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Suzhou

Mar 28, 20257 min read

Next: Nanyang
Prev: Wulingyuan

What was an unplanned escape ended up being my favorite city in China, Suzhou.

Day 1 - Getting to Suzhou

We needed to spend an entire day traveling from Zhangjiejia back to shanghai and eventually to suzhou.

I don’t particularly love days like this, but I don’t particularly hate them either. There is something relieving about travel days. I always feel like I need to be working on something. But I don’t feel guilt about it when traveling. I can just sit on a plane or a train.

The Shanghai Train Station was my first real experience at a major chinese citie’s station. I could believe how big it is or how many people were there.

Accidentally going to the wrong Suzhou station was a bit of a blessing, because the station was a ridiculously massive concrete brutalist station, with bullet trains whizzing right through the center of it at high speed. And with these buses, I had a bit of an aesthetic moment.

I’m a big fan of this style of building.

Invited To Dinner

That night we were in a small village on the south side of the city. The hotel we choose was completely empty, and the owner was very happy to have us. He upgraded us to the best room in the place.

Normally very lively, it was like a ghost town, since everyone went home to their villages for the new year. We were walking around hoping to find somewhere to eat.

We eventually found a small restaurant with people inside and knocked on the door. The restaurant was not open, because this was the owner and his family and friends. But they waved us in and had us sit right at the table with them.

They had us try all sorts of different foods. There’s also a strict rule in China, that I would quickly find out, is when anyone stands up and toasts you with their drink, you have to drink. Me, being apparently the first American in their store, was getting toasted to quite often.

These are some of the nicest people I have met, anywhere. It would be like inviting a random traveler, who can’t speak you languge, into your families christmas dinner. The owner forced us to take a huge bag of sausage as we left as well, despite our best efforts to decline.

Day 2 - Central Suzhou

During our dinner our night before, one of the guys there was a city official, who told us all sorts of things to do, and even got us tickets (that were sold out) to go there.

The first was the Suzhou Museum, full of priceless Chinese artifacts and buildings.

On our way to the museum, I stopped to get some soup dumplings, famous from this area. I first learned of them in shanghai, but the ones we tried there were from a tourist trap and not great.

The are small bun dumplings full of a meaty soup. You bit a small hole and slurp it out. These might have been the best thing I ate in China. Highly recommended, if you’re ever in Suzhou.

Right beside the museum is the Humble Administrator’s Garden. A place I wanted to go to because I like the word “humble”, but come to find out afterwards is known as the most famous Chinese Garden in the Country.

After that, we walked to -something- Street, a place Kai wanted to go that I didn’t know about.

It was a street along a canal, with boats rowing along and tons of shops. There were also tons of Girls dressed up in traditional Chinese royal clothing to take pictures.

It felt a bit like being both in the future and the past at the same time, which is how much of China ends up feeling.

Our final destination of the day was the “Oriente Gate”, a skyscraper with an interesting design I saw a picture of on the metro.

It’s a super big and tall building in the shape of an arch. One of the design features in all the cities in China I didn’t like much was turning the buildings into big TV screens, often displaying advertisements.

The gate is located on a lake, so we took a short walk to the lakefront, and as often happens to us, found another event just starting - a fountain show.

We got to watch a huge display set to music and light kicked off on the lake. Everything in China seems to always be as big and bright as they can do it.

Day 3 - Mudu Village & Lingyanshan

This day we wanted to relax a bit, and just hung around the little village we were staying in. Our awesome hotel host, who also owned a small restaurant outside, would invite us to eat noodles with him every morning.


Man fishing in the canal.

Mudu

Similar to the village yesterday, the one we were staying in had a canal going through it. Our host told us it is because there was a king who built a temple on top of the nearby hill, called Lingyanshan, he needed lots of wood. The Canal was made to transport the wood for the temple. The village is named after this, “Mudu” basically meaning “Wet Wood” in Chinese.

Lunch

We stopped for lunch at a small noodle shop, where the lady working there make sishaun style noodles. As the whole reason I wanted to go to ChengDu in Sichaun was to try the spicy noodles, and we had to cancel that part of the trip, I told here to give me the spiciest she has got. It was amazing. We had alot of fun learning about noodles while we were there.

Later, we climbed Lingyanshan, which has a beautiful buddhist temple at the top. You can see the pagoda from the village below.

There was lots of incense and monks. People leave little offerings like small nuts and candies at all the statues of gods. The monks then offered them to us when they were closing up the temple.

The scale of Chinese cities is hard to comprehend when you get a view from up high. Endless concrete.

Since it was new years, we bought a bunch of fireworks from the village earlier, and set them off on our walk back 🎇

Day 4 - Lake Taihu

Suzhou is located by a massive lake that is very popular for vacations by people who live in Shanghai. We decided it’s worth taking a trip down to see.

You can take the metro line we were by to the last stop to get there. We weren’t sure what we’d find, but there was a nice park with a huge waterwheel and lots of abandoned boats on the shore.

Later, we went to Tiger Hill, an ancient Buddhist temple with a massive stone pagoda and lots of gardens. We also caught a traditional dragon dance there.

After it got dark, we went to our third and last ancient canal town. This one was super crowded, but had some really good street food.

Our next stop was Nanyang, where Kai’s family lives. In the morning we our going to a small village to celebrate new years.

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