Suzhou and Zhoushang

Our first tour with Top China Travel was on Saturday, May 26th. We took a van for a 90 minute ride to our first stop, Suzhou ("Sue-Joe").  The van made a terrible high-pitched scream about every 80 seconds (I counted).  I believe it needed new belts or pulleys. We all pretended we didn't hear it
and no one talked about it. But I bet we all were visualizing our group stranded and sold into a black
market of slave tourist workers.

The town of Suzhou is 2500 years old...an old vacation spot of the emperors.  There used to be over 3000 classical gardens (royal & private) at one time. Ironically they called it the 'Garden City'. Now there are only 20 gardens left. We visited the Humble and Lion Forest gardens.  The Lion Forest being 700 yr old and famous for it's rockery.

For lunch we ate at the Silk Factory and then toured it. I'm glad we did the lunch first because the in-depth look at the larvae being extracted from all these cocoons was kinda sickening or at least certainly not appetizing. At the end of the tour they gave use the heavy pitch to buy garments and quilts made of pure silk.

From there we went to Zhoushang ("Joe-drun"). Our guide who I had been calling Chen all day, only later to find out it was Chin, told us about a famous artist who painted a a scene from there in the mid-1980s that became a well known piece of art and really is what propelled the town into a tourist trap.  We all tried taking a picture from the vantage point she said the painting was done from. If I just couldda waved all those people off the bridge, it wouldda been perfect!
I saw a copy of the picture two days later, at the Jade museum, on our first tour in Beijing.  I might put that up in the house in a cheap frame.

It will go nice with our cheap-a*s art copies collection.  We did the little boat ride and listened to our driver lady sing for tip.  She sounded as though she was in pain singing. I wanted to tell her "you bad" when I smiled and tipped her but Randi wouldn't have liked that  :)  It was really a beautiful little water town and calls itself the No. 1 water town. If I were to redo the trip and make a change to our itinerary, it would be to actually stay a night in Zhoushang and take the high speed train to Beijing from Suzhou the next morning.  Randi and I would have liked to have had dinner and drinks next to the river that night, after our boat ride but the tour must drive on.

This would be the only group tour we would take and by the end of the day we got to know our 10? other tour members pretty well.  They were from all parts of the world.  They included a gregarious Italian guy from Milan, who was funny even though no one knew Italian. He was very animated and seemed very happy.  We were happy for him.  Then there was a black kid from the US who wouldn't shut up.  He was chewin the ear off some other guy on the bus. The only time he stopped was when he fell asleep. But he did seem very nice. There was an older lady from Copenhagen who was touring without her husband.  She seemed very sweet and found Randi to be the same.  And a yound girl from the Czech Republic who was very well traveled. We took pictures with everyone and even exchanged email addresses to exchange pictures.