Landmark Skylight Pearl Hotel Suzhou

... s Garden we went to the nearby Suzhou Museum. The museum is free and was designed by a famous American architect who was born in Suzhou. The architecture mimics the traditional homes of ancient Suzhou, but with a modern twist. It was incredibly designed. The architect was brilliant in his designs. Each corridor is designed in a way that the light coming in makes patterns on ...

... were resembling drowned rats then headed back to the hostel ( 1 pound cab fare) to warm up and have a game of scrabble. Finally it decided to stop raining so we headed off the the quaint canal town of Tongli. A reasonably short bus ride away we arrived at Tongli with its winding canals and historic buildings, temples and gardens. We explored around making sure we walked over the three ancient bridges to make our wish for the future. Mine came true ...

The Garden of the Master of the Nets is by far the most beautiful and tranquil garden that I have yet to visit in Suzhou. It is the smallest of all the Suzhou gardens however, in my mind it was one of the most impressive. Even though the garden is rather small in comparison to some of the other gardens that I have visited, I feel it had the most to offer. The buildings themselves were beautiful and ...

OMG I have found a ciy that gives London a run for its money! Hong Kong is soooooooo cool!!!! Totally different to the rest of China (as expected) but just so cool!!! In the miniscule time that I had here I managed to fit in lots and lots! On my first day I walked aimlessly around Kowloon just getting a feel for the city....ended up at Avenue of Stars which is on the waterfront (that's lined by so so many skyscrapers....never ...

... dick on this. I guess I just need to head for the big sites..Tai Shan, Great Wall, Terracotta Army extra and miss some of the temples, Buddhas and gardens out..Ive seen enough and probably better so far. Maybe I will just relax in Beijing, sort out my Indian visa, get a new suit for work..rather than trying to fit to much in. So I have booked an over night train to Tai Shan..i climb this tomorrow and will be in Beijing for Tuesday.

... friends and make new friends. BUT...what about the next day? Footballers don't even stop to consider that do they! Anyhow, to the day. After falling to sleep around 7:30am I was woken around midday and didn't I feel like total ****. My head was still spinning and there were jumbo jets flying around my head smashing into my brain and skull a million times a second. I should have ...

... and I'm buggered if I remember walking to get noodles. Shanghai mate, it does strange things to your mind! Beers N Noodles to ya...shane The soundtrack to this entry was the George Thorogood anthology No comments needed for this guy. If you don't know him or don't have anything by him put your sandals on and head to the cd shop. If you have his stuff, don't you think its time you put some on.

... the first radical in the word, find out which page it is on, and then go to that page. Then I have to find the character in a long list of all the possibilties with that radical, and make a note of its pinyin (Chinese in latin characters) word. Then I can go into the body of the dictionary, and look up among the possiblities under the pinyin word. Somewhere there is the right Chinese character, and I can finally translate it. Easy, eh ...

... Hong Kong is way cool (which we already knew... but we reconfirmed being back there) but you need a fair amount ofmoney to enjoy it properly. It's not a place for the budget traveller, put it that way! It only took 45 mins to get to the 'border' of China and Hong Kong. Weird, they are supposedly one country now, but we met a really nice Chinese guy on the train who had lived in Sydney for 5 years and ...

... the amazon river - very stroppy they were too. By this time it was sunset so it was straight up the Jinmao tower (4th tallest building in the world) to watch the sun go down over Shanghai - spectacular. As a little treat we decided to hit the bar on the floor below the observation deck to watch the bright lights of the city, the views were amazing - if you've seen mission impossible 3 you'll have some idea of how good shanghai looks at night. The ...