The gardens of Suzhou

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well, time to leave shanghai. great city, i must admit. i got up at 6.30 to leave the flat at 7.00 and forget my soap, not a major mistake. my appointment with felix was meeting at the railway station a 7.30. when he was not there at 7.40, i went for the train. some minutes later he showed up in the train. we arrived in sunzhou and at first took a cab to the "humble administrators garden". nice garden, that's true. a lot of ponds, stones and small pavillions, but very crowded. maybe saturday is not the perfect day to go to suzhou.
then we went to "tiger hill". this place was much nicer actually because much larger and so the many tourists (mainly chinese) would gather in crowds on just some spots of the whole park.
an interesting episode happened after we entered. three chinese girls were looking at us and soon came towards us to communicate that they'd like to take a photo of us. well, there you feel quite special in a good way. i think it was probably the first time i enjoyed being on a photo. we ran around in this nice and quiet place for a while and i was searching hardly for the "thousand men stone". couldn't find it. i still don't know how one can oversee a THOUSAND men stone. then we left for some place in the city.
here we went to eat something and afterwards felix wanted to try some internet cafe. we found one in the loneley planet and then looked for a way to get there. at that moment one of this guys who take you around on a bike came towards us. we asked him how much it would cost to get there. 20 RMB. felix said he would pay for this. ok. it felt funny to go with this vehicle although i was really sorry for the guy who had to bike in this heat. i alredy started sweating from sitting their. i really would have liked so help him, especially when it went uphill at some point and he had to get off the bike and push it. however, in the end we couldn't find the internet cafe anyway and felix had to leave. that was strange. we have had some quite nice good conversations in the meantime and probably had gotten friends. i didn't want to pretend we would see each other again by exchanging mail adresses or similar and he didn't want that too obviously. so all that was left to do was a shy hug, shaking hands and wishing each other good luck.
alone again, i went to a temple. it was situated in the middle of a shopping street. very strange to combine absolute commercial and spirituality i think. guess the chinese don't give a damn what i think. i tried to get this combination into one picture somehow but didn't succeed.
there was still time before my train would go and so i went on to anothher pagoda, the north hill pagoda it was called. also a great place. you could walk up all nine floors of the pagoda and had quite a nice view from there. suzhou looked much better from here than from the tiger hill. there was also some temple agin with praying people. as always i started to feel uncomfortable watching them and so i walked away.
i took the train to nanjing where my uncle and my aunt picked me up. they let their driver drive to some important spots in nanjing to show them to me. great! then we went drove home, had dinner an i went to bed. did you know, that you sweat much less when sleeping in an climatised room?

find my traveling route so far on Travel Map

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Photos

Tiger Hill pagoda
Actually it's quite tilted but you can't see that on the photo.

Comments

[Linda]

:)
Hi Florian! I'm really glad to hear from you that regularly. That means I do not have to get a flight yet, to get you out of prison. ;) Reading your travelblog is a great chance to take a break from learning. Thanks! Let it rock in China!

[Flo78]

already told you about my prison escape plans, didn't i? but you can take a plane to come here anyway.