Since I had declined the ‘rickshaw ride’ part of the tour, we walked thru the town. The houses along the canal are part of Suzhou’s historical district and can’t be torn down which means that most of them were empty due to the cost of making them livable. It was very quiet. We walked through the local vegetable/meat/fish market. They have really shrimpy shrimp, along with lots of fish, eels, and strange vegetables (including a lima? bean that looked like it was on steroids).

After another lunch alone we went to the Hanshan temple. This working Buddhist temple was made popular due to a poem about listening to their bells. According to Buddhist legend, everybody has 108 kinds of annoyances per year and each bell tolling can help people dispel those coming annoyances. (I kept thinking back to when I taught middle school – I think that they might have meant 108 annoyances a day and not per year) During New Year's Eve, thousands of visitors gather at Hanshan temple to listen to the one hundred and eight bell tolls at the same time praying for luck and happiness in the New Year. They have 2 bronze dragons (they looked like a cross between a mean dog and a turtle) that you rub for good luck or money. I did my share of rubbing. This was one of my favorite places, even with the crowds it gave me a peaceful feeling and smelled great with all the incense.

We finished up the tour and I was dropped off at the hotel about 3 pm and strolled around my hotel area again. On my wanderings I discovered a foreign language book store, a grocery store that carried ‘coke light’, a Confucius Park with a really cute dog and a Pizza Hut. So guess where I had my 6th solitary meal? Yep, you guessed it. Well at least it was an American restaurant. I carried the leftovers back to the hotel and ate leftover pizza for breakfast – how American is that? The pepperoni pizza tasted the same but the garlic bread was not even close to the real thing. Wrong kind of bread and just the barest hint of garlic. Garlic is not their favorite spice. In this area the Chinese food seems to contain a lot of cilantro (not one of my favorites) and of course msg (which I do like but make my feet swell).

On the way back to the room I finally noticed that there was a very small ‘business center’ in the hotel so I jumped on their solitary 6 Yuan/hr internet computer and caught up with my small corner of the English language world. The room smelled like a giant ashtray but it worth it and anyway I had a warm “Coke Light” to drink so I was happy.

I don’t think it was the same guy as Wednesday night but I was lucky enough to get a repeat performance of a Chinese male banging on my hotel door for entrance. I decided not even to bother answering him. I had the lock on and it was getting boring. He quit before I had to call the front desk. Weird.

Side note - It is VERY loud today in the very echo-y, marble floored, large hallway. The workmen are yelling at each other and it is hard to concentrate. Nothing is quiet in China. I am going to crank up my country music just to let them know I am alive and kicking and taking my part in contributing to the noise.

Suzhou Part II

Wednesday, after eating a Chinese breakfast (alone) of baozi and fruit in the hotel’s restaurant, Tracy and the driver arrived and we began our Suzhou Tour. Suzhou flourished as a major trading and silk center after the Grand Canal was built during the Sui dynasty (6th century). The canal linked Suzhou to the capital. Not surprisingly, one of Suzhou’s nicknames is “Venice of the East”. Trading during the Ming and Qing dynasties made many of the local exporters rich. Much of this wealth was spent in creating over 150 elaborate gardens.

The first garden on our tour was the Lingering Garden. It had beautiful rock formations, ponds, and of course lots of flowers and people. The Lingering garden is well known for having some of the most famous rock sculptures. There are many of these “grotesque rockeries” all over China. They seem to be in all the parks and in front of any building that has the money to put one there. The Chinese kids love climbing all over them and they have some very strange shapes. Since the Song Dynasty (960-1279) masons have been quarrying these limestone rocks from the mountains near Lake Taihu in Jiangsu Province. They shape them a little bit and then stick them in the lake and let nature take over. After a few years they take them out and cement different pieces together to make the final sculpture.

Next stop was a boat ride through the Grand Canal. It isn’t just one large canal it is a bunch of them of different sizes. If you look at a map of Suzhou the waterways look like roads because they create blocked shaped islands. It really did look a little like Venice. There were a lot of unique old stone bridges and the water was surprising very clean. It had the same color and clarity of our marsh waters in Georgia on a good day. Lots of strange fishnets were in the water which Tracy said catch a very small silver fish. (I will experience them later). In the canals I saw a wedding boat, women hand washing their clothes on the rocks, and 2 boats that looked like they were made of cement. (It must have been an optical illusion- I wasn’t quick enough to take a picture).

