Day 18: Suzhou - Gardens and silk - Oct 7, 2009

Suzhou has the much more classical Chinese architecture that I'd been expecting elsewhere in China. I'd kind of forgotten that with 1.3 billion people that the majority would have to live in dense housing apartments, but Suzhou was more my picture, with houses only a few storeys high.

First stop was the Lingering Garden where I really could have lingered much longer. It is one of the four most famous gardens in China, but being only 2-3 hectares was one of the smallest we'd seen so far. There was a beautiful little lake where a Chinese couple, all dressed in period costume rowed a little boat, the man singing and the lady strumming a lute-type instrument. The atmosphere was so peaceful, except for the noisy Chinese tourists whose talking throughout the free opera sounded like a thunderstorm!

Instead of cycling through the town we took a rickshaw ride which was a lot of fun, and a different perspective to the traffic. Those rickshaw men are certainly fit!

We then went to a slik factory, where they were actually spinning silk from the silk worms' cocoons by machine. I'd never seen this before and it was totally amazing (I'm really running out of adjectives to use when describing China!). The end of the cocoon thread is found by dipping a brush in water and after a few moments it sticks to the brush. The end is then threaded in with eight other cocoons to make a continuous silk thread which is wound quickly on a machine. This way there are no joins, as when one cocoon is finished they just intertwine the next one into it. It was very clever. And like any good factory visit, we had to exit through the shop, and this one was pretty extensive. One enormous room was dedicated to silk quilts and quilt sets which were gorgeous and really well priced compared to silk in Australia, and another enormous room for shirts, ties, scarves etc. Adelene and I spent ages in there and eventually our guide had to come and hurry us up.

Next stop was Tiger Hill, a beautiful park surrounded on all sides by canals, and famed for its odd shaped rocks and its leaning pagoda. There were a number of cultural displays occuring throughout the park (as it was still during the national holiday week), e.g. dragon dancing, kids acrobatic show etc, but probably the most interesting feature of the park were all the unusual English translations on the signs. One of my favourites for the day was "No swimming, fishing or whiffing in the pond".

For dinner we had great dumplings at Da Niang Dumplings - sort of like the Chinese equivalent of McDonalds, but with dumplings. It was great and even had a little book in English for us to choose from. I ended up eating 18 dumplings which cost 15 yuan (A$3) a total bargain! I'm sure going to miss these prices.

After dinner we took a boat tour on the canal which was absolutely gorgeous with all the bridges and Chinese style buildings lit up with many lights. It was very pretty - and very photogenic!