In Chinese there is a saying: "There is paradise in heaven while on earth there is Suzhou and Hangzhou."
I had arrived in Shanghai last Sunday and had held a workshop with different people every day. The workshops still go on next week in this part of China which is why I staid in Shanghai over the weekend.
On Saturday I decided to go to Suzhou by train. Going by train in Shanghai is like going on a plane in Europe. You are not allowed to enter the station without a train ticket (tickets are usually sold next to the station) and only after a security check. Then you have to enter a waiting hall and when the loudspeakers announce that the check-in starts all passengers rush on the platform where the train is already waiting.
Suzhou was a real nice town. Rather small and easily accessible, it offered nice canals where you could take boat tours (the "gondoliere" even sang Chinese songs), Chinese landscape gardens (although unsurprisingly the most wellknown ones were damn crowded and not that good to visit, some small gardens were a positive surprise, e.g. the "Master-of-Nets Garden"), pagodas and an old town you could stroll around. I especially liked the old town (authentic) where children played in the streets, women washed their clothes in the canal and old men drank tea. Of course, living there is no easy life without the normal modern commodities. Washing clothes in the canals/rivers might look romantic to people from Western cities, but I also considered how dirty the water was and that it was real handwork done by women and female children only...
When I came back from Suzhou, I just passed the hotel where my parents were supposed to arrive on Saturday and wanted to leave them a message where and when we could meet, but when I entered the lobby, guess who walked down the stairs?
My parents! Their travel tour was doing a "Shanghai by night" tour and I decided to join. We visited the current tallest building of Shanghai (Jin Mao tower, 88 storeys) and went on top with the elevators. There we enjoyed the view over the Bund (the colonial area) and the TV tower (Oriental Pearl Tower). Next to Jin Mao tower they currently build a slightly taller building (nicknamed "bottle opener" because of its form), but the tallest inhabited structure of the world will still be the "101" in Taipei / Taiwan until the moment when the sheiks in Dubai will have finished their even taller building (probably 2009).
Many more night sights later (Bund, Nanjing Lu, Renmin Square with coloured fountain) the tour was finished.
I had arrived in Shanghai last Sunday and had held a workshop with different people every day. The workshops still go on next week in this part of China which is why I staid in Shanghai over the weekend.
On Saturday I decided to go to Suzhou by train. Going by train in Shanghai is like going on a plane in Europe. You are not allowed to enter the station without a train ticket (tickets are usually sold next to the station) and only after a security check. Then you have to enter a waiting hall and when the loudspeakers announce that the check-in starts all passengers rush on the platform where the train is already waiting.
Suzhou was a real nice town. Rather small and easily accessible, it offered nice canals where you could take boat tours (the "gondoliere" even sang Chinese songs), Chinese landscape gardens (although unsurprisingly the most wellknown ones were damn crowded and not that good to visit, some small gardens were a positive surprise, e.g. the "Master-of-Nets Garden"), pagodas and an old town you could stroll around. I especially liked the old town (authentic) where children played in the streets, women washed their clothes in the canal and old men drank tea. Of course, living there is no easy life without the normal modern commodities. Washing clothes in the canals/rivers might look romantic to people from Western cities, but I also considered how dirty the water was and that it was real handwork done by women and female children only...
When I came back from Suzhou, I just passed the hotel where my parents were supposed to arrive on Saturday and wanted to leave them a message where and when we could meet, but when I entered the lobby, guess who walked down the stairs?
My parents! Their travel tour was doing a "Shanghai by night" tour and I decided to join. We visited the current tallest building of Shanghai (Jin Mao tower, 88 storeys) and went on top with the elevators. There we enjoyed the view over the Bund (the colonial area) and the TV tower (Oriental Pearl Tower). Next to Jin Mao tower they currently build a slightly taller building (nicknamed "bottle opener" because of its form), but the tallest inhabited structure of the world will still be the "101" in Taipei / Taiwan until the moment when the sheiks in Dubai will have finished their even taller building (probably 2009).
Many more night sights later (Bund, Nanjing Lu, Renmin Square with coloured fountain) the tour was finished.
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