No Chinese tour is complete without a “factory tour”. This one was of the “Number 1 Silk Factory” I was prepared to tolerate this obligatory tour as I had many times before. I was pleasantly surprised to find that this one was REALLY interesting. Honest! It was a real working factory with the real live silk worms, mulberry trees and all the machinery that actually showed how the cocoon gets turned into silk thread. I would honestly like to go back!

Lunch alone and then onto Panmen Gate which is a water gate and the last part of the original city wall. This present wall/fortress was built in the 1300’s, and consisted of two water passes, two land gates, and an ambush area outside a city gate but inside the first gate so the enemy could be trapped. Inside the gate is the 7 story Ruiguang Pagoda which is the oldest Buddhist pagoda in the area. There were also lots of colorful and hungry coy in the small lake.

We finished up our day early so I added an optional ‘foot massage’ onto the tour. It was worth ever Yuan. They dropped me off for an afternoon break and dinner alone and then a night performance at another garden. There were singers, actors, and instruments. The Suzhou Opera is slightly different from the Peking Opera. Still very nasally and high pitched but not as hard on the ears. It was a much softer sound. My favorite ‘acts’ were the flutes and a weird ‘forerunner’ of the slide guitar.

Bedtime provided some excitement. A man kept banging on my door insisting in Chinese that I was in his room. He finally figured out I wasn’t going to leave or let him in and left. Maybe he just wanted to see the foreigner in her pj’s.

Chinese saying "In Heaven There is Paradise, on Earth There is Hangzhou and Suzhou." Part I

I have to confess that I picked the Suzhou tour because I was a little bit chicken. I know you guys think I was brave coming to China but I picked this type of “midlife adventure” because it is a fairly controlled and regulated situation with the added bonus of having ZUFE’s great foreign affairs office staff coddle me whenever I need it. I still have (and probably always will have) trouble eating dinner by myself in a restaurant, irregardless of my location: Georgia or China. So going on my first ‘solo’ tour dredged up that same type of “solo restaurant dinner” fear and avoidance. I talked myself into the tour using the following arguments:
• Suzhou is very similar to Hangzhou (see quote above)
• It is close enough to go by train (because I didn’t want to tackle taking a plane on my ‘first’)
• It will be WAY better than sitting in my apartment/hotel for a week watching DVD’s

Tuesday morning I got to the train station by taxi. Even this mundane mode of transportation ended up giving me a little scare. No, it wasn’t the normal crazy Chinese driving, it was the taxi’s route. The driver went down all these really strange back roads to get to the train station. So many and for so long that I actually started text messaging Ricky, who was staying in Xiasha, the number on the cab driver’s id. I never had to hit the send button because we arrived a little later at the very crowded train station without me being abducted into white slavery. My ticket was a ‘soft seat’ ticket (more money, more leg room, and more service) which meant you get to wait in a really nice waiting room with soft sofas, no beggars and no pushing and shoving when getting on board. I am buying those every time!

Second half of the 3 hour train ride a Suzhou native talked to me and gave me his cell phone number in case I needed help. The Chinese are so helpful to foreigners. I ended up having to take him up on his offer immediately upon arrival because we could not find Tracy, my tour guide, right away. She quickly found us and took charge of me and got me settled in at the Fuhui Hotel. After I unpacked my tiny backpack, I ate some snacks I had brought for dinner (cause I didn’t want to eat dinner alone in the restaurant- sound familiar) and had a tolerable night’s sleep on the typical hard Chinese mattress.

Variations of a Chinese Lantern

When I thought of a Chinese Lantern, the words “ red, oval, hanging, and silk” were the descriptions that popped into my head. During any special occasion (Spring festival, Olympics. Leisure Festival, etc) they display hundreds of the ‘normal’ ones I associate with China but now they have added variations. I think they may have gotten some of the ideas from our blow up Santas and other tacky Christmas decorations (Don't get the wrong idea - I am not putting down any tacky Christmas decorations. If I had the time, money and “Tim the toolman” type of manpower – I would happily compete with the tacky Townsend Christmas Lights.)

Back to the subject- The Chinese are taking storybook, cartoon and other fantasy characters and making colorful silk, ‘lantern-like’ scenes. Some are rather humorous. Make sure you check out size of Snow Whites head in relation to her body in the side photos. I arrived in China too late to take pictures of all the great silk lantern scenes that were being dismantled in Xiasha but I will have my camera charged and ready to go next January.

