It was a trip that began with the words: I have some vacation days that need to be used.
We joined Mayor in solving her problem and checking off a China bucket list item for all of us. We spent two days in the frigid north - we had to scrounge our wardrobe for gloves, scarves, and pants.
Suzhou is frequently toted as the Venice of the East thanks to its numerous canals and water villages. It is also the place for abundant gardens.
Like many places in China, a reservation system for entry tickets has been implemented in Suzhou. While I understand the need to keep the hordes at bay, the sad thing is that if you find yourself with extra time or just happen to stumble across a museum or site you did not know about before the trip, entry is denied. One afternoon we found ourselves in such a situation, but the couple of places we tried to enter did not work. We even got on the app to reserve at one location, but it has to be done 24 hours in advance. The museum was empty.
As for the sites we were able to enter, they were great. Our first stop was the Suzhou Museum - most famous for its architect, I..M PEI; the mind behind the Louvre Pyramids, Museum of Islamic Art, and the Bank of China Tower, to name a few.
The exhibits were forgettable but the architecture was engaging. The use of water within and around, the lighting, the niches that imitated the art hung within the walls. I truly loved the building and left inspired.
The garden we chose to peruse was the Lion Fortress Garden. Suzhou gardens are abundant in number, each claiming to be the town's most famous for something. In full disclosure, Chinese gardens are very repetitive - there might be one pagoda with a different roofline or a different flower, but all are mimics of the Summer Palace Garden in Beijing. Thus, for this trip we decided to choose one and be satisfied because redundancy is tiring (and each garden has a price tag which is not cheap.) Therefore, we chose the Lion Fortress because of the name - it sounded a bit ferocious and we thought the chances of some stone lions would be greater.
There were no specific stone lions but rather a great stone labryith that if one squinted their eyes enough and turned their head a bit, could envision ferocious beasts - a Chinese inkblot type test. The stone maze was spectacular - so much fun to be outwitted with each twist and turn. This was a moment we were so grateful to be visiting in low tourist season, for I cannot even imagine what an impossible task to even set foot near the pathways would have been in high season.
In Chinese textbooks, Hanshan Temple is famous thanks to a poet who penned a poem there once upon a dynasty. During her early school years, Mayor had to memorize and recite the poem, so she wanted to visit the site. Our caveat to going was that she had to recite the poem for us. Mayor has a great sense of humor and kept expounding excuses such as she could not remember it, the poem was in an old Chinese style so we would not understand it, to she just did not want to draw such attention to herself. In the end, we were told a few lines - mostly because Zach plopped himself in front of the stele and refused to budge until she produced something - to prove that she actually went to school, teased Zach.
While the temple is pretty, we actually enjoyed the surrounding garden area more. Like us, Mayor is a tree/plant/flower lover, so we spend a lot of our friendship hovering over unknown plants or plotting on how to turn our respective abodes into greenhouses. Strolling through the garden, we loved the variety of maple trees, surely planted to showcase the namesake Maple Bridge (where the poet tied up his boat before writing a famous poem.)
Inside the temple, thanks to Mayor's brilliant ability to eavesdrop on tour groups, we learned the famous bell was actually a replica because the real bell went missing. We were not shocked about the replica piece, but stunned that such a ginormous bell went missing hundreds of years ago and was never found. It is a great mystery for the temple. We claimed inside job - a hongbao got the job done. Our bell theft conspiracy theories were interrupted by the many people who stopped to rub the butt of a nearby lion statue. Touching or rubbing statues is not an unusual sight at temples or places of worship around the world, but our attention was seized because of the vigor and gusto in which the visitors did it. We joked that this little lion must have great power - Mayor touched the butt to investigate. In the following days, her luck at our card games did make us wonder what magical powers she had gained from this lion butt encounter.
Our two days in Suzhou were wonderfully spent learning more about China and spending some great quality time with Mayor. On the morning of our third day, as we rode to the train station, we were in agreement that we were ready to return to the south and face our next destination - the tulous of Fujian!
