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| Lights at our Apartment Complex in honour of Golden Week |
We're enjoying the last day of our "Golden Week" holiday. The Chinese Mid Autumn Festival - think Moon Cakes and a billion people on holiday simultaneously! Oh and lots of lights and lanterns.
We learned of this holiday a week or so after we arrived, and the general advice from other expats was "Get out of China if you can!" as the place is teeming with people on holiday. We were amused to find this article in the Sydney Morning Herald, documenting the phenomenon.
Golden Week: The worst time to visit China. That being said, with us busy planning a trip to the USA in Dec/Jan, we weren't up for spending much on this October holiday, so we stayed put (almost!).
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| A canal in the nearby city of Suzhou |
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| Sienna by the pond in the Garden of the Master of the Nets |
In a curious twist, in order for Ian to enjoy this last week off, he had to work last Saturday, but then had 8 days until his next work day. We visited the neighbouring city of Suzhou (pronounced "Sue-Joe" or Shoe-Joe" depending on your accent!) on Wednesday. It is a city of about 6.5 million - a similar size to Sydney? It is famous for its traditional gardens and we visited one of the smallest, yet most famous ones "Garden of the Master of the Nets" - it is now a world heritage area. Really a Chinese version of a stately home, it is quite compact, but consists of about 20 small buildings (each just a room or a few rooms) set about a lovely pond and gardens. Each room has glimpses of the exterior through wooden lattice-work windows - always thoughtfully designed so that what is seen through them indicates much more space than is really there.
We then took a boat tour, cruising part of the city's 28km moat, and exploring some of the city's canals, which have earned it the name of the "Venice of the East". It was fascinating to see the back of so many houses that had their rear exit to the canal. I snapped someone cleaning boots on their backdoor step - a logical place when you live on a canal!
After the cruise we visited a silk factory, as Suzhou is famous for producing Silk. It was very interesting to see how the silk is actually produced from the cocoons, and particularly to hear how 20% of cocoons are "doubles" spun by two caterpillars together. These are used to make silk stuffing for quilts and are not exported as the Chinese love them so much that there is not enough for the overseas market. We purchased a silk quilt for our bed, and I must say it is lovely - though still a little warm, as temps here are still in the low 20s at night.
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| Leafy Seadragons at Shanghai Ocean Aquarium |
After a rest day, we visited the Shanghai Ocean Aquarium. Though we went to see the fish, we really saw a display of Chinese crowds! There were several glass viewing tunnels, and there were so many people in them that they looked like sardines! Lots of pushing and shoving in order to get to see anything, but there really were lots of lovely creatures to see. One of my favorites was the leafy seadragons. I've been having fun using the whiz-bang camera Ian got me for my birthday- all the photos on the blog were taken with it, and it does an amazing job of making me look like a competent photographer!
It was with some trepidation that we headed out for the Shanghai Science and Technology Museum the following day - we really didn't feel like another day trapped in small, dark places with lots of people, but we were pleasantly surprised. Probably because it is so huge, the Museum felt busy, but not crowded. We saw a 4D movie on the Sabre-Tooth Tiger - Ian did very well to get us tickets, as the person who sold them spoke no English, and Ian's Chinese didn't really stretch so far as to specify a 4D movie! The movie was all in Chinese, but full of surprises - 3D visuals (with polarized glasses), wind, "fog", "snow" and seats that thumped down, when a kill was brought to ground giving us all quite a surprise. Their hands-on science exploration room was a huge hit with the kids - James said that it would be his ideal bedroom - only about 6 times the size of our house in Normanhurst! We only saw a fraction of the exhibits before going home for lunch. We certainly plan to return!
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| Fireworks in Century Park as seen from our balcony |
We were horrified when we exited the Museum to find it was raining outside - because we had tickets to see the fireworks show in Century Park that night. We had been in anticipation of the "13th Annual International Fireworks Festival" as we had seen, and heard, the shows on 2 previous nights from our balcony on the 25th floor. The thought of the show being rained out was very sad. Thankfully the rain cleared and everything had dried out by the time we were taking our seats for the show.
After a quick dinner at home, we raced to a taxi and after quite a bit of impressive jogging from everyone, we got to the park just on 6pm, when we thought our tickets stated the show started. Once we got there it was clear from the number of unoccupied seats that we were early. Closer inspection of the tickets with the aid of a wonderful Optical Chinese Character Recognition app on my iPhone, told us that the writing on the tickets had said that the park opens at 6pm, while the show was to start at 7:30. We had plenty of time for an ice-cream while we waited! (Magnums and Cornettos are both available).
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| Fireworks at Century Park |
The show was in 2 parts, and consisted of Music with fireworks choreographed to accompany it. The first half was from Italy - Italian music and Firework design, the next half Belgian. Century Park has a huge lake, and this was to be the launch site for the pyrotechnics. We had great seats - there must have been at least 5 sections, were were in Section C in the middle, 15 rows behind the VIP seating. It really was the most spectacular fireworks any of us had seen. The show lasted for an hour! There were spiral fireworks, flowers, heart-shapes, bouquets that changed colour as they expanded, and it just kept getting bigger and better. It was just extraordinary. After years of thinking that Sydney's NY Eve and Australia Day fireworks were spectacular, this left them for dead - and there would have been more fireworks set off for that one show that would have been set off in the whole of Sydney Harbour on New Years Eve. I actually felt sorry for all those "clever" expats who left Shanghai for Golden Week - they don't know what they missed! Certainly worth braving the crowds for. We were all on such a high after the show we managed to walk several km all the way home (Taren did get piggy-backed quite a bit of the way)
On a less ecstatic note, we all tried our hands at Badminton this morning, renting a court at our sport club. We are all pretty terrible, but are considering getting some coaching - I am sure the Badminton pro in the court next to us was doing his best not to laugh (or cry) at our playing! We are also continuing our "training" for the grand canyon by trying to climb the 20 flights of stairs to our apartment every day. (By dint of avoiding "unlucky" numbers such as 4 -the word for 4 in Chinese sounds like the word for death- and 13, we have 20 flights to get to the 25th floor!).
Thanks for tuning in to our adventures! Would love to hear about yours...
