China, day 2: Suzhou

We woke up at the Fish Inn hotel and went out to look for some breakfast. The area we were staying is home to Ningbo street, that offers a large variety of street food. The way food is treated in the street is very different than anything I’ve seen before.

The head of the fish, at the far right, was still trying to breath when the picture was taken. There’s also this:

And to clarify, you are looking at washed clothes and pieces of meat hanging from a rope to dry.

From a small food stand we got a Congyoubing, which is an excellent fried onion patty kind of thing, and then we sat down in a small restaurant for some dumplings. 

On the way back to the hotel we passed through an area of hardware stores which felt to me like heaven. They had everything - electronics components, gears, bearings, pipes, and all in a huge variety.

Ahhh.. big bulky buttons…..

We went back to the hotel, packed our bags and headed for Suzhou, about a 30-minute train ride.

In Suzhou we checked in at a Motel168, which is a local chain of hotels, and went out to look around. The hotel sits on a river bank, and across the river there’s a small row of food stands. They offer mostly pieces of meat on sticks. There’s really no need to ask what kind of pieces of meat these are, but they’re pretty good. We continued to the nearby Xiyuan Temple. Here, have some pictures:

We then took a taxi to Suzhou Gongyuan (Suzhou park), but because of Julia’s foreign accent (we’re working on that) the driver took us to Suzhou Gongyiyuan, which is something very different. When we realized we were heading the wrong way Julia notified the driver, who then suggested to just drop us off at Jinji Lake that was close to where we were. We were welcomed by a sculpture of a dog sniffing a pooping baby’s ass.

The lake is nice, and this was when we were really struck by how polluted the air is. 

We decided not to give up visiting the actual park we wanted to see, so even though it was already dark we took a metro and walked around Suzhou Park. At night, the park serves as an ad-hoc exercise ground for the elderly. It seems like old Asian people just make up random exercise routines on the spot. Some of them were just walking around while other were leisurely swinging limbs back and forth. One gentleman was standing in front of a tree while pounding it with both hands.

We left the park and walked around to find food. We walked into a restaurant called “Kaka”, which coincidentally means “poop” in Hebrew, We had some noodle soup and called it a day.