Day #100: "Venice of the East"

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Suzhou is a small city called the "Venice of the East" by tourist guides, so we had imagined a gentle, peaceful place, forgetting of course that in China a "small" city is still huge by European standards, in this case ten and a half million people. We took a boat trip through the canals, but although it is pretty, with pagodas and traditional homes, there are plenty of visible signs of industry and of the huge population, as we passed under concrete flyovers and past Soviet-style apartment blocks.

The heat in Suzhou took some getting used to: by the afternoon it was in the high 30s, and we began to relish walking down the shopping streets, because every time we passed an open shop we would feel a blast of the cook air-conditioning.

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