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| A Day in Suzhou |
Enjoy!
Sunday, February 24, 2008
Photos from A Day in Suzhou
Matt was kind enough to let me post some of his photos here from our day. He took many more than this, but I whittled it down to present these. It was a great day that is captured here.
Enjoy!
Enjoy!
Monday, February 18, 2008
A Suzhou Story
"I LOST MATT - I AM HOPING HE IS ON THE TRAIN. THE LAST 20MIN HAVE BEEN CRAZY"
- text message sent by me to Chris on February 17, 2008, 8:02PM
Yesterday Matt and I went to Suzhou - home of beautiful gardens, pagodas and monuments, about a 45 minute train ride due west of Shanghai. Suzhou is on the route from Shanghai to Nanjing, so there are lots of trains that go there. We took the 9:15am express train there in luxury - the seats were about $4 each and were nicer than business class on an overseas airplane. Plenty of room to stretch out, individual pillows, and a total train time of less than 45 minutes. It was a great start to the day.
Suzhou is a smaller city in China, only having 5 to 6 million people. In the past it was one of the most important cities in China because of it's silk production and until the last 200 years was must more important than Shanghai. Suzhou was part of the Silk Road and Marco Polo called it the Venice of the East because of the intricate network of canals and bridges throughout the city. Suzhou has the reputation of having the most beautiful woman in China and the Suzhou dialect is praised as being the language of poets.
Our guide "The Lonely Planet" said that there were five tourist buses that for 2RMB would take you to most of the sites and they left from the train station. Unfortunately, no one could tell us where the buses were. We went from one side of parking lot to the other, across the road and back, all the while being hounded by vendors selling maps and others who were trying to sell us very expensive boat tours. Matt finally bought a map and after purchasing it realized that there was absolutely no English on it at all. We finally boarded a bus, but the driver shooed us off when I asked if Tiger Hill was one of her stops. At that point, after spending most of an hour looking for the correct bus we gave up and took a taxi.
Tiger Hill was incredible - there was a long uphill walkway from the entrance flanked by drums and gongs. People were hitting the drums and gongs that sounded almost planned - a very happy sound. After some observation Matt and I realized that each year (rat, monkey, snake, horse, etc.) had a gong and a drum and people were hitting them for good luck with the new year. We found ours and followed their example.
The main attraction at Tiger Hill is a very tall brick pagoda that is leaning - the Chinese tower of Pisa if you will. It is very impressive and the scenery in the gardens is pretty remarkable. Because of the focus on rocks and water, Chinese gardens are beautiful year round, even in the middle of February. Also remarkable is that we didn't see any other foreign tourists. None.
After exploring Tiger Hill we headed to the second most famous location in Suzhou, "The Humble Administrator's Garden" which is a World Heritage Site. It was hard to believe that this was the humble administrator's garden. It was huge! There were at least two separate lakes, numerous pavilions, a museum explaining the different concepts in Chinese gardening as well as documenting other gardens in Shanghai and southern China.
Pushing on, we then visited the city's silk museum and then climbed to the top of the tallest pagoda in the city. The steps were steep, but the views at the top gave us a chance to see the city. After that we got into a bicycle rickshaw and our driver pedaled us to the twin pagodas, unique because pagodas are normally single structures. We had this last site almost to ourselves and the trees were just starting to bud, perfuming the air as the sun began to set.
Since we had tickets for the 7:17pm train, we went to dinner at one of the restaurants in our guidebook and had the traditional sweet and sour fish from Suzhou as well as local long beans, cold roast duck and fried rice. The food was excellent and we congratulated ourselves on a day well spent as we walked quickly back to the train station.
Our train was actually running 35 minutes late, so we settled into the waiting room with probably 200-300 people and began to unwind. When the train was announced we joined the rush of people heading down to the platform and tried to stand where we thought our car would be. Unfortunately, we guessed wrong and when the train pulled up we had to run to the other end of the track. Our car, car 11 was absolutely packed and the conductors weren't letting people on as some people tried to get off. Another conductor told us to go down to car 10 and get on there, but when we got there it was the same story so we went back again.
