Hi everybody! Just made a trip to the final major city in Jiangsu Province. Suzhou is an absolutely beautiful Chinese city. It is most famous for its gardens. Even outside of the gardens, the city has a lot of trees and green spaces. It was much cleaner and less polluted than other cities in the province. However, since Suzhou is more than 2000 years old, the streets are vary narrow. This causes the traffic there to seem even more chaotic than other cities.
There are many gardens throughout the city, but we only had time to visit one of them. So, we went to the Humble Administrator's Garden. It is probably the most famous garden in Suzhou. It was built in the early 1500s by a retired politician, and it took 16 years to complete.
The garden is filled with little pools and streams. Everything is connected together by a series of bridges.
There are many little rooms throughout the garden. They have windows that are set up to frame a particular view.
There are also a number of larger rooms where the politician and his scholar friends would gather.
Finally, there was an area filled with many bonsai trees.
On the second day, we visited the Suzhou Museum. It was a really great museum. Much better than most of the other museums that I've seen. The museum was full of ancient artifacts. The jade carvings were most impressive. I was amazed with the level of detail that these artisans managed thousands of years ago. There was no flash photography allowed in the exhibits, but I did take a picture of the lotus pond in the middle of the museum.
Also, this Wisteria tree was in a little courtyard in the museum. It was planted more than 460 years ago by a famous Ming Dynasty painter.
Of course, no trip would be complete without food and drink. We started the trip at Casa Zoe, a Tex-Mex restaurant. It was the first good Mexican food that I've found. It was amazing!
We ate dinner at an Aussie bar that had a great meat pie. One of my friends got a "chip butty." Apparently that is an English dish. It's a sandwich full of fries. Just bread and fries.
During the day, we saw this great looking bar (notice the pin-yin translation):
However, when we went to check it out that night, we were disappointed to discover that it was actually a "house of ill repute." So, we went elsewhere. We found a bar that had a true dart board, and I got to play a game of darts for the first time since leaving the states.
Suzhou was a great city. There is so much more to see and do there. I hope to go back sometime and see some of the temples and pagodas, and to visit some of the other gardens.
