On our fourth morning in China we checked out of our hotel in Nanjing and took a subway back to the railroad station, stopping to get some street food in the same place we got it the day before (thus setting up short-lived “our Nanjing routine”). This involved buying some yoghurt in the street (the woman explained to us with gestures the previous morning that we were supposed to return the bottle to her after we drank it), then getting some dumplings in a little market around the corner. People in Nanjing have been among the friendliest we encountered in China, and were very patient with our rather limited communicative ability, which largely boiled down to “zhege” (“this”), “dou shao qian?” (how much) and numbers. As many other people, the dumpling vendor insisted on explaining to something to us (in lengthy Mandarin monologue), despite our seemingly obvious inability to understand him. When he finally switched to miming, I finally understood what he was trying to say: to properly eat the dumplings, we were supposed to bite off a little piece, let it cool to the extent that we want, then drink the juice from inside the dumpling, then eat the rest. Unfortunately, this was only after I already made a mistake of putting a whole dumpling in my mouth and burning my mouth with the boiling water in it. When we finally got to the train station, we got our tickets to Suzhou (“Suzhou, liangge. Dou shao qian?”) – half way back to Shanghai.

Suzhou, about 1.5 away from Shanghai by train is supposed to be one of the oldest cities in China, dating back before Qin Shihuandi’s unification of the country. It was visited by Marco Polo at some point and described as “the Venice of the East”, supposedly not just because it has its share of canals, but also because it was a rather large city by the standards of the time. One of our guidebooks described Suzhou as a “small town”, despite listed population of almost 6 million people. Many parts of Suzhou did however have a small town feel, in the best sense of the word.

Suzhou’s main attraction is the classical “Suzhou gardens” (since then immitated throughout China and the world), and the most famous of those was three blocks away from a hostel where we stayed – “Garden of the Master of the Nets.”

While visiting the garden we suddenly both felt really tired – probably because of spending the past four days walking non-stop, so we ended up returning to our hostel to rest. At 9 we headed out, having read in the book about a “night market” on “Shi Lu.” We got into a taxi and said “Shi Lu” plus whatever the cross-street was. The taxi driver headed in the right direction, but kept repeatedly asking us something along the way. It seemed like he was saying a name of another street (“… Jie”), but I just had to shrug my shoulders. He finally stopped, roughly where I expected, said the name of the same street once again, and pointed into one of the directions with his hand. It wasn’t the right direction for the market, but I was curious, so we headed in that direction. After two blocks we found a beautiful old cleaned-up but not quite restored street, lit with lanterns. The street sign said “Shantang Jie” and I realized that this was what the taxi driver kept saying. We ended up wondering around the street, having tea and beer in one of the bars on the nearby canal, getting an icecream nearby with the help of an English teacher who overheard me saying “How are we gonna know what they have?”, then went back. (Unfortunately, I didn’t have my camera, so we took no pictures.) We left the night market till the next time, but ended up not going there later. It will have to be on our next visit to Suzhou. As I learned from my sogra, it is good to leave something for “the next trip.”