Back to Suzhou

I arrived in Shanghai and took the first bus out to Suzhou.  I t was supposed to take 1.5 hours, but instead lasted for 3.5 hours...then the taxi driver tried to make me pay double and I had to argue with him in majorly broken Chinese to get a decent price.  Ahhh, so nice to be back in China! 

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I was able to meet up with Jason and we had some nice street food and chatted the rest of the night.  The next day we decided to walk around the Industrial Park, full of Western-style apartments and parks.  Most of the Fortune 500 companies have offices/factories in Suzhou and this is the area they put up all their foreign employees, who all lilve VERY well here.  We walked around the lake and found a huge arboreteum to tour, even though the humidity was killer.  That night, Jason's girlfriend, JinYing, made some home-cooked Chinese food and then we went out to the internet cafe.  It's amazing - the internet cafe's here are like the movie theaters or a nice restaurant back in the States on a Saturday night with lines out the door...it is THE place to be.  People come here to obvioulsy use the internet, but also to play games and watch movies...all night long - crazy!

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The next day, we slept in and then headed downtown to check out one of the gardens and just lounge about.  It's still damn hot and I got this heat headache, so we stopped in a drug store and Jason got some tiger balm.  I had used this before for muscle ache, but WOW, you just rub some on your temples and BAM - the headache disappears!  I had been to several of the gardens before, but never the Blue Wave Pavilion.  It was nice and we just hung out.  Later, we grabbed some Bone Soup Hotpot with his girlfriend and had a nice final night before I took the train to Shanghai and  flight to Chengdu.  Talk to you next time from Sichuan!

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