Friday Night’s Cheap Entertainment

No, we were not entertained, we ended up providing the cheap entertainment for the boys pictured above. As Ricky and I were filling another boring Friday night by riding the new B1 Bus to the DVD store and walking to the Love District Boa Zi Stand, I observed a mother eagerly calling down an alleyway for her son. Even with my VERY limited Chinese I still recognized her using the term “LoaWai” meaning foreigner in her speech. Her boy and his friend quickly obeyed and ran out so they could be entertained by the strange behaviors of the LoaWai. They followed us around as we asked for, paid for and ate our boa zi.

Surprisingly, tonight the boa zi were half price 2 for 1 Yuan. I am not sure why they were cheaper but they tasted just as good as last time. Ricky bought 8 this time and I got my 'guarenteed to stuff me' two. The boys were cute and actually said an English “bye” to us as we left. As for being the entertainment, I am learning to accept it as a fact of life. I just wish I could speak enough Chinese to actually interact with them so we both could learn more about each other.

Ricky Cleaned His Room!

I should have taken BEFORE pictures, but I am sure I will be able to take some of Ricky’s “Normal Room” in a couple of days so you can see how it usually looks. Then it will be obvious why we never hold any of our Chinese Classes in his room and why the “cleaning of his rooms” actually deserved this bandwidth of a blog and pictures. I must note that his room is generally just ‘really messy’ and not deserving of any health department warning. He really did a good job on the bathroom….. hummm…. I wonder if I can trade a bathroom cleaning for teaching one of his classes.

There always seems to be a lot of dust coming in the rooms, which is probably due to the large amount of construction that is constantly taking place. I think someone said that Xiasha, where our campus is located, translates to “sand place”. It is also very windy here. I am not sure if it is seasonal or year round. The hallway outside my apartment is covered but open to the outside dust, dirt and breezes.

I asked a student that was visiting my apartment if students have clothes washers in their room and he replied that all they had were “lights”. They hand wash all their clothes and hang them outside on the balcony to dry. As freshmen they are not allowed to have a Computer, TV or DVD player in their rooms. Another student actually commented on how soft the floor was because I had carpet in my bedroom. I have been promised a visit to a student dormitory in the future and even without the frills I betchca it will look a little like the dorms at UGA or College of Charleston.

Bao Zi

Bao zi, a common street vender food and a typical 'chinese breakfast sandwich' are just 1 quai each and a favorite snack of Nathan’s and Ricky’s. I kept avoiding these weird doughy balls because of their appearance. From the street venders, I bought and ate only the things that looked familiar and safe to me such as a piece of bread that was sort of looked like a pizza. Also, I don’t like food that feels ‘gummy’ when you eat it and Bao zi looked potentially ‘gummy’. I am not crazy about China’s gummy dumplings and I assumed that these were just really large and really gummy dumplings. They are pasty-white, softball sized, balls of dough that come out of straw steamer trays. They contain unrecognizable green and brown stuff as a filling. See why I avoided them? Anyway, last Friday night Ricky and I went into Xiasha because we were REALLY bored. He had the green stuff it van drop us off close to where his favorite Bao zi stand, that he discovered on his ramblings, was located.

After an interesting walk through the part of town with a lot of very small ‘?hotels?’ with names such as Romantica we finally got to his stand. Tourists definitely don’t go in this area, it’s where the locals shop. Don’t worry it wasn’t dangerous, not much of China feels dangerous, just really different. Ricky got 5 vegetable Bao zi and 1 bravely got one meat bao zi, by the time we had gotten a half a block away I knew I would need another one so we turned around and I bought 1 more and Ricky bought 2 more. The white dough was not gummy but a moist soft bread that was missing any salt flavor. The flavorful brown stuff sort of tasted like pork. Chinese eat a lot of pork so I am hoping that was what the filling was. I am not sure how, but Ricky managed to eat all 7 of his Bao zi. I was stuffed after my 2. This is a meal that will get repeated, but if I compared it to the 10 rating I give Willies Weenee Wagon, the Love District Bao zi Stand would only rate a 7. It might have made a 7.5 if I could have located a real diet coke to go with it. I will continue my culinary quest for the Chinese version of Willies………