19/05 Suzhou:
Things I ate: for breakfast I had a couple of bananas, which I had bought the previous day. For some reason they are very cheap here but there are no mandarins available at all. There are pipa, which I was not expecting, but I haven’t asked how much, yet. I had a late lunch of Japanese tofu on a hotplate, which included onion, capsicum, black fungus mushroom and a bit of carrot as well as the tofu, in a sweet and sour sauce. There was also a kind of tea that didn’t have normal leaves, just these oval shaped seed-like things. The taste was not bitter at all. For dinner I had an eggplant dish which was in a sweet, sticky sauce. Both things were very delicious.
Places I went: in the afternoon I went for an exploratory walk, and ended up near the Garden of the Master of the Nets (Wangshi Yuan), reputedly the best of Suzhou’s many famous gardens. I figured that on a weekday the crowds would not be unbearable so I went in. There were a couple of tour groups but they mostly concentrated in the central area. It was indeed very beautiful. Aside from the outdoor areas, the rooms were furnished in traditional styles, and had some memorabilia of previous owners. Apparently one of them had kept a pet tiger. I also enjoyed sitting near the water, and wasn’t too bothered by the people going around (actually, it was quite fun trying to recognise their languages). Not everyone felt like this - there was an older spanish couple there whose Spanish-speaking Chinese tour guide had a very loud voice, and after a while someone called out ‘be quiet!’ but he didn’t hear them, I think, so they called again, ‘shut up!’ I had hung around hoping to see what would happen but they left after that.
People I spoke to: at the hostel I chatted again with the Dutch lady, and in the evening I also talked a little to one of the Chinese women in the dorm room.
