Thoughts on China

Click here for more images from Humble Administrator’s Garden.

I knew it would happen eventually, but when I got off the bus in Suzhou and got into a taxi, on the ride to Motel 168 (yes, they left the light on for me…) I felt like one of the droogies in A Clockwork Orange, enjoying the real horrorshow driving of the cab driver from hell…everywhere we went, he left people almost toppled over on their bikes and motor scooters, just like the night scene with the VW bug rolling over to get out of the way…the only difference was that we didn’t visit the Korova milkbar beforehand or engage in ultraviolence afterward…Finally, I got him involved in a conversation about cars and motorcycles (all in Chinese, of course, since he didn’t speak English)…I told him about my big motorcycle and how fast it went, etc…At the end of the ride, which was Y26, I couldn’t find the extra Y1 and he waived that it was OK! It pays to be a droogie!!!

OK, if you understood all that, great! If not, I’m not going to explain a Stanley Kubrick movie while I’m in China. Suffice it to say that this was the most exciting taxi ride yet… Well, I’m staying at Motel 168 in Suzhou. This one has a ratty carpet in the room, but will suffice for Y168 (about $22.50) a night.

So, I caught the 12:45 bus from Hangzhou to Suzhou and arrived about 2 hours later. I got to the motel quickly, thanks to the aforementioned taxi driver and was able to walk to the Humble Administrator’s Garden (HAG). It is poorly named, since the guy had to be ultra rich, and I doubt he was very humble. I got a tour, since I figured there were probably quite a few things I would not see that the guide might point out, and I was right. He didn’t speak very good English, so I helped him with that. He was trying very hard, though, and did know a lot about the garden.

The garden was beautiful. Rather than try to explain it with thousands of words, I’ll include a few pictures here. It is the beauty of the garden that convinced me that I’d add another night in Suzhou!

After visiting the HAG, I walked a lot and ended up eating at the low end dumpling restaurant (where the common people go). I get the feeling I was the only nonChinese to eat there in quite a while. I finished with dinner and walked a lot more, finally coming upon an area that was about 7 blocks by 7 blocks square that was lit up like Nanjing Road in Shanghai and which had a slew of Western stores in amid the Chinese ones. I have to say, I think it’s OK that the Chinese are getting to try different things, but it really didn’t feel like China at all. I didn’t like it, but then, who am I to judge?

Finally, the walk took me home (after numerous solicitations, per usual). In Shanghai, it’s watches, here it’s “massagy” from motorized rickshaw drivers. Some of them were more persistent than other, but my old standby of  我不要, 你明白吗? (”Wǒ bù yào. Nǐ míngbai ma?”) again worked almost all the time. If it didn’t, I just kept walking and waived my hand “no” until they finally gave up.

I didn’t take any pictures of dinner or the shopping area for two reasons (that was for Sophie, my Chinese tutor, who I hope does well on the TOEFL test): 1) It would have really been out of place at the dumpling place, where I paid 8RMB for a dinner of 4 pork dumplings and eight more chicken dumplings in a soup resembling wonton soup. In other words, people were already staring at me, wondering why I was in the $1 dinner place. To have me take out a camera and start snapping pictures of my meal might have made them feel like I thought it was a real novelty. In any case, I didn’t feel like it needed to be done. As far as the shopping district goes, just think of the picture of Nanjing Road the other night and you really don’t need to see another picture…

Well, that’s all for now. I really enjoyed the garden and would have spent longer there if it hadn’t closed soon after 5:00 PM. So, I may stay another night here, as well. I’ll keep monitoring the weather at Huangshan, If it won’t be relatively nice weather, I’ll have to hang it up, since it would be a waste. On the other hand, we all know how accurate weather forecasters are and I’m not going to be able to visit here that many times in my life, so I might go and hope they’re wrong if I don’t get a favorable report. Whatever happens, dear reader, I promise you’ll be on the front lines…WOoooooHoooooo Eeeeeeehhhhaaaahhhhh…to quote another Kubrick flick (Dr. Strangelove)…