Visiting the Master of Nets Garden

The other day I decided to venture out alone and see another of Suzhou's garden. This one is called the Master of Nets Garden or wang shih yuen (网师园), and happens to be the smallest of all of Suzhou's gardens. The weather wasn't very agreeable, as it had been heavily raining the night before, but I decided to go anyways.

In a taxi on my way to the garden

Once I got to the garden, which was surprisingly close to me - located on the same street that those wacky storefront Chinglish signs I blogged about before - I was very disappointed in the entrance sign leading me to the garden:

Keeping it classy!

After wandering down some residential back alleys, following the hand-written signs leading to the garden, I finally found a semi-respectable entrance to the garden:

One great thing was the total lack of tourists in the area, as you can see in the 'long' ticket line below:

Despite the comically-bad entrance to the garden, once I was in the garden itself, it did not disappoint. Despite being the smallest of the gardens, whoever designed it certainly knew how to do a lot with a little, as the tiny garden was designed like a labyrinth, with many tiny nooks and crannies and hallways that kept turning you right around, and made the tiny garden seem far bigger than it was:

For such a small garden, however, it was sure able to cram in a whole bunch of tiny shops with strange Chinglish:

It wasn't long before other tourists started to arrive in droves. I was honestly amazed at the large variety of Caucasians touring the garden, as I heard French, Spanish, German, and American English being spoken around me. To stand out from the other laowai, I thus decided to only speak very loudly in Chinese, which got me a lot of strange looks from a lot of the other tourists.

As is the case with most Chinese tourist attractions, the exit to the gardens led to a variety of shops selling largely the same bunch of overpriced, touristy crap that you can get at any other Chinese tourist attraction, with a few interesting exceptions:

It was the first time I'd ever seen Cultural Revolution Posters (right side of the picture) for sale in a tourist area

Having had a good time at the garden, I decided to go to one of the last major tourist attractions I had yet to see in Suzhou: Tiger Hill or Hu Qiu (虎丘), which I shall cover in my next blog post.

Until next time!