Almost everybody else was on the train except us and about half a dozen people in front of us. There were elbows and shoving and I finally got almost on and then a man with a piano tried to push in front of me. I smashed into the woman in front of me and managed to get ahead of the man with the piano at which point I turned around and realized that Matt was gone. He had been right behind me and I had absolutely no idea where he went. I couldn't move - I was stuck between a woman with a very large suitcase and the man with the piano. As I was standing there, trying to get from the hallway to inside the train car, the train started moving.
Needless to say, this was not the luxury train of the morning. I was slightly in shock as I showed my ticket to the attendent and he made the woman sitting in my seat move. She took it well enough, pulling a portable stool from underneath the seat and sitting right next to me on the floor. As I sat down, I considered my options: 1) Matt was on the train somewhere else and 2) Matt was on the platform in Suzhou. It was at this point that I sent the text message at the beginning of the entry to Chris. I decided to stay in my seat, hoping that if he was on the train he would eventually show up because his seat was supposed to be right next to mine. He never did.
Chris and I exchanged several more text messages - Chris tried to call Matt's cell phone from our apartment, we tried to figure out how to send an international text message - nothing. The default position was when I got off the train in Shanghai I would stand on the platform and start yelling his name. The ride home was about an hour and 15 minutes and the time passed very quickly.
To complete the story - Matt had managed to get on the train, he had realized the train was about to leave and run back to car number 10. He then had the honor of being the last person on board the train and a space by the door to stand for the hour and 15 minute trip. He said his car was so full that there was no way he could have traversed the length to get to car 11. Let's just say I was more than a little relieved to see him standing on the platform waiting for me when I finally got off in Shanghai.
Q - Have you ever lost someone when you were traveling or were you ever lost? Especially in the days before cell phones, it's a scary proposition. Share your stories!
I will try to post an album of Suzhou pictures as well as pictures from Matt's arrival and travels in Shanghai with us earlier during Spring Festival in the next week or so. My Chinese classes have started again and so my time is much more limited now, but I want to share them since Chris and Matt took such great photos.
Cheers!
- text message sent by me to Chris on February 17, 2008, 8:02PM
Yesterday Matt and I went to Suzhou - home of beautiful gardens, pagodas and monuments, about a 45 minute train ride due west of Shanghai. Suzhou is on the route from Shanghai to Nanjing, so there are lots of trains that go there. We took the 9:15am express train there in luxury - the seats were about $4 each and were nicer than business class on an overseas airplane. Plenty of room to stretch out, individual pillows, and a total train time of less than 45 minutes. It was a great start to the day.
Suzhou is a smaller city in China, only having 5 to 6 million people. In the past it was one of the most important cities in China because of it's silk production and until the last 200 years was must more important than Shanghai. Suzhou was part of the Silk Road and Marco Polo called it the Venice of the East because of the intricate network of canals and bridges throughout the city. Suzhou has the reputation of having the most beautiful woman in China and the Suzhou dialect is praised as being the language of poets.
Our guide "The Lonely Planet" said that there were five tourist buses that for 2RMB would take you to most of the sites and they left from the train station. Unfortunately, no one could tell us where the buses were. We went from one side of parking lot to the other, across the road and back, all the while being hounded by vendors selling maps and others who were trying to sell us very expensive boat tours. Matt finally bought a map and after purchasing it realized that there was absolutely no English on it at all. We finally boarded a bus, but the driver shooed us off when I asked if Tiger Hill was one of her stops. At that point, after spending most of an hour looking for the correct bus we gave up and took a taxi.
Tiger Hill was incredible - there was a long uphill walkway from the entrance flanked by drums and gongs. People were hitting the drums and gongs that sounded almost planned - a very happy sound. After some observation Matt and I realized that each year (rat, monkey, snake, horse, etc.) had a gong and a drum and people were hitting them for good luck with the new year. We found ours and followed their example.
The main attraction at Tiger Hill is a very tall brick pagoda that is leaning - the Chinese tower of Pisa if you will. It is very impressive and the scenery in the gardens is pretty remarkable. Because of the focus on rocks and water, Chinese gardens are beautiful year round, even in the middle of February. Also remarkable is that we didn't see any other foreign tourists. None.
