Suzhou
Day 11 1/1/03
We arrive in Wuhan and get breakfast in a hotel then sightsee. I sleep on the bus while people see Tiger Hill- a very tall pagoda. Then we shopped a little more and flew to Shanghai. Everyone is very excited for the four star hotel since it should be warm and most people haven’t showered in 3 days. SS also flies and looks awful. SV is also sick. They both get sent to hospital as we ride the bus to Suzhou. SV was very sad that he couldn’t come. Suzhou is a city of canals that is surrounded by a moat. It has lots of shops and seems to be the China equivalent of somewhere like Santa Fe. The hotel we stay at is very beautiful and simple- white and smaller with large Chinese style gardens. All I want to do is stay in the hotel room so I order room service- a hamburger and french onion soup which isn’t bad. Then I sleep like a rock.
Humble Administrator’s Garden
Garden and Canal
Day 12 1/2/03
I feel much better and am glad that my being sick didn’t cause me to miss much. In the morning we visit a very large garden which is another thing Suzhou is known for. It is called the Humble Administrator’s Garden- but is not so humble. It was from the Ming Dynasty. Chinese gardens seem to be characterized by lots of craggy rocks, clumps and islands of different kinds of trees and bushes and pagodas. It actually looks a bit like Pennsylvania woods – fairly natural and loose appearing. The bridges are all zig-zaggy for some spiritual reason. We see beautiful colorful mandarin ducks and a bonsai garden. They say bonsai is actually an ancient Chinese tradition called Pan Sai (or something similar) meaning pot landscape. After that we go to the silk embroidery factory- seems to be the highest quality/prestige artisans in China as they get 6 years of training and are paid very well. Embroidery is pretty impressive. Then lunch and the regular silk factory. They boil the poor worms in their cacoons so they don’t ruin the thread. After that we bus back to Shanghai and have one of the worst meals so far. It had a bunch of celery and slippery vegetables and some weird soft beef-like substance. After that we see the Shanghai Circus acrobats. These people are insane. There are contortionists, balance acts, roller skating tricks with one girl hanging off of another girl by biting onto a rubber ball and twirling. One woman balanced with a one-handed hand stand on a little stick up in the air for about 10 minutes as she did a bunch of other stuff with her legs. Then four guys got motorbikes in a circle cage and rode around without hitting each other. Total super humans. The obsessiveness of the culture and how they train the athletes from really young ages is really apparent here. After the show we hear bad news about SS (SVi is fine and is with us). He may have spinal menengitis. We are all very sad. I really thought he was going to die so I prepared myself for it all night although I dreamt that he would be OK.