Days 92-96: Suzhou and One Crummy Day

Some Suzhou pics.....

Me outside Suzhou University, before my lecture.

At the Humble Administrators' Garden.

Suzhou Opera Museum.

Overall, Kerry and I had a great time in Suzhou. The train ride on Tuesday to get there was pretty easy and fast; Carol and a colleague of hers took us to the train station. It was only about a 20 minute ride.  Dr. Haibu Gu (Tony) met us at the station. He had a car take us to the Gloria Plaza Hotel in Suzhou. The hotel was not great--the bed was really hard and the room faintly smelled of cigarette smoke. Once we got there, we rested a bit, and then went back to Tony. He took us to the old town area of Suzhou, and we stopped at two museums: a storytelling museum and an opera museum.  Both were small but interesting. I think I preferred the opera museum, mainly because I remember having this peaceful moment of standing by the opera stage and listening to a mourning dove, over and over again. Bliss!  Tony then took us to lunch, where we had garlic spinach, pumpkin dumplings, some duck, and an excellent lion's head meatball. Tony's graduate student Lindy was there, and she took over leading us around while Tony went to class. She even went to go get us umbrellas when it started raining. On the way home, we stopped at two cat cafes: the first one had no cats, but the second one had two sleepy ones. Kerry was happy!  Later in the evening, we had dinner with Dean Sun and some faculty who had been at Century. It was a fun, light-hearted meal. We also talked about the possibility of doing some more cultural exchange between the two schools, and Dean Sun seemed interested.

Wednesday was the big day of my lecture. Another faculty took us on a tour of the campus and to the Soochow University museum, which was quite impressive: it not only had university artifacts but also historical pottery and coins. She also took us to a lunch at the university guest house: not as amazing as the meals of the previous day, but still quite good--I particularly liked the scrambled eggs and silverfish. My lecture was at 2 pm; I was astounded because about 70-80 people showed up. I'm told that I talked for about 70 minutes, and people in the audience asked a lot of questions and reacted positively. Afterwards I met with some teachers who came to Century for a quick photo up, but then they scattered, leaving me and Kerry to rest a bit. One of the professors, Dr. Ku, came to ask me some more questions about online teaching and learning. He seemed very interested in my talk. The dinner that evening was great, but I ended up doing a lot of the talking. We had watermelon and squirrel fish, both of which were fantastic! However, by the end of the evening, my throat was a bit sore, and Kerry and to run out and get me some Ricola drops.

Thursday was more low key. A different professor came to talk us on a tour of the Humble Administrators' Garden--a beautiful garden in Suzhou, which is apparently one of the top four gardens in all of China. Such colors to see! So much yellow, red, orange...it felt like autumn. Beautiful architecture, such as many pagodas, too. We had an English tour guide, as we did at the university museum, who walked around with us. She was very insightful and explained the symbolic meanings behind everything we saw, such as rock formations that looked like turtles, and how turtles are symbols of longevity. After this, we spent a little time at the Suzhou museum: more pottery, jade artifacts, and even a goldfish pond. No paintings, though: the museum was very artifact-heavy. By this time, we were pretty tired and hungry. Before we left the area, we haggled with a shopkeeper for a couple items (with the help of the professor) and got some good deals. A lot of beggars in this area, but the professor protected us!  She told us that she said to them in Chinese, "It's not polite to bother the foreigners."  Indeed!  We had dinner in the hotel tonight with Professor Ku and one female professor. Professor Ku is very excitable and did most of the talking. He's very into online learning and wanted to discuss it constantly; the other professor barely said a word.

Friday we returned home; Dean Sun came to the hotel to say goodbye to us, which was nice. One of the graduate students accompanied us to the train. The train was pretty quick. We were wiped out so just ordered some McDonald's for lunch and then took a long nap. I mostly did grading in the evening.

Here are some more pictures from Suzhou:

Suzhou lunch during our museum walk.

Suzhou, the water town.

I'm next to Dean Sun. That's Haibo Gu (Tony) on the right. Plus other teachers who came to Century College.

From the Suzhou U Museum.

From the Humble Administrators' Garden.

Me at the Humble Administrators' Garden.

From the Suzhou Museum.

Saturday was a bit of a waste. We were supposed to meet one of my students at Hongkou Plaza, but everything went wrong. First we couldn't get a taxi to show up through Didi, and then we flagged a driver down, but she didn't understand where we wanted to go (apparently "Hongkou Plaza" and "Hongkou Mall"--both of which Kerry tried on Google Translate--did not translate to Chinese).  So we did the walk to bus, take the bus, take the subway thing.  We tried to contact the student about all this, but didn't hear back from her. So we basically went to Hongkou Plaza for nothing; not even the lunch that we had there--a teppanyaki place--was good. The pork was too gristly, the beef was too spicy, and there were too many onions and peppers in the dishes. We drowned our sorrows in sweets afterwards: I got a couple donuts (one for home), and Kerry bought some cake. Yes, we were being bad, but we were both in a crappy mood. When I got home, I did more revision/proofreading on my lectures and then we packed after dinner (we had pot-stickers from Wal-Mart from dinner--oh joy--but they were better than our lunch).

Tomorrow...Changchun!  I'll let you know how it goes.