Suzhou

About a half an hour's train ride from Shanghai is the town of Suzhou. So we decided to get a train and check it out. The process of acquiring a train ticket in the airport is a story unto itself. Arriving at the station by taxi, we are immediately met by a young man who seems to know instantly where we want to go. "Suzhou?" he asks, and rushes us over to another guy, who says he can buy out train tickets for us for 120 Yuan. So we hand over the money, and then some other guy takes us to a booth and talks to the lady in the booth and then turns to us and says he needs another 60 Yuan. At this point, we feel we are being ripped off, but he already has the 120 Yuan, so what can we do? Anyway, we got the tickets, finally, but could only book a trip which would give us a couple of hours in Suzhou. The train station waiting rooms are packed with humanity, but the process of boarding the train and the train itself is quite nice. The train is modern and very quite. Just as we were about to get off the train, a young man sitting in front of us handed us a note written in English which apparently he had been writing on our whole trip over to Suzhou. He wanted to convey to us his displeasure at the way CNN has been treating the whole Tibet story, and wanted to tell us how in 1958, Chairman Mao liberated the Tibet people from a life of slavery, and that CNN is trying to ruin the Olympic games for China. He seemed to have the idea that the entire population of the U.S. was protesting in the streets, so we did our best to tell him that it is not that way, and that we have nothing against China or the Olympic games. Anyway, we had to go and he was staying on the train which was heading to Nanjing.

At Suzhou, we headed toward a taxi line of people who wanted to get to the town of Suzhou. Our impression of Suzhou from the train station was a lot of dust. There didn't seem to be any town, as the town was some distance from the station. Anyway, we decided that being we don't have a lot of time before having to catch the train back in a couple of hours, we should pick one place and just walk around and check it out. So we told to driver to take us to the Sheratin Hotel which was by the Panmen Gate and Ruigang Pagoda. Photos are on Flickr. The place is nice, and Suzhou is more urban and larger than we had expected. The gardens and pagodas are nice, and I'm kind of glad we didn't spend more time there, because I got the feeling that all these gardens in Suzhou are kind of alike, and when you've seen one...(you know the rest).

Getting back to the hotel after a harrowing taxi ride (they're all rather white knuckle affairs, really), we decided to have dinner at the hotel restaurant and relax. I forgot my sunscreen and now the top of my bald head is sunburnt.