My friend, Simon, and I went to Suzhou for the weekend trip and found that Suzhou held the friendliest people with the greatest gardens one can find in Asia. These are pictures me at our Suzhou Fast Train station, hostel, a local noodle restaurant, views of the water city, the beautiful Zhuo Zheng Yuan and a pagoda.
My friend, Simon, is a Critical Language Scholar recipient, also a government scholarship for students learning one of the 12 (or 13) critical languages deemed important to U.S. foreign relations. I met him a couple weeks ago and we decided to travel to Suzhou to see the sights of Portland's sister city.
We bought tickets online, thanks to my Chinese roommate's help, and we paid $5USD to take the fast train to Suzhou which is around one hour away. Once we arrived, it was immediately clear the air was cleaner than Shanghai when we weren't wheezing in car exhaust everywhere, haha.
Simon reserved this very quaint hotel with a Koi fish pond in the middle, shelves of books and DVDs, and board games that included Jenga and Chinese Wei'qi. Before we settled down we searched for food, but we didn't realize that in Suzhou everything was closed by 9. We walked around for an hour until we found a small stand selling fried noodles. We ordered two plates of spicy fried noodles and talked about life back in the states in Chinese.
The next morning we ventured to a small local noodles place--the Chinese absolutely adores noodles--and then headed to Zhuo Zheng Yuan which is Suzhou's famous park and is protected by the United Nation's Heritage Center. It was huge, almost the size of the Forbidden City. We took two hours, and I wasn't sure we saw everything. We spent the rest of the day climbing a very tall pagoda and having dried dates on the top floor while enjoying the view.
When we were returning, we only had an hour to get back to the station to catch our 7PM train. We didn't realize that Suzhou had four train stations, so we had trouble figuring out which one we had to go to. None of the taxis would pick us up because they were all full of customers, but we finally caved and took a black taxi--an taxi driven by an "independent contractor." She was one of the nicest taxi drivers and hands down the prettiest.
However, once we got to the station were we first arrived, we found out it was the wrong one. But instead of trying to fly to the other part of town in 10 minutes, we decided to buy new tickets back to Shanghai. We waited for a couple hours and returned home around 10:30PM. As this was all going on, Simon kept on chanting, "This is what adventures are made of!"
We bought tickets online, thanks to my Chinese roommate's help, and we paid $5USD to take the fast train to Suzhou which is around one hour away. Once we arrived, it was immediately clear the air was cleaner than Shanghai when we weren't wheezing in car exhaust everywhere, haha.
Simon reserved this very quaint hotel with a Koi fish pond in the middle, shelves of books and DVDs, and board games that included Jenga and Chinese Wei'qi. Before we settled down we searched for food, but we didn't realize that in Suzhou everything was closed by 9. We walked around for an hour until we found a small stand selling fried noodles. We ordered two plates of spicy fried noodles and talked about life back in the states in Chinese.
The next morning we ventured to a small local noodles place--the Chinese absolutely adores noodles--and then headed to Zhuo Zheng Yuan which is Suzhou's famous park and is protected by the United Nation's Heritage Center. It was huge, almost the size of the Forbidden City. We took two hours, and I wasn't sure we saw everything. We spent the rest of the day climbing a very tall pagoda and having dried dates on the top floor while enjoying the view.
When we were returning, we only had an hour to get back to the station to catch our 7PM train. We didn't realize that Suzhou had four train stations, so we had trouble figuring out which one we had to go to. None of the taxis would pick us up because they were all full of customers, but we finally caved and took a black taxi--an taxi driven by an "independent contractor." She was one of the nicest taxi drivers and hands down the prettiest.
However, once we got to the station were we first arrived, we found out it was the wrong one. But instead of trying to fly to the other part of town in 10 minutes, we decided to buy new tickets back to Shanghai. We waited for a couple hours and returned home around 10:30PM. As this was all going on, Simon kept on chanting, "This is what adventures are made of!"