Water Towns & Gardens

Well it's Friday, the last full day in China... the suitcase is full, bursting actually since Marks and Spencer's was full of chocolate cookies, and yet here I am up in the morning for a bus ride to Suzhou and Zhujiajiao...  Yes, it's getting unpronounceable...

I had been escaping the weather all week, when I first flew in there was rain forecast for every day, yet as each day came the forecast cleared, there was cloud but no rain... When I was in Huangzhou, it was blue skies in Shanghai... and today it was cloudy in both the city and where I was off to.


First stop was Suzhou - which if you have been following along is the other place found underneath Heaven. Huangzhou was the first. Out here, the land is sodden really, it's full of rivers and canals, and as I head Zhujiajiao you see why they built towns the way they did - around the water - as there was no massive drainage projects then. Today however, Suzhou is a 'small' Chinese city of some six million, (Shanghai is over 23 million souls) - the tower blocks being built, in the thousands, is the creator of demand for power, oil and steel that China is now famous for, it looks like they are building an apartment for every one of their billion plus inhabitants... anyway here is the gardens of Suzhou:

 There's lots of fruit here, including ones I like a lot, mangosteens, grapes, sweetsops and rambutans!

 Yummy! The black ones with the spoon are giant grapes, hate to see what they use for fertilizer.

 In the gardens:

 Very old world

Below is the rain room, to listen to the rain falling on the banana leaves.

 Some of the trees lost their leaves already, even though the climate is mild...

 The rock below is said to look like a dragon, and rocks, naturally found with natural shapes, is a common thing here..

 In the water, the reflected sun is seen trying to burst through!

 In the old days, there was one side of the room for men and one for women, they'd all smoke opium..

 The wall picture below is all embroidered with silk..

 Out in town again.

 Oh I wish they sold this fruit at home!

 Chestnuts are also big this time of year, also very tasty!

 They yellow leaves are ginko biloba trees

 More shaped rocks, the wear and tear of the water on rock is seen as an art form

 Jagged walkways apparently keep evil spirits away, which helps explain while almost all roads in Regina are straight.

 Sunshine!

 This rock looks like a crab.

 This is a buffalo eating a crab - which seems odd, but it comes from a chinese expression..

 This area is perfect for growing mulberry leaves - they grow larger here than anywhere - and since silk worms love to eat mulberry the silk yields are much higher.

 The worms above eat leaves until fat, wrap themselves in silk to pupate, the cocoons are below...

 The stages are shown in meticulous but gross displays...gross because silk is industrial science now, it's not small family farms naturally doing everything..

 the cocoons are sorted, for silk thread only one pupa can be inside, if more than one, it has a different use, they stretch out the cocoon to make duvet filling.

 the single cocoons are soaked in hot water and machines run the thread...

 No one could tell me how they find the end of the thread on the cocoon. Look carefully for the threads :)

 Here are pupae in cocoons for bedding. yeah, they take the pupae out... I bought two silk stuffed duvets - they are cool in summer and warm in winter.

 And off to Zhujiajiao: Where pig feet shops rule the day, knuckles too, they boil them for hours until the fat turns to jelly - I didn't partake... but there are dozens of shops like this! Not a good place to be a pig.

 The old water town is a network of canals

 And old store fronts, this is a very popular spot for Chinese as well as foreign tourists

 Below is a very cute hostel

 In the spring I am sure it is much nicer.

 Boat rides are mandatory.

 In restaurants you pick your own fish and veggies.

 And pretend you are in ancient China.

 This cat pic I like - an old woman came to chase him away a  short while later.

 On the boat now...

 It is indeed a cute old town.

 Too many tourists getting in my pictures though!

 Below is an old man making combs and gua sha massage tools from yak horn.

 And when it got dark it was time to leave...

 Back in Shanghai, I went down to The Bund to try and catch the Oriental Pearl Building covered in LED's but yet again I miss it, what the heck... soup dumplings for dinner made with agaricus blazeii mushrooms (also filling my suitcase) and this was Friday :) Nite Nite!