Morning in Suzhou. Still humid, not too warm yet. The stares are starting to get very annoying and it's only been a couple of days. What do we have to do, beat someone up to get them to believe we really study kung fu?
They assign a new guide and translator for each town we go to, it looks like. The Suzhou guide is pretty lame. Our guide in Shanghai was pretty cool -- for a while there I thought he was just spouting Party niceness about how Shanghai was much more free, people had more choices, etc. But he eventually spoke very freely about the various types of crime, drug abuse, and so on that have been on the rise in Shanghai. Interesting figure -- 30% of people in Shanghai live in ``slums''. That figure even agrees with what we've been seeing. 30%! My god...
Suzhou seems like a small-to-medium size town. Hard to tell, though -- not sure how much area it covers. No buildings taller than 5 stories. Went out walking for a while last night but didn't find anything interesting. No markets that I saw, which I thought was odd. A couple places that looked like they sold cigarettes and soda but that was it. Maybe they're hiding them. Or maybe Chinese people just don't eat.
Rock Gardens at Suzhou.
About half of our group.
Another Rock Garden shot.
High point of yesterday -- on the bus ride to the train station, as we were stopped in traffic there was a guy outside a restaurant with a snake. We got to watch him behead it, gut it, and skin it, all with a pair of old scissors before traffic started moving again and we were carried away. We've seen some shops that sell various types of snakes, presumably to eat. I wasn't hungry enough to go in.
It's quite hot -- 35° C or so, last I heard. Fairly humid, too, so it's easy to get all sweaty. Our busses are air-conditioned so it's not too bad. Maybe it'll be worse when we get to the more rural areas but most restaurants so far have A/C, and even the gardens and such we've been visiting have strategically placed electric fans. Then again, if it's like this when we get to the spots we'll be doing our demos, we're going to be dying. Gotta remember to bring plenty of water so we don't dehydrate.