Lingering Garden and Wuzhen

Day 8

When Andrea finally woke up (or actually was women by the phone) we got ready for the day. The hotel had a razor that I used to shave for the first time since we got here. We ate breakfast at the hotel restaurant which had a huge assortment of cuisine, Japanese, Chinese, and traditional western breakfasts. Andrea and I tried something called sago lamp that was like sold tapioca disks with red bean filling which Andrea loved.

We then boarded the bus and headed to the Lingering garden which was a private garden of a rich family and their living quarters. The gardens are beautiful with lid of rocks from a lake 60kms away. The taller, thinner, and more filed with holes the more prestigious it was considered. The garden also had bamboo, the oldest ginkgo tree in China (600 years) and a bonsai garden tended by 18 gardeners. It was beautiful.

The original owner of the house had 5 wives and 11 children. If any were half as good as mine then he was a very lucky man.

We tagged along with an English speaking guides for group and the kids actually learned a bit. Andrea and I had a rare moment of disagreement about enforcing good behavior. It is a good thing that child rearing differences don't count as arguments of we'd be up to six.

After the gardens we went to lunch. I particularly liked the greens, bamboo shots, mushrooms, and eggs with tomato. There was a delicious fish in sweet and sour sauce but it was deep fried so I ate little of it. The fish was sliced so that pieces protruded, battered, and fried whole so that you could pull off pieces with your chopsticks.

Street lunch most of the group went boating but we stayed behind and had coffee, bubble tea, and browsed the small shops.

The entire day the weather ranged from pouring rain to drizzle. I didn't take a single photo but Joshua took a lot of video.

OK, I need to amend the last paragraph because I wrote that on the very long bus ride to Wuzhen and I ended up taking lots of pictures. Wuzhen was a huge place, full of cobblestone streets alongside canals. There were restaurants, shops, and artisans that demonstrated how things were made hundreds of years ago. They made silk and dyed fabric. Singers sung traditional songs as we ate dinner. We walked and browse the shops, taking in the sights, masking or way through the crowd to the far end of the village where we boarded a traditional Chinese boat and were propelled by a man in the back, pushing a huge rudder like thing back and forth, to our hotel. We all agreed that it was one of the most beautiful places Wed ever visited.

Our hotel is worth some comment. Each room is laid out with an ante chamber and a long hallway off of which the kids a bathroom and two bedrooms. They have is two key cards each of which opened the main for and one of the two bedrooms, allowing them to rent the room as a double or two singles. The accommodations are nice, but the A/C didn't work in our first room forcing us to move to a new room. The little toiletries were cute and included a wooden comb and a sewing of in a small decorative wooden case, which was a nice touch.

I went to sleep at 11am slept very soundly all night.

I can no longer get my VPN to work at all which leaves me with access to Facebook and blogger only from my cell, on which restrictions are relaxed because I have a foreign sim card. However, the cell only had 2G, which along with slow Chinese Internet is so painful to use that it's hardly worth it. We could upgrade to 3G for $25 a week per line or to 4G for $50 but we've decided that is just too expensive.