wuxi & suzhou

hello..haven't written on here for awhile so i should have lots of stories, but of course i forget most of them....haha, anyway we went to Wuxi with Fun Shi Ja last weekend which was fun. She told us that she was gonna drive us there, but it actually turned out that her parents drove us, and then they visited her aunt who lives there while we shopped. Neither of them really speak any English so we weren't able to really talk to them wish is kind of a shame, but it was cool to meet them anyway. It was about an hour and 20 min ride to Wuxi which wasn't too bad.

The city has 2 big walking streets and an underground shopping area. It seems like the underground shopping areas are pretty common in cities here. They're basically like a subway station but there's no subway, just lots of stores and restaurants and stuff. Unfortunately I forgot to bring my camera..unlike in Zhangjaigang, the side streets in Wuxi, near the walking streets, had lots of random clothing stores where you can bargain, and then piles trash next to them..and even some chickens just walking around! lol, pretty funny, and definitely very "China" lol.

I bought a very trendy sweatshirt (haha, i'll have to take pic soon) its pretty long kind of like a dress.. and its black with two fuzzy white pockets that match the lining of the hood, and then the hood has a huge bow attached to it (probably a ft long, lol) its cute though, really, lol. I also got another short sleeve tweed jacket thing thats kind of hard to explain, but its also cute..and I bargained for both them which was fun :) oh, and which Fun Shi Ja's help I was actually able to find women's jeans that fit me! amazing, since mine have been getting really streched out since i can't shrink them in the dryer..and they're also really trendy with lots of creases and wrinkles like ironed into them, lol.. Cherry will be happy though. Actually I just realized I never wrote about Cherry..she's a girl in 11th grade, i think, who asked me Candice to goes shopping with her a few weeks ago. Her English really good, and she showed us some of the smaller stores that she likes around the walking street. She was really funny cause she kept telling me that I could look very "fashion" if I shopped in these stores, and she picked out a few things for me to try on..but of course they were all too small, lol. anyway, she's very trendy and will be happy to see me in these new trendy chinese clothes, lol.

oh, she also helped us buy some popular music which was cool. I got SHE, a girl group from Taiwan that my 5th and 6th graders love, and Candice got Jay Chou, a chinese pop/rap singer..so now i have both of them which are fun to listen too. also, speaking of music..there's this one song that Candice and I hear everywhere, like in cabs, and stores and restaurants..and I always have it in my head which is funny since I can't undertstand it and don't know the words..and it was playing on the radio in the cd store whenwe were there with cherry (ha, i love that thats her name, lol) but they didn't have that cd. so then when we were in Wuxi it was playing again in the underground mall thing, and we asked Fun Shi Ja if she knew the song and could help us find the cd. She said she didn't know, but its on a mix cd that her dadhad just bought! so, lol, her dad let us borrow the cd and we have it..along with a bunch of other "hits". i'll attach the song so you can enjoy it too, lol :)

so, back to Wuxi, after shopping all day we came back to Zhangjiagang and went out to dinner with Fun Shi Ja and her parents. Aside from the "whole chicken with head and everything in pot" dish, which was a bit unappetizing, the food was really good. We had dumplings and fish and soup and shrimp, and some random other stuff. They asked us if we'd eaten goat yet, since apparently its delicious and very popular around here, and when we said that we hadn't they invited us to go to Chengdu sometime to go shopping and go to a restaurant that has really good goat dishes..so that should be cool..

last week, i had a cold and hardly any voice all week which was pretty annoying. Thurs. I really couldn't talk at all so i had my older kids play 7up and the younger ones just watched some videos that they had on the computer. I'm better now though, which is good since it was pretty impossible to get the kids to listen to me at all, haha.

This past weekend, Candcie and I met Alicia, Tiffany and Michelle (other Ciee teachers) in Suzhou. It was only about a 1 1/2 hour bus ride from here, and it was soo pretty! When we got there though and tried to call the number for the hostel so they could the cab driver where to go, the number didn't work...lol. then after standing around for a few min trying to figure out what to do, there was a pretty big crowd of people around us, lol..some just looking and some asking us where we wanted to go. we knew that it was supposed to be a 10 yuan cab ride to the hostel, so when guys said theyd take us there for 40 we said no way, lol..then finally we bargained with a guy riding a three wheeled little car thing for a 20 yuan ride. it actually ended up being kinda far so i'm pretty sure we got a good deal.
The city's really old and famous for its gardens. We went to one big garden, and a buddist temple that also had a pretty big garden. We also took a boat ride down a canal which was real cool. People live all along the canals and wash their clothes and stuff in them, a lot more like the "china" that you see in books and stuff than Zhangjiagang, which is only like 15 years old. There were lots of small pathways with shops and good street food too...very cool and lots of fun! The downtown part of Suzhou has a lot of shopping areas too but we only really walked through there before we left on Sunday..we're pretty close though so we can always just go shopping there for the day which is good to know.

I'm gonna try to upload all the pics using the new uploader they have on here so hopefully it'll work. I don't really feel writing captions though so sorry if they're boring, lol.

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