Shanghai - Day trip to Zhouzhuang - Oct 14, 2009

For a long time I had wanted to visit the number one water village in China, Zhouzhuang, but to find a one day-tour was next to impossible. I found two companies, but there weren't anyone else booked on them so they weren't running. In the end I decided to do a whole day tour to Suzhou and Zhouzhuang, even thought we'd already been to Suzhou on our Geckos tour. I checked out the sights we'd be seeing, and with luck they were all different to the ones we saw on the Geckos tour.

The meeting point for the day trip was in the Ritz-Carlton hotel - another gorgeous hotel that if you stayed there you wouldn't even know that you would be in China. Very nice though!

The first stop in Suzhou was at the Humble Administrator's Garden, the largest private garden in Suzhou, and another one of the four most famous classical gardens in China. Our day tour guide, Chen, went at a beautiful leisurely pace, so I really appreciated it. Interestingly, the other five people on the day trip, though from English speaking countries, were all of Asian descent.

From there we walked a few minutes to the Lion Forest Garden, a smaller garden famous for its rock statues, some quite obviously in the shape of lions - others needed a little bit of imagination, or alternatively you could turn them into any thing at all!

Lunch was in a very nice restaurant that all the day tripping buses seemed to be stopping at at the same time. We were told that Suzhou food tends to be a little sweeter, and this certainly made a nice change not to have any chilli in anything. There were some extremely delicious crispy prawns which the Asians ate everything of except for the tail. I had a go at a couple that way, but then resorted to the usual pulling the legs and shell off! My favourite dish was beef in a sweet brown sauce. The meat was so tender that it just fell apart. Yum!

Next stop was at the number one silk museum in China. I was a bit worried that this might turn out to be the same silk museum that I'd seen a few days ago, but no, it was different, and yes, it was bigger and better. There was a bigger display of the whole silk worm process, with trays of moths laying eggs, medium sized caterpillars eating the mulberry leaves, a conveyor belt where one poor lady was sorting double cocoons from the thousands of single ones that were coming down the line, and even a quicker machine that feeds in hundreds of cocoon threads at one time and then the machine sorts them out into groups of nine for spinning. Of course, there was another enormous shop, which actually seemed to be identical to the one the other day, which wasn't surprising since we'd been told that everything is government run.

Then we drove the forty minutes to Zhouzhuang, the number one water village in China that I'd been hanging out for. They say that this water village is the Venice of the East, and it is the one that you see in all those famous pictures and paintings of canals in China. Unfortunately I could have had more time here, as there were a few too many tour groups crowding around the most famous of the bridges. I did get a shot or two that I'd really wanted of the most famous view, and then we did a lovely 15 minute gondola boat ride through the tiny little canals. This was exactly how I imagined it to be, tiny canals winding through the back areas where people were just going about their day-to-day business. It was very nice.

On returning to the Ritz-Carlton Hotel I used the great English speaking concergie to book a ticket for the Shanghai acrobats, so I'm looking forward to that tomorrow night.

Returned to the Indian restaurant for dinner, where the Indian staff were were happy to talk in English to me. The Indian waiter has an interesting background, as I was kind of intrigued how he came to live in China. He has relatives both here in Shanghai and in the United States, but came to live here in China a year ago when the one here offered him a job in the restaurant I was eating at. He says he really doesn't speak any Chinese at all, even after being here a year, which isn't surprising, since the patrons in the restaurants were two Germans, an Englishman, a very loud group of Frenchmen singing French songs to try to entertain their Chinese business associates, and myself! So in a situation like his, I could see how you would only be speaking English and not Chinese all day long.