TONGLI - A WATER TOWN

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CHRIS

In the morning a car came to pick us up. The guide's name was Kelly and she was very nice and she has been to Australia, she went to Sydney, Melbourne among other places. We drove out a long way to see the water town which is an old town built next to two rivers. We caught a boat to the other side of the water town and gave a toy koala to a little girl. (We have been giving out little toy koalas wherever we go)

We saw a very old house where a rich Japanese family used to live. When we were going home we were caught in a very bad traffic jam but Kelly told us the traffic was quite normal.

When we got back to the hotel, Mum let us order room service and we had really good BLT sandwhiches.

MATTHEW



Today we went to a water town just outside the suburbs of shanghai. Our tour guides’ name was Kelly, she drove out to the water town with Merryl(our friend), Mum, Chris and I. It was an hour and a half’s drive to the town, once we arrived we queued up to the end were a mini bus was waiting for us.



It took us into the market area in the town. From there we made our way over a reasonable amount of bridges, through a lot of breath taking gardens when we came to an old house, not house, mansion.



The mansion must have been at least 500 years old. The house a huge gates as grand as the house it’s self but the grandest part was the garden a small pond surrounded with trees and bushes. The pond was full of massive gold fish, on the edge of the pond there was an opera stage and parallel to the stage there was a small porch were the family could watch the opera. There were lots of rocks one of which the Chinese thought looked like a turtle a sign of longevity.



In the mansion there were court yards scattered throughout the place some of which had huge towering trees and little huts and others had small trees, like the size of your arm small. There was an awesome tree that in one of the courtyards, picture a ancient tree with a twisted black trunk a lots of individual canopies like a Japanese maple it was like that expect 1/40^th of the size. On the way back we got caught in a bit of shanghai traffic adding an extra hour on to the trip time.

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Photos

Mum and the boys
At the garden

merryl kelly matt and chris
in a gondola going up a river in the watertown

The Garden
Matt found it breathtaking