SuZhou - girl

A lot of our time here revolved around a fabulous bar/coffee shop/book shop called Bookworm. We whiled away a few happy hours drinking, playing scrabble and chatting in the sun. When we weren't hanging out though we were being diligent tourists, checking out the gardens for which SuZhou is famous, the canals and Tongli, a waterside village full of Chinese tourists. In fact, everywhere was packed to the rafters with Chinese tourists; there was no respite from the tour guides with microphones or the snapping of the tourists with new cameras. No respite until we found the Twin Pagodas garden, which wasn't particularly interesting but was almost empty. As we were sitting and breathing in the silence, a French girl came in and exclaimed 'mais, il y'a personne ici!' and we knew just what she meant.

 

Thanks to the expo, rail travel is not easy at the moment as everyone is either getting to, or leaving Shanghai. We tried to get train tickets back to Shanghai when we arrived in SuZhou (four days before we wanted to travel) but were very firmly told we couldn't. So, two days later we tried again, having been promised it would be no problem. We queued with the million others wanting train tickets and when we got to the front we handed over our little note explaining, in Mandarin, exactly what we needed...and we got yelled at. First we were told, in a shouty kind of way, that there were no tickets so we handed over another note asking for something different and got properly yelled at. We can only assume the woman didn't much like Sundays, or trains, or people. We joined another queue and showed our notes to another woman who only yelled at us a little bit but did at least, eventually, decide we were human and that she should help us. Phew.

 

SuZhou is a lovely town and it would definitely be even better with fewer people but we had a good time, ate well and met some lovely people even if none of them were at the train station. I would recommend that the Head Communist Comrade of SuZhou does something about the drains though. There are select patches where the smell is so bad I almost vomited, no hyperbole.