When we first arrived at Shanghai train station, we were accosted by travel agents based there to join their one day tours. They dangled a carrot in front of us - free ride to our serviced apartment. We capitulated seeing that would cost us around RMB100 each. We should have known that if it is too good to be true, then it is! We chose the Suzhou day tour and the agent said if we also join the Zhou Zhuang at the same time she would give us a RMB50 discount each. So we did. Sigh.
Suzhou one day tour started ominiously which was a sign of things to come. The agent told us that the driver would come pick us up at 7 am in a mini bus and then drop us off to the big luxurious tour bus parked in a more central area.
Reality? He rung at 6.10 am and said are you guys ready? Dad got pissed off at them so they agreed to come pick us up a bit later. We rushed through getting ready and eating our breakfast. It turned out that they meant they need to get us to the tour bus BY 7 am. What the. That was not the end of the dramas. We got there in the worst rickety mini bus you could ever imagine. There were many moments where I thought the door was going to go flying open and throw us all out of it. They then proceeded to tell us that we would be going to Suzhou in that minibus because the small "luxurious" tour bus was already full!!!! Luckily more tourists came so they had to move everyone to the bigger tour bus which obviously costed more petrol. Bloody snakey China people.
There was a Finnish lady in our tour and I assumed that she could understand Mandarin. But Mum asked her and she said no. So I told her to stick to me and I'll translate. She said she didn't really mind but she did stick to me the whole day so I didn't take as many photos as I normally would. Her name was Heli. She gave me her email address so that I could Facebook her but I lost it. Woooops.
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First stop was some crappy residence + garden of some rich family from the olden days (耦园 Couple's Retreat Garden) because Suzhou is famous for its gardens, you see. It was stupid and boring. It included a boat ride. The weird thing was that not everyone was charged the same price on this tour and not everyone was doing the same thing. We paid the most out of everyone else obviously and Heli's package did not even include the boat ride so the tour guide was meant to ask her for an additional RMB50 but she didn't. I guess it was too much hassle since the agent couldn't speak a word of english. If it wasn't for me, Heli would not have known what was going on or when or where she was meant to meet up with the group.
Stupid boat ride
After that, we HAD to go visit a silk factory obviously. How else are they going to milk more money out of us?
Boiling silk worms to get the silk off, I think.
It's like a scene out of Ah Here's favourite film, Alien.
This was cool. The beige coloured parchment travelling along the top was the pattern that the machine was spinning.
This was meant to show how stretchy and fine the silk could be.
The workers showing how a silk duvet is made.
A layer is stretched like a fine spider's web and this is repeated a million times.
Voila.
Suckers buying duvets.
Next up, we went to visit 唐寅园 Tang Bohu's former residence. This was a stone carving of 明四大家 four masters of the Ming Dynasty. Guess which one he is?
This said 一代才人 talent of the generation as he was one of the most talented scholars of his time.
The tour guide told us that we were soooooooo oooooooooooooo lucky because a professor who is a famous calligraphist, just happened to be on site that day and could recreate Tang Bohu's works or he could make up a poem using people's names for only RMB10.
Everyone wrote their names down as it was a bargain. Then the tour guide told us the fine print. The fee was RMB10 but the paper it will be written on range from RMB100++ to thousands. Bahaha we said no thanks.
Tang Bohu's works
This is the stone sculpture of Qiu Xiang, his one true love according to novels even though he had 7 wives. In reality, he only had 3 wives and it was one after another. Qiu Xiang was a known courtesan of his time but she was at least 30 years older than him so there was no way they had been in love. It was just a story to make it stick in people's minds. China, full of smoke and mirrors.
Lunch was someplace where the food was already cooked and just ladled onto plates. I knew for sure because it took 5 minutes from ordering to arriving at our table. Heli ate with us. For the first time on this trip, Dad had a drinking buddy. Yay. Oh yeah, Dad was wearing the ONLY purchase he made in China haha.
After lunch, we visited a temple and garden complex made famous by a scholar as it was depicted in his poem. Only one poem, by the way. In this poem, the scholar described the midnight belt ringing at Hanshan Temple.
The giant bell..
Apparently it's not the original bell. Dad had a go ringing it but I had to video it so no photo footage.
The famous poem..
The poem on a giant plaque
Last official stop for the day was some temple pagoda. I climbed to level 2 with Heli. *pat self on the back*. This place also had the honour of having the WORST toilet I've ever been to. No doors and no flush. It was a tiled ditch basically with no flush. I thanked my lucky stars that I only saw liquids and no solids. *shudders*
We ended the day at a jade shop for the tedious obligatory souvenir shop. We were ushered into a room straightaway and a trainee lady started giving us some basic information about jade. A guy then poked his head in and said that big boss just happened to be onsite and will be coming in to check her work. She continued talking and then a few minutes later, another guy (dressed crappily) came in and said he is Ah Hui the big boss. He asked us how the trainee did and we said she was good. So he said ok, go out and get your angpow (lucky money) to the lady. He then said to us he wanted to share his great news with us. His wife just gave birth to twins last night. The baby boy was healthy but the baby girl was not as healthy. So he wasn't there to do business but to ask us for our prayers. He said we were there not by accident but by fate so he wanted to give us a gift for us to remember him by. We were then ushered into another room and he said loudly to the employees to go get the gifts. He then rambled on for at least 15 minutes about the different types of jade and how to tell real from fake. Still no sign of the freebies. He said he won't be making any profits and that usually they have a huge markup on jade because they own their own jade quarry. Since he was there to ask for blessings, he will be hugely discounting everything in that room. Still no gifts. Some idiots actually did buy. A lady paid RMB3000 for a bracelet which had a retail price of RMB90,000++. Well her stupid boyfriend paid for it. Hope he got some. Mum and Dad heckled him every now and then so he knew that we weren't duped. Mum then demanded the free gifts and got 2 crappy jade pendants. i gave one to Heli.
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