18/05 Nanjing to Suzhou:
Things I ate: for breakfast I had doujiang/youtiao (from a shop ‘round the back of the vegetable market which is opposite the tourist area), with an oven-baked flaky pastry from the same shop. I had lunch at a noodle shop near the Suzhou hostel, where I ate pork noodles. I added lots of chili - it seems I have absorbed the Guizhou/Chongqing idea that this is the appropriate kind of thing to eat in hot, humid weather. I had a bit of trouble with dinner in that I couldn’t find anywhere, so walked generally in the direction of a branch of that dumpling chain, which I had spotted from the bus. However I must have miscalculated the distance and ended up in a shopping area where I could only see fast food stores (and one rather expensive Chinese restaurant). I was about to give up and go to KFC but just as I talked myself into it (I get cravings for it occasionally (in China, anyway), usually when I’m really hungry, but always talk myself out of it because I never enjoy it as much as I think I will) I found a street with lots of places to eat. The first place I spotted was a sushi place, and suddenly my cravings switched - so I went there instead of the other prance of the dumpling shop which was next door. Anyway, I had a one plate with vegetables, one with those tofu-skin things, one with tinned tuna and ‘egg,’ one with tinned tuna and ‘salad,’ and two desserts: coconut mochi balls and taro in a not-sweet fairy floss kind of coating. It was a bit more expensive than KFC. After dinner I stopped in a supermarket to buy water and an icecream, which was actually frozen strawberries filled with ice-cream. The packed said, ‘eat after 5 mins thawing’ but it was still frozen then so I left it until I got home, when I promptly forgot about it, so by the time I ate them it had been over an hour and the strawberry bit was actually defrosted. The ice-cream was still frozen, though.
Things I did: today I took the train from Nanjing to Suzhou. It was one of the bullet trains that goes from Nanjing to Shanghai. The train itself was not very interesting, although I was surprised that so many people with bulky luggage did not use the overhead racks. I guess they thought it was too heavy (and there was plenty of leg space for it). In Suzhou I did not do much except find the hostel and settle in. I did go for a brief walk but the only interesting thing I discovered was a church around the corner, and lots of interesting plaques on all the alleys.
People I spoke to: at the first stop after Nanjing, Zhenjiang (as in the vinegar), a middle-aged man got on the train with a huge jar of oil, a heavy bag of rice, and a couple of boxes. After he had some trouble getting these across me to the window seat and I replied to his apology in Chinese, he decided I could speak Chinese and struck up a conversation. After the initial ‘where are you from - are you a student - I don’t believe you don’t have a boyfriend’ bit I put my earphones back in and continued listening to my ipod, but it seemed he couldn’t take a hint and continued talking to me, so I soon gave up. It turned out that he was going to visit his son who attends the number 3 high school in Suzhou, where he is number 17 in his class (this is really good). He himself left school after year 9 but is clearly doing pretty well since he told me his bag was a Y20 000 Armani bag his wife bought for him when she went to France. When I told him I studied Chinese history he got me to start listing the stuff I studied but decided before I got very far that we had only been taught superficial stuff! Naturally I had to defend the quality of my education but it was only once I got up to the opium war that he decided that I had in fact been educated adequately. He also told me how his wife grew her hair long, then sold it for Y800 when she cut it, because it was very healthy with no split ends. Anyway, after a while, when he was trying to explain something that I didn’t really understand (one amusing thing about this conversation was that when I was nodding and smiling and pretending to understand, he actually called me on it!), a young man standing in the aisle intervened to help explain in English. He then proceeded to ask me about differences between Chinese and Australian universities, in English, and then my neighbour decided to talk to him too, mostly in local dialect. It turned out that the young man was a graduate of Qinghua University and had a very high level of English - high enough to be a translator, which is very difficult to get into. I was reassured that he also seemed to find the man next to me rather amusing. The next person to get drawn into the conversation was the young woman on my other side, a native of Anhui who now lives in Suzhou. She seemed unusually reticent about answering relatively personal questions (like what her husband’s job is). Anyway, it turned out that she was travelling with two Korean women who she had met when they were studying in Anhui a few years ago. She told me that they had seen me at Mingxiaoling the previous day. She and I agreed, contra my neighbour, that Korean people don’t all look the same. At the hostel, in the evening, I spoke with a Dutch (I think) woman in the dorm, just about normal traveller stuff. She also told me that the dorm was fairly noisy since one woman, who was sleeping there when I arrived (with no undies on and the doona riding up! flashing the whole dorm!) but had now left, seems to stay up all night (hence the daysleeping).
