- 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!
4 comments:
i dont remember losing anyone, but i do remember having to make a transfer at a train stop. Took the train (got to the right place) but apparently it was a faster train then our ticket was for. didn't know this until we got OFF the train, and the people at the station seemed upset. (also a city with very little foreigners, i guess). I also have experienced long train rides crammed in with others. The worst part was being crammed in a non-express train that had doors open on different sides depending on the stop. You never knew where the people were going to come from, or try to squish out to. Still, i do miss trains.
Of course Misha wouldn't remember but we lost HER once when she was a little tyke (about 2). We had gone up from our home in Mexico to Texas and were shopping. Jorge and Alex went one way, and Julie and I went another, each parent thinking the other had Misha. When we met up and realized neither did, we began our search. We eventually found her casually walking down the main aisle of the mall with only her diaper on. When we asked her where her clothes were, she said "I show you" turned around, walked several stores back and into a changing room at the back. Sure enough, there were her things! It was a loong time before I took her out shopping again.
Misha's mom
Well, trains remind me of Eurail Passes and taking the train between cities at night and sleeping on them in order to save money on hotels. I can remember being on a train through the Austrian Alps in 1967 trying to go to Venice only to have the conductor tell us at 4am in the morning when he checked our tickets that we were going back to Vienna. (We had unwittingly gotten on the wrong car in Vienna and sometime during the night while we slept our car had been uncoupled from the train we started on and had been attached to a train returning to Vienna.) Or so we thought that was the message since we spoke no German, the conductor no English or French and us half asleep. Based on this "understanding' we got off in this small village in the Alps to wait for the train going the opposite direction. It was dark, the train station was closed, no cafes or taverns were open and all you could see were steep mountains on either side of the track with a sparkle of light here and there. If you followed the track in either direction there was a narrow slit where the train left the valley to go out either end. And it was very cold so we bounced from foot to foot for a couple of hours as we waited for the 6am train to Venice that we thought the conductor told us would come. Talk about faith, or stupidity on our part. The train to Venice did come and we eventually got there. Bummer though, it was raining most of the time we were there. Take my advice, Venice in the winter when it is raining is not the place to be. Yes, riding the train is great!!!
ANGERS II
I was lost in a Venture once and bawled my eyes out at the customer service desk until my mom showed up (they had called her over the intercom system). Does that count??
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