Suzhou Zhuan: Unintentional Hilarity OR Having a holiday in Suzhou

With the week-long national holiday of the autumn festival now in full swing, Suzhou's campus has become like a ghost town, the tranquil quiet was almost unnerving when contrasted with the excessively loud hustle and bustle that normally emanated from every corner of the campus.

This the main street of my campus, often filled with bicycles and pedestrians

The dorm buildings here are almost empty as you note the lack of laundry hanging outside

This campus store is often packed with people

The dining hall - note the lack of literally anyone else there

There were literally more cats scurrying about in the campus's abundant garbage heaps than people

I had originally intended to use this week off to travel to Nanjing, and possibly Hangzhou, but decided against it when I saw what horrific problems my fellow foreigners were having in travelling anywhere, due primarily to the gargantuan volume of Chinese tourists moving about the country at this moment. In many cases, my other foreign friends had to cancel their trips altogether either because there were no more hotels or hostels available to them, or the wonderful owners of those places decided to triple their rates. Thus, I decided to stay in Suzhou with Miguel, who decided against braving the tsunami of tourists.

To pass the time, Miguel and I first went to the Humble Administrator's Garden, or Zhuozheng Yuan (拙政园), one of Suzhou's other major gardens. It felt fairly similar to the Lingering Garden I previously visited with the other foreigners, although unlike the last garden, there was a depressing lack of Chinglish this time.

It was a good thing we decided to go there just when it opened at 7:30 in the morning, because by 8, the garden was beginning to overflow with Chinese tourists.

We may have also discovered an ancient tunnel to China

Before the start of the week-long holiday, Miguel and I had heard about there being two English-language bookstores that were located very close to the university, and decided to go for an exploratory walk off of campus in an attempt to locate them.

The area just outside one of Suzhou University's smaller gates, which supposedly had two English-language bookstores

On our way to locate this mysterious bookstore, we came across a good many stores with strange English-language names, the result of which was much hilarity and picture taking:

Where everybody knows your Chinese name

I wonder if any Australians have actually been here

*Insert Friends TV-show comment here*

I like the ripped-off Disney font

I enjoy that it's trademarked when its obviously a CocaCola rip-off

I hope the name isn't a commentary on the service

"Smelly Cat" is played all day long

We also found the Chinese Abbot and Costello:

After an hour and a half of fruitless searching, we were becoming very agitated, as it was apparent that, in Suzhou, one could very easily go and buy a laptop in one of the thousands of identical computer stores...

...and then purchase and IPhone or IPad or IWhatever at an obviously real Apple Store...

...eat at a Chinese knock-off of KFC...

... buy DVDs that haven't been released yet...

...buy some "Chinese Tradlonal Dresslng"...

...visit Google's secret Chinese headquarters...

...yet still not find a bookstore!

I blame Chinese Abbot and Costello (this time in copper!)

Just when we had lost all hope and we about to head back to our dorm room in defeat, we stumbled upon the foreign language bookstore!

The rainbow here is pathetic fallacy

It turned out, however, that the gods were against us the entire time, as the store was closed until the end of the holiday.

So close and yet so far...

We returned to the university, but were not utterly dismayed, as we returned with something almost as good, if not better, than books: mountains of cheaply-purchased, pirated DVDs.