Now it appears my driver has determined I am a tourist. I may have hit upon something here. Can I trust him? He motions for something…my notebook? No. My map? No. Money? No. “Woo Woo..” Does he want my train ticket? YES! He looks at the ticket, checks his clock and has determined I have time to go visit some places.
We visit a local Buddhist temple. That’s him sitting on the hill. No…I did not walk the steps to get up there, but It would have been a nice hike. Next time, I should plan better. Maybe even know where I am going? Maybe? I was unable to find out from the internet what this statue was. It’s too bad I didn’t have time to go up there. It looks VERY impressive!
We are near a pagoda in the distance. Turns out when I got back I find out this is the Yunyan Pagoda, or Huqiu Tower, a tower that is now leaning due to lack of foundational support (half soil, half rock), built during the latter part of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms era (907-960 AD).
We find another pagoda which turns out to be the Beisi Pagoda of Suzhou, built between 1131 and 1162 during the Song Dynasty (with later renovations), 76 m (243 ft) tall. I didn’t actually visit the pagodas because my time is limited. If I miss the train back to Shanghai, I am spending the night. Not good.
The city is very nice. It’s clean, organized, the roads are well laid out with lanes for cars, lanes for scooters and bikes, and a side walk. The hustle and bustle of Shanghai is in the distance. People are industrious yet the pace seems more like what a normal US city would be like. I think I am in the real China now. I could be very comfortable living in this community, and even a smaller one. All is good.
My driver checks my ticket again and suggest we take a detour. I’m game. He says I have “two periods” before I need to leave. I figure this is two hours. If I am back an hour before departure, I’m good. So far I’ve spent $20 USD and I’m in a cab with a person that has my best interest in mind making a few bucks touring me around the city. He’s not going to dump me out in the street because I still owe him money. I love capitalism!
We take the detour. What a stop!! It’s like 5 minutes south of the train station. He just pulls over on the road (a four lane), in the middle of a bridge and stops. He tells me to go under the bridge and walk and he’ll be on the other side of the road when I get back. This is a bit weird, but I can walk to the train station from here! Him and I are doing a pretty good job communicating now. His English has improved dramatically! And my Chinese? What can I say? I’m a Rosetta Stone mega-man!
It’s a water village! The streets are really cool. The water is great. They look at me with some really interesting looks. It might have something to do with me being an oddity…tall, handsome, white guy!
The streets have very nice quaint little shops in them. I stop look and no one is trying to hawk anything! I just look. I decide to buy an item in one of the shops and have to wait for service. WOW! This is very nice. I took a lot of pictures here, but it’s so hard to put them into facebook. I can send them to anyone that wants to see them. It was a nice quaint place to visit.
So you finally found your water village! Yea! Did you give your taxi driver some of the homemade cards you took?
ReplyDelete