Rain, Rain, Go Away

Sunday, Suzhou

Kun Opera singer in a Sunzhou teahouse

Today was a culture day in the most interesting city of Suzhou (sue-chow). We began in the morning with a cruise in a small canal boat on the Grand Canal and then on some of the smaller canals. First you motor by lovely gardens and apartments and then all of sudden the canals are edged by older one or two story houses that look a bit worse for the wear. The residents do their laundry on the steps leading down into the water (brownish, brackish and full of floating debris) and then string the clothes on bamboo poles which are hung outside for drying. Lots of mop buckets being filled from and emptied into the canals as well as a number of little open air restaurants, tea houses and people selling everything from fruit to chicken feet from wooden carts on the canal banks.

Back ashore we zigged and zagged through narrow streets not ten feet wide until we reached the Garden of the Master of the Nets, a perfect manifestation of a Chinese garden first designed a thousand years ago. It's been burned and restored a number of times in the interim but contains the four requirements of a true Chinese garden: rocks, water, plants and gazebo. It's not large by any sense of the word, but is a true gem appreciated by resident and visitor alike.

Then it was off to a silk workshop where artisans work decades to become masters in the art of double-sided embroidery using the thinnest of strands of silk. The prices of the finished pieces reflect the skill and time (often over a year) needed to complete them. I left with a little silk scarf, Made in China...

It started to rain as we walked to a teahouse along one of the canals to learn about and listen to songs from the Kun Opera performed by a woman in full make up and costume who accompanied herself with some antique Chinese instruments. No one was really too excited about this, but it was actually great fun. She first explained the story told in the songs and I swear they could be country songs. The Kun Opera is softer sounding than the Peking Opera which can make your ears bleed.

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Suzhou train station

It was raining even more as we headed to the train station. It took a solid two hours to go by bus from Shang Hai airport to Suzhou yesterday but today we were making the  reverse trip in just 29 minutes on the bullet train. The train station was just madness. It's a vast open space with thousands and thousands of people milling about and then suddenly heading to gates when announcements were made, only in Chinese. The bullet trains now run to the capital cities of every province in China. They're sleek and white on the outside and like first class airline compartments inside, except with more room. At exactly ten minutes before departure, the turnstiles to the gate are activated.  You feed your ticket into the machine, the little gate opens, you dash through and then grab your ticket as it pops out, much like a subway. Then down an escalator to the train platform where you stand on the number of your compartment. The train comes in with a swoosh, the doors open, you get on and less than a minute later the train takes off again. It was such fun to ride at such speed that we were sorry our ride ended so soon. The station we used in Shang Hai was, of course, vast, but also a well-organized transportation hub for buses, trains, subways and even airplanes.

The bullet train

Of course we had to ride another hour through stop and go traffic by bus to dinner and our hotel. I'm sure we could have taken a subway and gotten there much sooner but it took four local guides and two AAA reps from the US to make sure all forty of us got on the right train going the right direction. No way were they going to tempt fate with the Shang Hai subway!

So now we've traveled by jet, bus, pedi-cab, cruise ship, pea pod boat, canal boat and bullet train. Tuesday we're going to take the world's fastest train, the MagLev, to the airport. It makes the 20 minute if-there's-no-traffic trip in 7 minutes! Would that the airplane could MagLev it's way to Chicago as fast. It's 13-1/2 hours from here to there and then another couple of hours to Atlanta. Tuesday is going to be a long, long day AND we go back across the international dateline so even though we leave here at 4 pm on Tuesday, we arrive there at 4:30 pm on Tuesday. The day that will not end.

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Aboard the bullet train en route to Shang Hai

We're all about ready to finish this adventure. It's been a fabulous trip, but frankly, we're pooped! Our wake up call comes at 7 am every morning and we're rarely back to the hotel before 8 pm at night. Oh, does that make us sound o.l.d.

We're also counting down the number of Chinese meals left--just two more to go. Each lunch or dinner has had at least one dish that was just delicious but we're all about riced out. Today I found myself wondering what United would serve us on the way home...please, God, nothing stir fried.