After exploring Tiger Hill we headed to the second most famous location in Suzhou, "The Humble Administrator's Garden" which is a World Heritage Site. It was hard to believe that this was the humble administrator's garden. It was huge! There were at least two separate lakes, numerous pavilions, a museum explaining the different concepts in Chinese gardening as well as documenting other gardens in Shanghai and southern China.
Pushing on, we then visited the city's silk museum and then climbed to the top of the tallest pagoda in the city. The steps were steep, but the views at the top gave us a chance to see the city. After that we got into a bicycle rickshaw and our driver pedaled us to the twin pagodas, unique because pagodas are normally single structures. We had this last site almost to ourselves and the trees were just starting to bud, perfuming the air as the sun began to set.
Since we had tickets for the 7:17pm train, we went to dinner at one of the restaurants in our guidebook and had the traditional sweet and sour fish from Suzhou as well as local long beans, cold roast duck and fried rice. The food was excellent and we congratulated ourselves on a day well spent as we walked quickly back to the train station.
Our train was actually running 35 minutes late, so we settled into the waiting room with probably 200-300 people and began to unwind. When the train was announced we joined the rush of people heading down to the platform and tried to stand where we thought our car would be. Unfortunately, we guessed wrong and when the train pulled up we had to run to the other end of the track. Our car, car 11 was absolutely packed and the conductors weren't letting people on as some people tried to get off. Another conductor told us to go down to car 10 and get on there, but when we got there it was the same story so we went back again.
Almost everybody else was on the train except us and about half a dozen people in front of us. There were elbows and shoving and I finally got almost on and then a man with a piano tried to push in front of me. I smashed into the woman in front of me and managed to get ahead of the man with the piano at which point I turned around and realized that Matt was gone. He had been right behind me and I had absolutely no idea where he went. I couldn't move - I was stuck between a woman with a very large suitcase and the man with the piano. As I was standing there, trying to get from the hallway to inside the train car, the train started moving.
Needless to say, this was not the luxury train of the morning. I was slightly in shock as I showed my ticket to the attendent and he made the woman sitting in my seat move. She took it well enough, pulling a portable stool from underneath the seat and sitting right next to me on the floor. As I sat down, I considered my options: 1) Matt was on the train somewhere else and 2) Matt was on the platform in Suzhou. It was at this point that I sent the text message at the beginning of the entry to Chris. I decided to stay in my seat, hoping that if he was on the train he would eventually show up because his seat was supposed to be right next to mine. He never did.
Chris and I exchanged several more text messages - Chris tried to call Matt's cell phone from our apartment, we tried to figure out how to send an international text message - nothing. The default position was when I got off the train in Shanghai I would stand on the platform and start yelling his name. The ride home was about an hour and 15 minutes and the time passed very quickly.
To complete the story - Matt had managed to get on the train, he had realized the train was about to leave and run back to car number 10. He then had the honor of being the last person on board the train and a space by the door to stand for the hour and 15 minute trip. He said his car was so full that there was no way he could have traversed the length to get to car 11. Let's just say I was more than a little relieved to see him standing on the platform waiting for me when I finally got off in Shanghai.
Q - Have you ever lost someone when you were traveling or were you ever lost? Especially in the days before cell phones, it's a scary proposition. Share your stories!
I will try to post an album of Suzhou pictures as well as pictures from Matt's arrival and travels in Shanghai with us earlier during Spring Festival in the next week or so. My Chinese classes have started again and so my time is much more limited now, but I want to share them since Chris and Matt took such great photos.
Cheers!
