20/05 Suzhou:
Things I ate: I had bananas for breakfast again. At lunchtime I was on a bus, so I ate a packet of 3+2 biscuits I had bought (lime flavour), and then, when I arrived, I ate a pudding flavour (kind of milky) milk tea and a ‘hand-held bing’ from a Taiwanese chain. The bing is made by frying dough on a barbeque thing, flattening as you go. Then you put an egg on the hotplate and stick the mostly-cooked bing on top, then add one of a selection of sauces (I had sweet chili), fold it up, and stick it in a little paper bag. It was fairly nice. For dinner I had daoxiaomian noodles at a Lanzhou restaurant I’d spotted two days ago. I had some mango ice-cream (in a little tub, from the supermarket) for dessert.
Places I went: today I went to Tongli, one of several ‘watertowns’ around Suzhou. These are basically Lijiang-style old towns with wider canals and Chinese rather than Naxi architecture. Tongli, at least, also looks a bit more run-down. Before getting there, I had a bit of trouble finding the bus station - Keyun Beizhan, which according to the travel guides is ‘next to’ the train station. It turns out that ‘next to’ in this case means across the road, along the canal, under a large bridge, and around the corner. They also say that one can buy tickets which include the bus price in the entry ticket, from a window at the end of the bus station. The Dutch woman had reported that she hadn’t been able to find this (though apparently she had little difficulty with the bus station itself!) but I actually found it first, because it is at a completely different site. That site is ‘next to’ the train station for values of ‘next to’ which include ‘across the four lane road and over an iron bridge that crosses the city moat’ - but once you make it that far it’s quite easy to find, turn right once you’re over the bridge and it’s the last window of the small building before you actually hit the buses. Once there it’s a ten minute walk to the old town or you can get a shuttle (I didn’t to go there but did to come back). Anyway, the old town has several sites and lots of tourist shopping. I visited one old house, one garden, and the Chinese Sexual Culture Museum. The house and garden were pretty but pretty much the same as others of those things. In the garden I sat for a while, listening to some musicians who were playing in some of the buildings and decorating the scenery, and several people (mostly members of passing tour groups) took my photo. The sex museum (which used to be in Shanghai - I see from Alex’s old travelog that they tried to visit just after it had moved) was quite interesting. It is set in a large garden of fertility statues, and has exhibitions on ‘sex in primitive society’ (including lots of vaguely suggestive rocks), ‘marriage and women’ (including the results of a Republican-era survey of Nanjing prostitutes, complete with pie-charts drawn by 1930s statisticians, and thumbscrews apparently used on disobedient prostitutes), ‘sex in daily life’ (including ‘trunk-bottom pictures’ that a mother would put at the bottom of her daughter’s trousseau so she would know what to do on the wedding night), and ‘unusual sexual behaviour’ (including scandalous stories about monks and nuns). There was also a life-size statue of Leda and the swan, which was the centrepiece of a room devoted to books written by the scholars who started the museum. Of course, a lot of it (especially the ‘women and marriage’ section) just presented the standard CCP line on such things, but at least it made the exhibitions mostly coherent.
People: This morning the Dutch woman in the dorm left for Hangzhou. In the evening I talked a little to the same Chinese woman from yesterday. I think she had noticed me watching some other guests show of their purchases, so she also showed me the souvenirs she had bought. When she was telling me about a shirt she had bought I asked if she thought it was a good price, then how much it was, then where I could get it. She laughed and said, ‘that’s so Chinese!,’ but then she gave me directions. I wonder if she thought foreigners don’t usually care about getting a bargain? She also told me how cute I was when I was sympathising with her about how often to wash her hair. Oh well, I’m glad she found me entertaining!
