More Jin Ji Lake

This will be the last entry for our stay in Suzhou. After our visit to The Lingering Garden, we had planned to go to the Suzhou Museum, but upon arrival found an extremely long line, which wasn't even moving, and we decided to just go back to Jin Ji Lake.
We went back to Zapata's and this time got to sit on the outdoor balcony since it wasn't crowded.
While looking around from the balcony, I saw another wading type area around the side where we hadn't gone before, so we went to check that out after lunch.
I think the area is called the water garden area. It had four wading pools, each with a row of large boulders. Behind the pools was a nice shaded, grassy area where many people were relaxing. Leah enjoyed the pools and we stayed for quite awhile.
We knew that there was an Imax Theatre in the Suzhou Science and Cultural Arts Center (SSCAC) around the other side of the lake and I saw in a tourist book that you could catch a free double decker tourist bus at the Expo Center which was next door to it, so we caught a taxi there. The SSCAC was huge! Here's some info I found online about it:
"Suzhou Science & Cultural Arts Center (SSCAC) is an attempt to epitomize all that is Suzhou under one roof. SSCAC sits alongside the beautiful Lake Jin Ji on 150,000 sq. meters of land south of the maple forest and the Suzhou International Expo Center. The Centre houses a variety of facilities: Grand Theatre, Dinner Theatre, Cineplex, IMAX Theatre, exhibition galleries, function halls, commercial center and horticultural gardens. It will be the permanent home to the world-renowned annual ‘ Jin Ji (Golden Rooster) Cinematic Awards’ , a communication platform for artists around the world and a landmark for shopping and leisure activities."

We went to the Cineplex on the 2nd floor and were VERY surprised to see what was inside of the rounded section of the building we had seen from across the lake - it was beautifully landscaped with waterfalls cascading down the hill! It turned out that the Imax was only in Chinese and we decided that at $10USD each, we would skip it.
We went next door to find the tourist bus. Well, we thought the Arts Center was big, the International Expo Center was HUGE! And... we walked around the entire perimeter of it looking for the bus stop! I told Jim we weresaving a lot of money by getting our exercise this way instead of paying fitness club dues ; - ) We did finally find the bus by showing a group of Chinese people the picture in the book and having them point us in the right direction. At this point, it was getting dark, but once we were on the bus - filled with CHINESE tourists!- we thouroughly enjoyed the 45 min ride around the lake, got to see all of the lights. We got back to where we started and although we only wanted to go one more stop to where we saw a Papa John's, the driver indicated we had to get off the bus. Well, we waited 1/2 hr for him to come back! We went to an area called Times Square, explored a little, but we were really tired, so ate and headed back to the hotel! What a day!

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Part of trip: Nanqiao, Fengxian, China #2

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