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
The Year of the Rat
Happy New Year to you all! Chinese New Year has been an event - a week long celebration of family and friends. Our friend Matt has visited us since New Year's Eve (February 6th) and both guys took a lot of pictures. I didn't. I'm (as you probably realize by now), more interested in capturing people than things. Both guys have agreed to let me make copies of some of their pictures and when I do I will post them for your viewing. One benefit to being the one without a camera affixed to her face is that I am the subject of many of their pictures, proving beyond a doubt that I was in China for New Years. Here is one picture I took of the two of them at Yu Garden to prove that Matt really did visit:
This year is the Year of the Rat. Most of the decorations make the rat look more like a mouse and I think the Disneyland here is taking full advantage of the connection. I even saw some balloons with Mickey and Minnie on them. Rats are seen as good animals here and there are many stories about how the clever rat managed to manipulate the other animals so that it would be first on the Chinese zodiac. Rats are supposed to be charasmatic, charming and manipulative. I am a Monkey, so the Year of the Rat looks pretty good for me depending on the website you choose. One that we have had a lot of fun looking at is:
http://www.usbridalguide.com/special/chinesehoroscopes/Rat.htm
This website also assigns an element to different years to coordinate with your year of birth and really gets some characteristics dead on. For example - I am a metal monkey: "Persuasive and passionate, this Monkey is a warm person. He is successful due to his innate determination and ambitious nature. He works hard to climb the ladder of success and prefers to work alone. They are loyal employees, always prepared and tactful with answers and upper management. In love these Monkeys are just as loyal as well as loving and affectionate. "
One thing that we had the opportunity to do was go to dinner with my friends Mike and Lily Chiang and their children. When I first got to China they were wonderful, making sure that I had everything I needed. We stuffed ourselves on dumplings, rice, soup and veggies and then Lily bought us cream puffs to take home. Below is a picture of me with their family in the metro station. It's been pretty cold here for Shanghai so we were looking for a warm spot to snap a photo.
Other Chinese New Year memories that I hope to expand on later - fireworks and firecrackers being lit in front of our building and hitting our window, getting carried along by the mob at Yu Garden trying to cross the bridge of nine turns, walking through the market and narrow streets after we found the fabric market was closed, Matt buying so many DVDs at the DVD store, eating Hot Pot and being the only customers in the restaurant, following the woman who decided to make it her mission that I found a milk tea, negotiating for Matt's rolex, burning incense at Jing'an Temple, the views of the city from the TV tower....
Question - What is your sign (Chinese or Zodiac)? Have you ever had a horoscope really predict your day or year? If you don't believe in horoscopes - what's the strangest horoscope you've ever heard?
Thanks to you who responded to my last post. I am glad you are still reading. Xin Nian Kuaile!
Saturday, February 2, 2008
Weather or not
The weather in China over the last week has made international news bulletins. I have gotten several emails asking if I was ok. I am fine, although hundreds of thousands of people have gotten stranded in train stations and in some areas of the country there are shortages of oil and power. Over the last week we have gotten about four inches of snow in Shanghai. That may not sound like a lot (especially to those Chicago folks who got a foot yesterday), but this is the most snow that Shanghai has had in over 15 years. The city has no snow removal equipment and all of the street cleaning is done the old fashioned way with brute force - shovels, boards, brooms and the occasional mop serving to clean the streets. This morning I woke up to another 2 inches of wet, sticky snow and slid my way to the train station to go to work.
An entire generation of Shanghai children is learning how to build snowmen and throw snowballs. One day on our way to Chinese class Chris and I saw at least three different sets of people taking their pictures in the snow. Later that day, I made Chris take the following pictures of me.
An entire generation of Shanghai children is learning how to build snowmen and throw snowballs. One day on our way to Chinese class Chris and I saw at least three different sets of people taking their pictures in the snow. Later that day, I made Chris take the following pictures of me.
I also took a photo out the window of our apartment.
This photo was taken before the additional snow last night, so pretty much everything is white at this point. One of my coworkers is from Australia and she had never seen snow before. Having someone else experience snow for the first time is really special.
Part of the reason that the snow is causing so many problems is that next week is Chinese New Year. Everyone is going home for the holiday, so millions of people are traveling in this week leading up to the festival. I am not - my plan is to stay in Shanghai and take pleasure in doing nothing for awhile. Also Chris and my friend Matt is coming and we will be touring him around Shanghai. I'll put up pictures from Matt's visit in the future.
Q - I'm not sure if anyone is still reading my blog (except my parents), as my comments have dropped off sharply as of late. This time, if you're out there, please post a quote or funny story that I can use to inspire myself on these gray winter days or post your first memory of snow or your best memory of snow.
Also - an FYI, yesterday I finally successfully bought my hand lotion. One thing down, many more to go.
Cheers!
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