Day 38: February 10, 2013 The Leaning Pagoda of Suzhou

        After getting everyone loaded on the bus, we were on our way not much after 9:00 this morning.  We were introduced to our English-speaking tour guide, David, who will be taking us around for the next 3 days. He talked for about the first 30 minutes and told us what we would be doing for the day once we made it to Suzhou. 

     The first place we stopped was Tiger Hill where we got to see this 2000 year-old leaning pagoda that was really cool. Seeing the architecture up close was really interesting, especially to a group of nerdy engineers like myself. We walked all around the park for some different views of the pagoda and the rest of the park and hill and then made our way to the next location, which was lunch. We had a family style lunch once again that had some interesting things including duck tongue. There were also some really good dishes like the fried weever fish and what tasted like orange chicken.

Tiger Hill Pagoda

      After lunch we made our way to a silk factory where we got to see a how silk was made as well as enjoy the beautiful products that were made there. They showed us the production line that was basically 2 big machines with silk worms floating in water. The silk worms are in groups of 8 to 10 where they have their strings of silk attached to the machine, which winds them up. I was pretty amazed at how almost prehistoric it seemed, but it worked just fine. We then moved on to the next room where a lady was stretching the cocoons from the silk worms around an arch to dry and use for quilts. 

     The next room was full of what looked like a bunch of clouds. There were endless amounts of the stretched cocoons and the ladies even let me stretch some myself. It was actually pretty fun and harder than it looked. After that we made or way into the room that had all of the products they made. They had everything form silk sheets and quilts to lingerie and clothes to scarves and ties. I ended up giving in and buying a scarf as per usual and then headed back to the bus. 

     Our next destination was the Humble Administrator’s Garden, which was really pretty but absolutely packed. We definitely got a lot of surprised looks and pictures taken of us while walking around in a group full of 40 Americans. Besides that, there were a lot of cool pagodas and water views in addition to a section with banzai trees where one was over 1000 years old. 

Humble Administrator's Garden

Bonsai Madness

     After we were all done at the garden, we finally made it back to our hotel, which was more than a pleasant surprise  - we were at a Holiday Inn! Catriona and I were amazed at how nice our room was, including the unbelievably comfortable beds, until Adam and John walked in saying how their room wasn’t the same. We walked down the hall to their room to see that they had gotten lucky and somehow gotten what we ended up calling the executive suite. Needless to say, that was the room to hang out in all night since it had a nice couch and a ton of open space. We had about an hour until we had to meet up for dinner in which we all just hung around, and then made our way to the restaurant on the bus. Dinner was delicious with another family style with tons of great food and nothing too strange. After dinner we ended up just hanging around the hotel in the suite until we decided to go explore the city, which was pretty uneventful. The night market was already closed by 9:30 so we ended up just going to McDonalds for a late snack and hanging out in the hotel the rest of the night. 

Suzhou at night