Happy Mother’s Day to our mums, hope you enjoyed your day. xoxox
Road trip day, after a 6:30am wakeup call and breakfast we were on our bus to start our 2+hr trip to Suzhou at 8am.
For the first 30mins of the trip there were high rise apartments almost as far as you could see, it then changed to low rise and farmland, market gardens.
From the time we left we got sooooooo much information directed to us about the greatness of china and all its inventions, history politics, etc. The whole “once upon a time” version., gee she can talk!
It took just under 2hrs to get to Suzhou. Along the way we saw many magnetic levitation bullet trains running into and out of Shanghai. We asked if it was possible to get the very fast train back to Shanghai, but we were told it wasn’t possible because you had to book to get a seat, particularly on weekends.
High speed train, 350-400km per hour
Suzhou is known as the Venice of the East (in reality Venice should be called the Suzhou of the west as the canals of Suzhou existed a long time before Venice), it has around 150 miles of canals in a 50 square mile area.
After we got there, we got onto a small canal boat and had a guided cruise along a few canals before being dropped off back to dry land. We then had an hours free time to walk around and explore the immediate area a bit. Deb and I went off by ourselves and checked the many small local shops and stalls along a few of the streets and laneways. This part of the city was fairly old and while there were many tourist shops, it was a predominately local shopping arrea with many fresh fruit and vegetable stalls, meat shops, clothes shops, we even saw one shop that sold frogs, we assumed for food rather than pets.
After the hour was up we met back with the group and made our way back to the bus, and drove for 30 minutes to a restaurant for lunch.
With the arrangements for lunch, 4 tables of 9 people, we got separated and were seated at different tables. It just meant we got to know a different group to each other. Lunch was another Chinese banquet, so much food, and most is very tasty, much like at home. We shared the restaurant with a group of chinese, we had 4 tables they had 3. Turns out they were there celebrating Mother’s Day and their mothers. As both groups finished our meals the chinese group wheeled in a cake with candles on it and an old Chinese woman stood up near the cake. We all thought it must have been her birthday and sang happy birthday to her, (the chinese joined in as well) then they told us it was for Mother’s Day. They blew out the candles and invited all mothers in the restaurant over to have a group photo with the cake. It was lots of fun. Then all the Chinese mums took turns, from oldest down, to cut the cake. The cake was then offered to everyone in the room. Such a frieldly inclusive group.
From there we drove for abut 30mins to a UNESCO listed garden.The Master of Nets Garden, a classical chinese garden laid out under the Southern Song Dynasty was originally called the Fisherman’s Retreat, but was renamed during the Qing Dynasty. It has a centrally located pond surrounded by walkways and pavillions, with gardens around the living quarters. There were lots of people there and the tranquility of it was lost. We couldn’t quite see it worth the UNESCO listing, but hey that’s just our opinion.
We left to go back to Shanghai at 3:40pm. We struck a bit of traffic as we came into Shanghai, but made it back to our hotel by 5:55pm.
We took ourselves out for dinner, 2 blocks down on the 4th floor of Bank of China building, a restaurant called ShunFeng. We got there no problem, then found out no one there spoke English, or even Chinglish! We eventually got our idea across to the 3 giggly girls on the front desk and had to wait for a table. The wait was about 40 mins. We eventually worked out that the young guy in the wait line behind us spoke english. He had worked in Sydney and was back in Shanghai, briefly, he hoped, for work. Anyway, while we waited we were given a menu and picked our meal by pictures (and english text underneath). Oh, the frogs we saw in the Suzhou shop were on the menu!
We ordered the food ok but when I tried to get a beer it was a little more difficult, but with a bit of pointing we got it sorted. The food came out in an odd sort of order, it was all delicious but way too much. A great experience.
Tomorrow we have a late start, bags out by 10, check out by 11 and a tour of a park before heading to the airport for a flight to Yichang at 7.30pm.
Just an interesting “fact” we were told today, Suzhou is a tech centred city and makes 70% of the laptops made.
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