Chinese Culture

Yesterday morning, two bus loads of us took off for Suzhou, a city about 1 1/2 hour away from Shanghai for a SAS trip to the historic gardens. This city was once home to 300 gardens, but now there are only 27.

Our first garden was an administrative garden, built by a retired government official and in the background, you could see a pagoda.  The pagoda was actually about 15 min away, but was garden builders often included other features in the view as a "borrowed" element.

 

Gardens incorporate 4 elements--mountains (the rocks), water, trees (often bonsai) and buildings. The limestone rock formations were carefully chosen.

 

We followed the first garden trip to the Suzhou museum where we saw some exquisite works of art from earlier dynasties.  I had never paid too much attention to Chinese art, so I had no idea how much fun it was to view.  This jade piece was carved in the Ming Dynasty--1368-1644.

 

The picture above on the left reminded me of our friend Kaitlyn, cleaning her fat horse.  The one on the right is just a close up of an entire carved elephant tusk.

 

Next, we went to a silk mill to learn a little about how silkworms work and how silk is made from the cocoons.  A single cocoon can have a 3 mile long length of thread. As depicted here, it is a labor intensive process. We were all fascinated by this stop.  Then we had a lunch at a restaurant with a lazy susan in the middle of the table. Apparently, this is fairly common.  For New Year, the include a complete fish--head and all-- on one the serving plates as luck. At the end, they spin the lazy susan, and like wheel of fortune, the winner (where the fish head is pointing) gets to pay.

After another garden stop, we took a boat ride on the canal. The canal took longer to build than the Great Wall, and its use is limited in the modern era.

 

Some things just don't translate.  Our final stop was to a "lingering garden" where we had little time to linger, and for some of us, it was a slightly panicked visit as we tried to find our way out of the maze-like sections.

 

I've tried to find photo spots along the way to show where the old intersects with the modern, and this is the one from Suzhou.

After we returned to the ship and had dinner, Nancy and I ventured out for a walk and a stop by one of the convenience stores for long-missed ice cream.  Yes, dear friends, I have been long times without my beloved ice cream, so ice cream on a stick was yummy.  Then back to the ship to watch fireworks.  This was the 4th day of the New Year, and the spirits return, and EVERYONE shoots fireworks.  I've seen big fireworks displays, and this one was not one of the fancy ones, but nothing I've ever seen matched it in sheer volume and intensity.  I can still hear firecrackers this morning. The deck of the ship let us see fireworks for 360 degrees, and the cumulative sound was like being next to a freight train.