A trip to Suzhou

Monday Jan 26^th (New Year’s Day)…

We left early in the morning for our 3-day tour to Suzhou and Hangzhou. The bus ride to Suzhou was about 2 hours.  Suzhou is known as the Venice of China. It is one of the many little watertowns outside of Shanghai.  Suzhou has been built up a lot so I wouldn’t really consider it a watertown now but rather is has some waterways that are still used. Nonetheless we had fun. We started our tour at Tiger Hill. The walk to the top was very pretty with everything decorate for New Years. At the top of the Tiger hill we saw the leaning tower of China also known as Yunyansi Pagoda. It was way different than the leaning tower because the Yunyansi was made of bricks. There were parts of the tower that looked like a brick was just going to come flying out of the structure…thankfully that didn’t happen.

Upon leaving Tiger Hill we went and had a traditional lunch and then went to Cold Mountain Temple. All of the temples that we saw, including this one were really crowded. Many Chinese people travel to the temples within the first couple of days of the Lunar New Year to pray for good fortune.  The courtyards at the Cold Mountain Temple were really busy with people lighting incense and candles.  Even though these places are temples they are not a place for silence like in a church. Many people were loud, and kids were running around.  We were able to ring the bell of the Cold Mountain Temple three times. After a little more walking around we got back on the bus and headed to Panmen Scenic Spot.

Panmen Scenic Spot was an old part of Suzhou. It still had the working canals and some beautiful scenery. We took a Gondola ride. It was not like a gondola you think of when you hear about Venice but it was a little boat with a woman standing on the back rowing, and she sang to us in Chinese. It was a short ride but relaxing to be on the water. It was also nice because we were able to see some of the old houses and a little bit more of the historic areas of Panmen, not just the tourist areas. Even though none of the flowers were blooming it was still a beautiful old area.

After a full day of touring it was time for dinner. These traditional meals they set up for us are just fantastic. We had an amazing sweet and sour tempura fish. Wow it was phenomenal. We also had many other enjoyable dishes.

After dinner we went to our hotel, which ended up being extremely nice. We weren’t expecting anything special but these rooms were really nice. I would much rather have those rooms than the Faculty Club room any day.  I went up to one of the guy’s rooms to borrow his computer; I had to send mom some birthday roses! In the mean time some of the other guys were in our room and we didn’t know it at the time but they hid some fish skulls and bones from dinner in our room. It was gross to find these fish bones later in the night. We walked around Suzhou for about an hour and then I headed back to the hotel. I was exhausted and ended up getting a good long sleep.