After another huge and delcious breakfast at the Garden Hotel Shanghai we were met by 'Alvin' (Su something - I forget his first name) and immediately fell in love with him. A very gentle and sweet guy. His English is very idiomatic and he loves using euphemisms, figures of speech and expressions to a very startling effect. So we never heard any word about rich people but encountered many opulent people and were treated to lots of similar goodies.
Soon after leaving Shanghai the landscape became very green and lush and as we approached the Zhouzhuang area we saw more and more gardens full of flowers, canals and bridges.
The town itself has been declared a World Heritage Site by Unesco and rightly so. It looks like a cross between Venice and Amsterdam - built on canals with hundreds of very picturesque bridges spanning them and many flat bottomed boats, often peddled by middle-aged women (the boats are peddled using a single oar). Some of the women also sang and as most of the tourists here were Chinese, many of the clients were clapping on wooden instruments to the tune of the songs - it really was a most romantic sight.
We strolled around the town for a couple of hours, heard some Chinese opera rehearsal, visited an opulent man's house and garden, and then had another medicore lunch. Seems that our request not to take us to those touristic resaurants did not get so far west. As we expressed our disappointment, Alvin got very concerned and we hope he can change our next lunch reservation. We did eat a couple of local specialities - hog hoofs which Avi enjoyed and wild rice stems which were very nice, and Judes and I enjoyed a lot. Avi also bought some street food - a red bean paste stuffed pita which was nice and some dried yam candy which he trashed rather quickly.
From Zhouzhuang we continued to Suzhou - a very pleasant town of only 6 million inhabitants. It is clearly in good economic shape but without the glitz of Shanghai which makes it seem like a very pleasant place to live. The people look well off, many cars on the street and comfortable looking hi-rises. The old city center is surrounded by a moat and also here there are many canals and waterways. Very nice!
Our first stop was a teapot factory where we got an explanation on the virtues of their teapots, signed by a master and containing some most excellent minerals which will give us lots of health (all the Chinese we met seem very concerned about their inner organs and we got enough medical and cosmetic advice here to last a lifetime). To Alvin's dismay we declined buying $100 teapots and continued to the hotel.
The hotel is much simpler than the previous one and we are back to the very hard Chinese mattrasses but it is clean and nice. Alvin waited for us in the lobby and we invited him to a cup of coffee (he had tea) in a close-by coffee shop. It was ok but we should have gone to Starbucks instead (we saw a couple later in the evening).
The next agenda item was a foot massage where we made complete fools of ourselves laughing hysterically all the time. Unfortunately, Daphna's life is now in great danger as Judes swore to kill her for recommending this ordeal. Turns out that by not talking Chinese we could not react to the particular pressure points and they could not diagnose our ailments correctly, although looking at the chart on the wall I am very worried about Judes' digestive tract. She denies any problems with it though. Was very amusing.
Alvin and the driver dropped us of at the City Center where we decided to forego the local specialities at KFC, Pizza Hut and McDonalds and bought some pita bread instead. We took a cab back to the hotel, and as usual I woke up at an indecent hour and am spending the wee hours of the day writing this...
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