Day 21 : the Gardens of Souzhou
We decided to escape from Shanghai for the day but couldn't escape the heat. Souzhou is famous for its gardens - there are hundreds of them hidden between the canals and behind houses. There used to be over 200 which somehow escaped damage during the CulturalRevolution - they weren't destroyed but weren't maintained either. Now, because of industrialisation of the city, there are only about 70 left.
The first thing we did was to buy our return ticket to Shanghai : in China, you can only buy tickets from the point of departure. Luckily, the ticket agent could speak english. We were relieved.
From there, we headed to the east of the city towards the Garden of the Humble Administrator. It was really beautiful but overcrowded with loud Chinese tour groups and people talking on cell phones. We figured that such a place would be peaceful and quiet so we couldn't appreciate it as much as we had hoped.
Then we tried to find another garden wich we couldn't find, as usual. We found it right as we were giving up. But since it was lunch time, we decided to walk south through the city to find a restaurant. We didn't calculate the distance very well so ended up walking about 4 kilometers in the noonday heat. All this on top of the fact that Jerome had his foot run over by a taxi in Shanghai the previous day.
When we finally got to the restaurant, it wasn't there...so we ended up in a local place (for local people) where no one spoke a word of English. We sat down and the waitress gave us a menu as she giggled. We took out our dictionary and pointed to a couple words: chicken, vegetable, green. We had a very nice lunch of spicy chicken, chinese brocoli, rice and cold drinks all for the price of a coffee at Starbuck's in Shanghai.
We then realized it was late so we got a taxi back to the garden we couldn't find at first. The Lion Grove Garden was interesting because of it's jagged rock formations. But it was hot and crowded and we had almost had enough. Ready to give up on the gardens, we forced ourselves to go to one more. The Master of the Nets was not only small and beautiful but it was empty. We sat around for an huor watching the fish and the turtles and enjoying the cool breeze. Have you ever seen the Chinese Garden in the Met in NY? Well, it is a copy of this garden (without the turtles and fish).
The gardens all closed early so we had a couple hours to kill before our train. The nice woman at the tourist office told us there was an internet cafe 3 traffic lights away on the left. We followed her instructions but didn't find anything. We stood on the corner for a long time, tired and sick of not finding what we were looking for. We went into a hotel and asked but no one spoke English and they didn't even seem to understand the map we were showing them (seems the maps in the guide books aren't very good). Lost, we went back to the corner and staked out people who might speak English or be internet nerds. We finally found one but he didn't know. Then we asked a rickshaw driver to take us to an address in LP but he couldn't - explaining with hands and drawings that there was a bridge he wasn't allowed to go on. We finally took a taxi - the driver didn't understand our map of course - and he dropped us off on another corner. This time, we were relieved to see @@@@@ all over the windows.
Back in Shanghai, we were hot, tired and hungry. We walked out of the hotel and just went anywhere for food. A girl in the restaurant helped with the translation and we had some fish in a really nice spicy sauce and more green vegetables. As we were finishing, a French couple walked in. They were the image of what bad tourists are to us. They didn't want this or that, didn't want spicy food or heavy food, and took about 30 minutes to decided what they wanted. The entire restaurant staff looked on so it was pretty amusing. They began to tell us about their trip and we quickly realized that we hadn't seen the same China.
The first thing we did was to buy our return ticket to Shanghai : in China, you can only buy tickets from the point of departure. Luckily, the ticket agent could speak english. We were relieved.
From there, we headed to the east of the city towards the Garden of the Humble Administrator. It was really beautiful but overcrowded with loud Chinese tour groups and people talking on cell phones. We figured that such a place would be peaceful and quiet so we couldn't appreciate it as much as we had hoped.
Then we tried to find another garden wich we couldn't find, as usual. We found it right as we were giving up. But since it was lunch time, we decided to walk south through the city to find a restaurant. We didn't calculate the distance very well so ended up walking about 4 kilometers in the noonday heat. All this on top of the fact that Jerome had his foot run over by a taxi in Shanghai the previous day.
When we finally got to the restaurant, it wasn't there...so we ended up in a local place (for local people) where no one spoke a word of English. We sat down and the waitress gave us a menu as she giggled. We took out our dictionary and pointed to a couple words: chicken, vegetable, green. We had a very nice lunch of spicy chicken, chinese brocoli, rice and cold drinks all for the price of a coffee at Starbuck's in Shanghai.
We then realized it was late so we got a taxi back to the garden we couldn't find at first. The Lion Grove Garden was interesting because of it's jagged rock formations. But it was hot and crowded and we had almost had enough. Ready to give up on the gardens, we forced ourselves to go to one more. The Master of the Nets was not only small and beautiful but it was empty. We sat around for an huor watching the fish and the turtles and enjoying the cool breeze. Have you ever seen the Chinese Garden in the Met in NY? Well, it is a copy of this garden (without the turtles and fish).
The gardens all closed early so we had a couple hours to kill before our train. The nice woman at the tourist office told us there was an internet cafe 3 traffic lights away on the left. We followed her instructions but didn't find anything. We stood on the corner for a long time, tired and sick of not finding what we were looking for. We went into a hotel and asked but no one spoke English and they didn't even seem to understand the map we were showing them (seems the maps in the guide books aren't very good). Lost, we went back to the corner and staked out people who might speak English or be internet nerds. We finally found one but he didn't know. Then we asked a rickshaw driver to take us to an address in LP but he couldn't - explaining with hands and drawings that there was a bridge he wasn't allowed to go on. We finally took a taxi - the driver didn't understand our map of course - and he dropped us off on another corner. This time, we were relieved to see @@@@@ all over the windows.
Back in Shanghai, we were hot, tired and hungry. We walked out of the hotel and just went anywhere for food. A girl in the restaurant helped with the translation and we had some fish in a really nice spicy sauce and more green vegetables. As we were finishing, a French couple walked in. They were the image of what bad tourists are to us. They didn't want this or that, didn't want spicy food or heavy food, and took about 30 minutes to decided what they wanted. The entire restaurant staff looked on so it was pretty amusing. They began to tell us about their trip and we quickly realized that we hadn't seen the same China.
posted by Gros Joe at
12:21 PM
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