Buses, Trains, and Rickshaws...

This past weekend Jeremy and I took a trip to a town outside of Shanghai called SuZhou (pronounced Sue Joe). The town is about 45 minutes away by train, so it makes an "easy" weekend trip. We went to the train station on Friday to get tickets for Saturday morning, because believe it or not everything is quite a production and occurs in Chinese, not to mention there are 1.3 billion people everywhere. So we get to the front of the "Smiling Friendly, English Speaking" line. Jeremy whips out his awesome Chinese (for real) and gets us round trip train tickets for Saturday. That was easy...

The next morning we wake up early to go to the train station. The train station is a symmetrical maze intertwined with the local and long distance bus station, as well as the metro, labeled in chinglish signs such as "East-Southwest Corner." Needless to say, finding anything is quite difficult. So we left the apartment about 9am, stopped on the street for some breakfast of dumplings and awesome Chinese breakfast burritos, seriously. The train station is about a 20 minute walk or a 25 cent bus ride (if you know the right bus). So we see a bus coming and chance that it's the right bus, and we got it!

We get to the train station and walk into the exact location from which trains leave, seems easy. We get up to the "security" point where you put whichever bags you choose through an x-ray machine. We get through the line of security and a women looks at our tickets and says "Downstairs" in English. Confused, we walk downstairs and look for what we think may be a local train line. Nope, nothing, but we have time it's only 9:40. So we go back upstairs to the same place where someone is trying to tell us something in chinese and then says, "downstairs." So, we go back downstairs. I must add that it's a flight of about 75 stairs crowded with a million people carrying their house in a backpack or garbage bag.

We get downstairs for the second time and Jeremy asks someone else for directions, I'm not sure if it was in English or Chinese (We'll say Chinese, he's getting pretty good). She points to a corridor, that we have no choice but to enter and hope someone else can point to another corridor. That's exactly what happens. We walked through a food court and underground mall and somehow end up at the metro. Where we think we don't want to be, since we bought train tickets. Then a really nice old women tells us "Siga Kuai" Which means 4 RMB. This is confusing because we already have tickets we just want to get on the train. What she's charging us for is metro tickets because it turns out our train tickets leave from Shanghai Railway station and we are at SOUTH Shanghai railway station, about a 30 minute metro ride away. At this point it's 10:20am. Our train leaves at 10:36am.

So we get to Shanghai Railway system via metro and have to figure out how that's somehow connected to the train station, however we've already missed our train so we have to get in line to buy new tickets. We wait in another 1.3 billion person line. By line, I mean clump of chinese people that push you to the front. There's a man behind me waving money, all up in my business. Jeremy yelled at him correctly in Chinese. It completely shocked him and he backed off. That was funny, because this is a very non-confrontational culture, and of course the man was totally not expecting Jeremy to whip out perfect Chinese. So we get to the front of the "Smiling Friendly, English Speaking" line and hand her our tickets, which are clearly expired. All she says is, "Number 39." Your guess on what that means was as good as ours. We figure out that Number 39 is the refund line. At this point we don't even know if there is a train that leaves for SuZhou today and are planning how we're going to spend the weekend. So we get into line Number 39, another pushing clump of 1.3 billion people. She refunds our ticket and puts us on a 12pm train with "Standing Tickets." We have about an hour to kill, so we found a "Mister Donut" across the street and relaxed with a cup of coffee. Whew! Still not in SuZhou...

We found our train with no problems. Having never ridden "standing," we were unclear as to where we were to stand and in order to get out of the way we slid into a row, sat down, and played ignorant foreigner. As we're waiting to get yelled at in Chinese the train starts to pull out of the station and pick up speed. We think, we've got seats! Then it comes, getting yelled at in Chinese we realize the rightful seat owners have showed up. So we move to stand with the rest of the people who have been kicked out of other people's seats. In case you haven't already guessed, there is no "standing section" so we're wedged in between rail cars by the bathroom. Jeremy purchased a map completely in Chinese so he was trying, in vain, to match the Chinese characters. Standing next to us is a very nice man who spoke some English, and wanted to teach us everything he knew about English/Chinese and SuZhou. He introduced us to his wife. told us to get off the train at the right stop, and then shuffled us into the taxi line.

We arrived at the hostel and of course didn't book in advance, so we stayed in a dorm-style room with 4 Brits. We dropped off our backpacks and went out to explore!

Sadly, my camera is broken so we didn't get any pictures. It was a beautiful town full of famous gardens and canal streets. We spent the majority of the weekend reading in tea houses. It was very relaxing.

Here are some google images of where we were:

This an image of the canals we saw in SuZhou. We went here at night and the red lamps were all light up and lining the water. Very beautiful!


These two photos are of one of the gardens in SuZhou. The one we went to is one of the most famous in China called "The Humble Administrators" Garden.

There area of Jiang Nan is supposed to have the most beautiful gardens in China, and SuZhou supposedly has the most beautiful gardens in Jiang Nan. The interesting thing about the gardens is that each Dynasty created their own garden, which they used almost as their recreation/ vacation home. There are about 18 famous gardens from different Dynastys in SuZhou.

The story of the Humble Administrators Garden, as copied from the Chinglish walking map/city guide, is as follows, "Being the world cultural heritage site and one of the four famous gardens in China, the garden was built in 1509 in the Ming Dynasty and covers an area of 5.2 hectares. With water as its center, it has fine studios, halls and pavilions surrounded by rookeries and brooks and dotted with trees and flowers. This spacious garden represents the graceful and natural style of art of classical gardens in SuZhou. Really poetic charm reigns everywhere in it."
(yes it says rookeries, which is Chinglish for rockeries, which is Chinglish for ???)

This is the temple next to the Garden. We didn't go in. It's in a really touristy area. Sometimes it's hard to appreciate these things because there are a million tourists and the Chinese idea of historical places is to tear down the old one and reconstruct a new one that would have looked like it in it's place. I think this is a result of everything being destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. It's an interesting concept because western culture values preservation versus recreation.

As I told you we bought round-trip train tickets, so we had a 4:30 train to catch. We left the at about 3:15 which is plenty of time for a 15 minute cab ride and finding the train. However, we could not find a cab ANYWHERE! So we started to walk in the general direction of the train station. We were walking faster than the grid-lock traffic. I called the hostel to ask which bus to take, and of course she told me to take a cab... Thanks Lady. So, we kept walking. Finally it got to be 3:50 and we had to make a move fast! All weekend we'd been hearing, "HELLO?!" shouted at us by the local bicycle rickshaw drivers. Well, this was our only hope.

(Please click on this picture to enlarge it; so funny!)

We found the sturdiest looking Chinese biker. We tried to negotiate a price, but he would budge because he could tell we were in a hurry, and well, he had a bike and wasn't lost. So for 30RMB ($6.50). This man biked us to the airport. Let's just say we're slightly bigger than the average chinese person; our driver had to get off the bike and pull us up a hill. However, as I learned in my crash physics course bigger goes down faster/ harder. I don't think he'd ever taken his bike as fast as we went down that hill. We got through "security" and made our train! This time we had seats, and had to kick out the standers that had staked out our seats.

It was such a fun and relaxing weekend! Sorry it has been so long since we posted!
Miss you all!
Christine