Suzhou

"I have been a stranger in a strange land"
-Exodus, II. 22.

A couple weeks ago my friend Jaime had a chance to visit Shanghai. We didn't have any sort of itinerary when he he first arrived, but he knew for sure he wanted to visit Suzhou. Since I hadn't yet had the chance to visit, it sounded like a great idea to me. We opted for a day trip as Suzhou is only 30 minutes away by train. That decision was a good choice, but we made the mistake of waiting until the day of to buy tickets, which ended up being a much more stressful process than we had imagined.

To begin the day, I left the school at 9:00 am, met up with my friend at about 9:30 and made our way to the train station by 10:00. Once at the station, we were directed to the ticket office and told to wait in the English speaking line (though I think I could have managed in the Chinese only line without any problems). As we made our way nearer to the front of the line, we began hearing some bad news. From what we could tell, it sounded like most of the tickets to Suzhou had sold out. Normally this wouldn't have been a problem, but being a Holiday weekend there were copious amounts of both foreign and Chinese travelers. Packed into the massive crowd of people and trying to speak over the constant roar, punctuated by the frequent coughs of the man in front of us (If he hadn't already, he probably should have seen a doctor), we began debating whether or not we should avoid the rush and buy tickets for the next day. When it was our turn, the lady at the ticket desk told us they had first class tickets available at 1:00 pm with a returning train at 7:00. After consulting my handy guide to Shanghai (and its outlying cities), we decided 5 hours would be plenty of time.

After killing a couple hours walking around the city and enjoying at light lunch at Starbucks, we boarded the train and were on our way to Suzhou, frequently referred to as the Venice of the east (who began referring to it this way, I cannot say). I might mention here that the comforts of first class in this train were nigh immeasurable. For one, there was extra leg space. Then there was a wonderful beeping noise that occurred approximately every 5 seconds for the first 10 minutes of our journey. Then, there was... well, that's about all I can recall, but at least it was only 5 USD more.

Upon arriving in Suzhou, we spent another 15 minutes waiting in line for a taxi, then about 20 minutes stuck in traffic (luckily, we had already planned for this and were expecting large crowds after hearing about the sold out tickets). We had an idea of where to go thanks to my Chinese friend Zhujing, who sent me a text message that I was able to show to the cab driver. Following the crowd, we made our way down a walking street brimming with people and bikes. With a small canal flanking our right and brash shopkeepers vying for business on the left, we found our way to the entrance of the humble administrator's garden.

Apart from boasting the title "Venice of the east," Suzhou is known primarily for its myriad traditional Chinese gardens. This particular garden that we chose to visit is the largest in Suzhou. I would like to tell you that the garden was beautiful, peaceful, calming - all the things a garden should be. Sadly, however, I cannot. It was certainly beautiful, alive with rock formations, flowers, and trees of all kinds, but the crowds were so dense it was impossible for the garden to pose any semblance of peace or calm. As an ongoing joke, Jaime and I had a competition to see who could make the garden seem more empty in the pictures we took. It wasn't easy.

First sight upon entering the garden

On a small "island"

For the rest of the pictures from this garden, feel free to visit the photos tab at the top of the page. The photos are also on my Facebook page, for those of you that I'm friends with, as well as directly on my Flickr account, right here!

The next part of our game plan was to visit a second garden and then make our way to the temple of mysteries. Sadly, in our excitement to visit the temple of mysteries we accidentally walked straight past the second garden we had planned on visiting. By the time we checked our map, it wasn't really worth backtracking, so we trekked on. Turning down a street according to my guide, we were surrounded by tons of retail buildings. We figured the only thing mysterious about this temple was that it could exist at all in an area like this. We kept walking further and further (much further than it looked on the map) and thought that perhaps the mystery lies in finding the temple. That didn't turn out to be the case: before too long we arrived. Unfortunately, I can't tell you what was so mysterious about the temple of mystery, seeing as we arrived 2 minutes after its closing time at 4:30 (honestly, who closes a major tourist attraction at 4:30?).

After resting our weary feet for a spell, we decided it was time to hike back to the train station. Though it was a long way, it wasn't too bad of a hike. Being the Venice of the east, there were plenty of attractions to see all throughout the city, such as a large pagoda, a large river, the train station itself (which is quite remarkable looking from afar), and of course several blocks of construction.

Pagoda - hastily captured

Suzhou train station from across the river

It may not sound like we did too much, but we did manage to fill the full five hours, and I was completely exhausted by the time we were finished. While I'm not sure I would go so far as to call Suzhou the Venice of the east, it was certainly a beautiful city and is worth seeing (though I would not recommend visiting on a holiday).