Three days and 3 cities to go. After a 3-hour bus ride, we arrived in Suzhou. Our first stop was to Tiger Hill – home of the Leaning Pagoda (kind of like the Leaning Tower of Pisa). The pagoda leans about 3 degrees off-center, because half of the foundation was built on rock and half was built on soil causing 2 support pillars to crack. There are no internal staircases in this pagoda, but no one is allowed to go up in it anyway. The gardens in this area are very lush as you would expect with so much rainfall and humidity.
Dr Tai’s brother met us at lunch (he lives an hour away, but drove in). He brought us several boxes of fruit, including lychees and peaches. Lychees are about the size and shape of strawberries, but have a hard skin that needs to be peeled like a kiwi.
The next stop was the Number 1 Silk Factory. I liked watching the women spin silk thread from the cocoons, but I didn’t like looking at the actual silkworms eating the mulberry leaves. They had a huge display area full of silk products like clothes, bedding, table linens, and purses. We got to see a Chinese fashion show – not quite like New York City runway models, but interesting.
Next we took a boat ride on the Grand Canal. This reminded me a lot of the canals in Venice with the houses right up against the water. The locals aren’t supposed to do their laundry in the canal, but we saw several elderly women doing it anyway. It’s terrible for the water, but it saves them money.
Our last stop was the Lion Forest Garden. The famous architect, I.M. Pei (designer of the John F Kennedy Library in Massachusetts and the Louvre in Paris), was supposedly inspired by these gardens. There was a very intricate and twisting maze in the middle of the garden that most of us got lost in. The maze is built out of taihu rocks, which the Chinese think look like lions; I thought they looked like lava rock or gray coral.
