one day in the gardens of suzhou

Early Saturday morning, we got on a high-speed train and headed to Suzhou, an ancient city on the east side of this province which is famous for its garden and pagodas. I decided that we should get there early in order to avoid heat and crowds as much as possible, and this turned out to be a good idea. A lot of the Chinese had the same idea, but it could have been much, much worse. Anyway, our first stop was the Humble Administrator's Garden, which many people feel is the finest garden in Suzhou, if not all of southern China. Its history goes all the way back to the Tang Dynasty, which makes it more than 1000 years old. I felt like it was the best thing we saw that day, and I'm glad we went.







There are various small buildings on the grounds; this is the inside of one of them:











After we were done there, we walked over to nearby Pingjiang Road, which had been touted as a really cool area along one of the canals for which Suzhou is also famous (it's sometimes called the "Venice of the East" due to the canals). We must have been there too early, because we found it pretty dead and lifeless--hard to imagine it being lively at any time of day, to be honest. So, we quickly moved on to our next attraction, the Lion's Forest. This is a garden that is completely walled in. It's much smaller than the Humble Administrator's garden and not nearly as interesting. And, to make matters worse, it was jam-packed with tour groups.

The Chinese go gaga for rock art/formations; here's the little lady walking through some:



More from the grounds:




We didn't stay terribly long, and then caught a taxi to the Pan Gate, which is the city's only remaining original gate in its walls. In reviewing my photos, I realized something kind of funny: we never actually saw the gate. We were immediately attracted to the pagoda on the grounds and completely forgot about finding the gate and the wall. Oops.



It was an extra 6RMB to climb the pagoda, so we went for it. This one was harder to climb due to the steep, narrow stairs, but since you could only go up to the fourth level, it wasn't that strenuous of a climb.

You can see a bit of the stairs here, as I look down at the little lady from the top of the first flight:



Two views from the fourth level:





Not far from the pagoda was another bell house, and since the little lady felt I needed some good luck, I paid the 6RMB they were charging to ring the bell. It was supposed to be for three rings, but they gave me three extra so the little lady could get more photos. I rang it hard, too, to make up for the weak hits that Becca perpetrated on the bell we found in Hangzhou.

The bell was really big, as you can tell by comparing the dirty Germans standing next to it:



More of the surrounding grounds and gardens:





We came across two chicks dressed like anime characters toward the end of our time at Pan Men. You can file those outfits under "WTF":



After this, the little lady wanted lunch, so we walked all over creation looking for restaurants that served traditional Suzhou-style food. We walked all over creation and kept buying drinks and snacks, so we never ended up getting any of that delicious local cuisine. More on that later.

We walked a few miles and finally came to one of our next destinations, Shantang Street. This was far better than Pingjiang Road, and is the old-style Suzhou that you would expect to see after looking at tourist photos.

The Shantang gate:



The main road:



There are canals and alleys off the side of the road, and this is the really cool part of Shantang Street:









We didn't stop anywhere or buy anything in the myriad shops that lined the street and alleys, but walking around was pretty cool. It's definitely a place I would visit again, preferably to do some night photography. It's probably great at night.

After this, we walked around in search of a nearby mosque that appeared on Becca's phone maps, but we never found it. Bummer. So, we sat down and rested for a little while, then caught a cab to our next destination, which ended up not being the place we wanted to go, but a nearby garden. I forget the English name, but the Chinese name was Ding Yuan. This garden was pretty good, but still pretty crowded.







By the end of our visit to Ding Yuan, we were both really beat, so we decided to find a place to eat. I could tell that the little lady was fading, so I quickly settled on a Xinjiang-style place that advertised homemade, knife-cut noodles--a specialty of the Muslim people that live in Xinjiang (northwest China). The little lady was pretty annoyed with this choice, since we had walked all over creation in search of Suzhou-style cuisine, but since I had already noticed there was none to be had outside of Ding Yuan, I figured this was our best option.

It turned out to be a great meal, despite the fact that they didn't have most of the things on the menu available for order. We tried ordering a lamb/onion/rice dish. Sorry, no rice. We tried ordering some spicy stir-fried cabbage. Sorry, no cabbage. OK, so what do you have? Noodles. So, we ordered one stir-fried lamb ramen dish and one stir-fried knife-cut noodle dish. The little lady took some photos of the dude making the noodles, so hopefully those will make it into her blog at some point. Here's what the knife-cut noodle dish looked like:



I gotta say, these noodles were awesome. I've been wanting to try them for a while (there is a small shop less than a block away from our apartment that I've been wanting to try), and I was not disappointed. I liked these noodles way better than ramen noodles, and now that I know this, I think I'll be hitting that joint by our apartment soon. Anyway, after we were done with the noodles and the soup they gave us along with, the little lady noticed that the owners were eating some kind of cake that looked like cornbread, which neither of us had ever seen before, so I asked them what it was and if we could buy some. They looked at me funny, as if no one had ever asked this question before, but the lady (very traditional-looking, wearing a typical Chinese Muslim hijab) broke off a large piece and handed it to me--with her bare hands, and not on a dish. Kind of funny. It was very bland, but tasted really good when dipped in the sauce left over from our noodles. This restaurant was a hole-in-the-wall kind of place on the side of the road and didn't even have a drink selection, so I had to go to a nearby convenience store to get drinks. So, we had two plates of noodles, two bowls of soup, the cake and three bottles of drink, and the whole thing cost us about $3.30. Man, I love China.

We were totally beat after dinner, so rather than go to the destination we were originally supposed to hit when we arrived at Ding Yuan, we got in a cab and went to the train station. I'm kicking myself for that decision now, because I saw said attraction from the road as we were driving to the station, and realized it was the most famous pagoda in Suzhou. Oops. I suppose if we want to go back, Suzhou is only about an hour away.

It was a tiring day, but we saw some really great stuff. It's a great place to visit if you're in the area, and it's conveniently located between Nanjing and Shanghai.