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Today was water town day, basically a chinese Venice, I tried to find it in Lonely Planet but there is no reference to it, it was called Zhouzhuang. It was absolutely jammed with Chinese tourists and tourist tat but once you looked past that it was quite pretty. I ended up buying some scrolls with pictures of plants (bamboo etc) on them for 150 yuan, probably to expensive but not to bad and it was a local family down a side alley rather than on the main streets and I got to meet the whole family including grandpa.
The weather started to turn but we had a trip on one of the local gondalas which at least was covered. Chinese tourists are so funny, they go around in large groups led by a guide who holds up a flag. All members of the group have one identifing symbol to identify them as part of the group, usually a baseball cap, badge or t-shirt. It was hillarious that people would do that and kept me amused for a good part of the day. We also had lunch which was the usual Chinese fair but with the addition of snails, I did
have one but got very turned off when I discovered that half of the snails have baby snails inside them.
After lunch we were supposed to head to a silk factory but the company the guide had booked us with insisted that we went to many shopping places, Jerry(our guide) hadn't agreed to this when he booked the trip and got quite angry with the tour company guide but she wouldn't budge. We had to catch the train to Xi'an that evening and time was getting a bit tight. Anyway we ended up going back to Suzhou and jumped of the bus and into taxis before the guide could take us to more shopping places, this meant that time was very tight and some poeple went back to the hotel to meet people who hadn't come to Zhouzhuang and pick up the bags, it started pissing down now and everyone was getting a little worried, especially Sally (the one I really didn't like) as she had lost a bag one time on a trip to Chile.
Anyway Jerry arrived with the bags and after a quite shuttling job everyone was reuntited with there bags, well everyone apart from
Sally who couldn't find hers, after near histerics she found it under another bag. Funny, stupid bitch.
Anyway the train to Xi'an was an overnight job and everyone was starting to get to know eachother, I was in a bit of a drinking mood so after everyone had eaten and a few drinks with Stacey and Blahine I headed to the restaurent to chat with the locals (always good fun). Some of them spoke English and I had my PSP with me so that did the rounds around the carriage including two offers to buy it off me. After a few more drinks I headed to bed around midnight, although I wasn't drunk. Well not much not with 3.1% beer.
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