On the way back from our visit to Suzhou, Siqi wanted to stop at the lake. We more or less achieved that, but things didn’t go as planned that day. See below for a few photos of the lake and a strange story or two about our journey back home.
Month: June 2023
The Xuan Miao Temple
The inner area of this Taoist Temple in Suzhou required buying tickets, but the area around it was already pretty interesting, so we didn’t go in, we just took a lot of photos around it. I really like the stylized dragons on the gate in front.
Suzhou Signs
In a world where I can’t read most text, my eye is drawn to all the English. I see lots of funny mistakes. Here are 7 signs you’d never see in the US, spotted on a trip to Suzhou.
The Road to Suzhou
Every place is a place, and connecting places, there are roads. Along the roads, there are trees, plants, buildings, bridges, lights, power lines, signs, and maybe animals. There are millions of combinations of things you can see out the window of a car. And if you’re not driving, you can take photos. Which is what I did on the road to Suzhou.
Suzhou
My boyfriend Siqi drove us to Suzhou for a short vacation when we had a long weekend for the Dragon Boat Festival national holiday here in China. Suzhou is famous for “Venice-like” water towns, ancient residential complexes with exquisitely landscaped courtyard gardens, and the city museum adjacent to the city’s most famous garden.
We didn’t plan very far in advance—in fact, we didn’t plan much at all—but we still enjoyed our time. The main tourist sites were completely booked and/or full of people, but we were lucky with the weather, and were able to amuse ourselves just fine by walking around in the historic district. Now that we’re more familiar with Suzhou’s geography, we know where to go when we go back, which is easy to do since Suzhou is just next door to Hangzhou.
I took photos mainly of:
- modern infrastructure on the highway (see separate post: The Road to Suzhou)
- new and old Suzhou buildings, including shops and their wares (see below),
- a few signs with amusing English (see separate post: Suzhou Signs),
- a Taoist temple (see separate post: The Xuan Miao Temple),
- Lake Tai (see separate post: Glimpse of Taihu).
River Dinner
A friend wanted to have dinner by the river. After some deliberation, we identified a place called Blue Mountain Café (Lanshan Café) that suited our purpose. Below are the photos we took after dinner, from both sides of the river.
GAITC 2023
I briefly attended the exposition at the Global Artificial Intelligence Technology Conference (GAITC) 2023 in Hangzhou at the Hangzhou Future Sci-Tech City Academic Exchange Center.
