Wuzhen

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Today was the “Chinese tour bus” visit to Wuzhen. (no, it wasn’t a “follow me with my flag” tour guide type tour bus! Haha) The bus trip was fun, we sat right up the front so had a great view of all the chaotic driving, with our calm driver obviously feeling good about the fact he owned the road as his bus was the biggest. Sometimes he decided that red lights didn’t apply to him! Haha. I make it sound very dangerous I know, but I don’t think it’s too bad – everyone drives SO slowly at intersections etc, and is very aware of each vehicle around them.

Once again we had the little, “do we get off here” mini-panic towards the end of the trip when the bus stopped and some people got off. But we managed to decide (with the help of pete’s trusty GPS+google maps) that we weren’t there yet and stayed on till the end. Yay!

Wuzhen was essentially a restored village made into a tourist attraction. It’s an old water village, with a network of waterways and connection to the “grand canal”. You wander through the village which has touristy parts with shops and eating places, and also more residential parts where people still live. Because of its good links to the grand canal, it was a prosperous place for silk production and trade. They had some buildings showing working displays of the dyeing and printing process for blue cloth. I loved the way the long pieces of pretty blue printed fabric were hung out in the courtyard. Another working display building showed the production of rice wine- still making the wine on site. The whole place smelt really yummy! Kind of yeasty! From what I could tell, without much English explanation, it was a process of crushing the rice to get the juices out, fermenting, distilling, ageing in clay pots, the bottling (also into clay bottles). There were lots of cool little old men wandering around with aprons on tending to this and that.

Apart from those main interesting attractions there were a few more eg- the old school, bed museum(!!?), carving museum etc. And we generally just wandered around and ate+drank tea till our bus came back to pick us up in the afternoon.

Next Stop Nanjing

-Hannah+Pete

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