Visiting Suzhou's Gardens, Take 2

After our glorious misadventure to visit Suzhou's Lingering Garden, we once again embarked upon our magnificent quest to wake up earlier than noon in order to visit Suzhou's cultural sites.

I'm the young-looking mother here

Of the original members of our group, less than half decided to try once again to go the garden, opting instead to go to a place of much greater cultural importance: a bar.

Knowing the Chinese, there are most likely several real-life replicas of this in Mainland China

Miguel, the two Belgians Joke and Thomas, the Swiss Katerin, and I, all went together on this grand adventure. Before we made it to the gardens, however, we walked through an area where we were all convinced that every industrial tool in the world is made. There were literally thousands of stores lined up one after the other selling and making electric saws, sanders, concrete mixers, and every sort of tool imaginable.

These pictures don't to justice to the sheer volume of these stores

After a short walk through the seemingly endless row of industrial tool stores, we found ourselves in front of an impressive gateway, called Chang Gate (阊门), which was obviously a rebuilt version of Suzhou's old city wall. We had finally arrived in slightly more touristy area.

The entrance to more culture!

Beyond the gate, we caught some glimpses of some of the nicely upkept areas of classical Suzhou, complete with some impressive stone work and some nice looking Qing Dynasty-era architecture.

While in a slightly more cultured area, we still had to be reminded we were in modern China, where people just let their animals defecate on the streets:

The man didn't appreciate the fact I noticed his dastardly deed

We also ran into an interesting political demonstration, with Chinese students and likeminded nationalists taking to the streets to proclaim China's right to the Diaoyu Islands (钓鱼岛). I was especially interested by the use of Mao's image, which was plastered over many signs that the students held up in defiance of Japan's claims to the island.

Some of the folks noticed me taking pictures and either scowled and smiled at me, so I gave them a thumbs up and cried out "钓鱼岛是中国的!" (The Diaoyu Islands belong to China!)  much to their bemusement and amusement.

After our brief foray into Chinese mass-movement politics, we finally made our way to the Lingering Garden, a 400-year old garden that, up until the Communists "liberated" China from the Guomindang in 1949, was a privately-owned garden that, over the centuries, was passed from rich official to rich official.

*Insert pipe-dream comment about hoping to own a garden like this some day*

The garden was everything I hoped it would be, being both inspirational and beautiful despite the throng of tourists.

The Lingering garden's design reminded me of the setting of the Chinese novel that got me interested in Chinese literature in the first place, the Jin Ping Mei (金瓶梅), which can be translated as The Plum in the Golden Vase, or - as my outstanding graduate supervisor once said - The Book of Manners. The bulk of the novel takes place in a large family compound that was said to have many fancy gardens, pavilions, and artistic lakes, much like the Lingering Garden.

Once you have finished reading my blog post, you will go to Amazon.com right here and purchase a copy of the Jin Ping Mei to read for yourself. If you don't, then there's something terribly wrong with you.

The garden was also home to an ample collection of Chinglish:

Before we left the garden, we were able to witness a Kunju (昆剧) performance, Suzhou's traditional opera.

After leaving the gardens, we once again ran into the same group of Diaoyu Island demonstrators, as they obviously felt it was too tiring to demonstrate someplace else:

Until next time, please enjoy the appropriate music: 

Visiting Suzhou's Gardens, Take 1

I apologize for the recent lack of blog posts, but there have been some major changes over my past week here in Suzhou, which I will address in a blog post soon. I have every intention of continuing to have 2-3 blog posts per week, and this shall hopefully be nothing more than a minor hiccup. In short, this video should sum it up:

When I left off on my last blog post, I mentioned that my fellow laowai and myself planned on going to one of Suhou's garden the next day. To make a long story short, we didn't end up going to one of the gardens, or more accurately, we didn't end up going into any of Suhou's gardens. That was because several of my fellow foreigners wished to sleep in until the completely reasonable time of two o'clock in the afternoon, at which point we hopped on bus in an attempt to get to The Lingering Garden (留园 "Leo Yoo-ehn") before it closed. Time was not on our side, however as the garden was closed half an hour after we got there.

My reaction to their sleeping in

Our adventure did not end here, however, as we then decided to take a stroll through Suzhou's "Tourist" downtown, the part of town that all of the tourists - but none of the locals - always go to see. 

En route to Suhou's Tourist downtown

Before we got to the downtown, however, we unfortunately found ourselves lost, and thus spent a half hour staring at a map, arguing about which direction to go in.

Working hard, and hardly working

We quickly realized, luckily, that between all of us, there was at least a modicum of competence in Chinese. Thus, after asking two elderly folks for directions, we hastily made our way to Suzhou's tourist area.

 Not that the area looked very touristy at first

We finally made our way to Shantang Jie (山塘街 "Shahn Tahng Jee'eh), which comprises most of Suzhou's tourist downtown. The area was very nice, and filled with lots of very interesting classicaly-themed architecture: 

There were some areas, however, that were not so nice or tourist-friendly:

 There was also lots of entertaining Chinglish:

 The entire downtown was filled with tourists from around China that came to marvel at Suzhou's famed beauty.

We were literally the only non-Chinese tourists in the vicinity

There were plenty of places to buy both souvenirs and snacks, which some of my fellow laowai decided to indulge in:

Note his rather surprised reaction since he was expecting something salty, but instead had something sickeningly sweet

There was this one especially large store that we all decided to look in, which was filled with many overpriced pieces of strange kitsch:

The store had a whole bunch of Cultural Revolution-esque souvenirs (mostly notebooks with Maoist art on it), since the Cultural Revolution is popular in China in the same way 1960s Mad Men memorabilia is in North America:

Note the face on the left

Ironic does not even begin to describe this

 A funny story happened in the store as well: One of my friends pointed out to me that there were signs all over the place written in Chinese that said "taking pictures not allowed" (禁止拍照). Being ever the rebel, I responded to her "I'd like to see them try and stop me," and proceeded to take pictures of the signs.

This is where I should say YOLO

Once we left the store, we discussed the possibility of taking a boat ride down one of Suzhou's canals, which we could do for about 80RMB per person. Because Miguel (my Mexican roommate) and I were cheap sticks in the mud, we decided against going, which turned out to be a smart decision since the boats you were taken on had dark blue windows that didn't allow you to take pictures. It turns out the nicer-looking boats would have cost us 150RMB per person, which no one in our group was willing to pay.

Pictured - NOT the boats we would have taken

As we continued along the road, we noticed that the store fronts began to get a little less inviting and tourist-friendly:

It turned out we had ventured beyond the touristy area, and back into regular old Suzhou. We decided to turn back, and bid farewell to the touristy area of Suzhou.

Like a ship adrift after a heavy storm, we then wandered aimlessly through Suzhou's real downtown, which was filled with several high rises, gaudy neon signs, and overwhelming amounts of traffic. 

Before heading back to the university, we decided to stop at one of the large malls located near to the university, where I purchased an interesting lemon drink that should apparently make me happy all the time.

We also stopped off at the most popular restaurant in all of China, KFC:

As seen in a previous picture, the Colonel is also a Communist hero

With our misadventure over, we returned to the university, not having seen any of Suzhou's gardens, but still getting an interesting cultural experience. Before we went our separate ways - and me being the natural slave-driver that I am - I made all of my fellow laowai promise that they would attempt to get up early the next day to try going to the garden once again, which I shall cover in my next blog post!

I'm the happy-looking fellow with the whip