Suzhou

On Monday, I had a doctors appointment, where I was told that, although they still don't know what is wrong with me, or why I am having seizures, that it is definitely not MS and that all of my blood and spinal fluid results are coming back negative.  So, while that's not everything we hoped for, we came out of the appointment, at least feeling fairly positive and with permission from my doctor to travel a bit.  So, we decided that we are going to go somewhere different in China once a week for the summer holidays.  We already have Hong Kong booked for when Matt's parents are here at the end of the summer.  On Tuesday, we decided to head for the nearby canal town of Suzhou.  It's only half an hour away on the train, but is absolutely delightful, and has a huge amount to offer.  Much more than any of us were expecting.  We stayed in a lovely hotel called the Garden, which did delicious buffet dinner and breakfasts including a fish coconut curry, which I just could not get enough of (still starving hungry from all the steroids, although it isn't so bad now that my steroid intake has gone down slightly).

The afternoon we arrived, we headed for the lovely Dinghui Temple...

... which through sheer luck, happened to have the most wonderful Lotus flower buds coming out. The Lotus flowers don't last long, and it was just starting Lotus season, but the buds were just beautiful, and already smelt wonderful.

We also saw the 'twin towers' of  Shuang Ta pagoda, unusual in the fact that there are two of them.

Our hotel had calligraphy and instruments that you could have a go at, which was quite fun. The calligraphy brushes are lovely, and very thick, and you paint with water, tracing over lines of characters.

On Wednesday morning it was torrential rain.  It was meant to stop at midday (it didn't - it actually carried on for the entire day), so we headed to the Suzhou Silk Museum to do something undercover.  The museum was free (always a bonus) and had lots of information in English.  It was actually a really good museum, with two fantastic highlights...

... live silk worms!  They were in among the fake silk worm/mulberry leaf exhibit and had a model/statue of a person tending to them, so you could quite easily believe that they were fake.  They weren't even behind glass, just in the middle of the room, wiggling about and making the most fantastic noise, eating the mulberry leaves - like a faint rustling of leaves in the wind.  They were amazing to see! 

The second highlight was two silk making machines that were set up and being worked on by two women on each.  The sheer number of things that could go wrong on these machines was incredible.  I found it amazing how the women knew when there was a problem and how to untangle it!

The silk on display was beautiful, and we of course stopped for a coffee (and snack for me) in the coffee shop!

Next door to the museum was the Bao'en Temple, with this fabulous Buddha.

...and more wonderful Lotus buds.  It was still raining very heavily, and the water droplets on the Lotus leaves looked great.

It finally stopped raining in the evening! Thank goodness! We were all getting a bit miserable and were really drenched by lunch time, so a bit of relief from the rain was nice.  We headed out after dinner to the Master of Nets garden, which was just over the road from our hotel.  This garden is open during the day as normal but also opens in the evening from 7.30 for a special show.  The show was 8 different performances from Chinese opera, in and around the gardens, which were lit up and looked beautiful.

The first performance was a spoken piece from the Kunqu opera about a mouse and a man who persuades him to tell the truth.

The next was 'Suzhou Pingtan' which was these two instruments and the lady was singing...

Then 'Chinese Zither' (an instrument) accompanied by a Chinese classical dance...

Then there was two girls dancing and singing in the garden dreaming about finding love fromthe 'Kunqu opera'... and then a girl and boy singing, about finding that love.

Then there was a Xian (sounds like a clarinet) solo.

And finally Southern Chinese silk and bamboo music. There were 8 performances in total, and I loved every single one.  The music was soothing and the performances were just wonderful.  I thoroughly enjoyed myself!

Yesterday, the rain held off and in fact it got very very hot, 34 degrees at one point!  We headed out after breakfast to Shantang Jie, which is a canal road that you can walk alongside.  It's 2.2 miles long, and we didn't realise that only the very start was full of shops and interesting canal scenes.  We actually walked the whole thing!  Lots of it was just residential, and local shops, with a few temples scattered around to visit.  The local scenes were very interesting too, but it was awfully hot!  

Having walked all the way to Tiger Hill Scenic Area, there was no way we weren't going in, so we did, instead of going to a garden that we had meant to visit.  The scenic area was very pretty, and has a nice Pagoda that is leaning 4 degrees out!  A king is buried nearby supposedly with 5000 swords and a white tiger appeared around his death in the area, hence the name, Tiger Hill.

The area was leafy and being in the shade was so nice.  We got a taxi back to the old town and went for lunch in 'Avocado Restaurant'.  We suspect that we were their first ever patrons, as they seemed to have literally just opened!  The food was nice, and we timed it perfectly to pick up our bags and head back to Shanghai on the train. We were home by 5.30 and eating takeaway salads by 6.  Then Matt went out to play football and Mum and I tried to sort out Mum's problem of not being able to withdraw any cash - her card had been blocked, but then they were saying it hadn't been blocked - very confusing and we're still not sure where we stand! More investigations to be done today!