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.
Category: China
I am American. I moved from Singapore to China in 2022.
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.
Spring trees at Zhejiang Lab Nanhu Campus
The Zhejiang Lab campus is impressive, not least because a veritable army of gardeners is employed to look after the enormous variety of trees, bushes, grass, and flowers. I appreciate their work daily on my short walk to the main building, and during lunchtime strolls, which take me and my colleagues in different directions on different days.
This post features flowering trees. Some are cherry blossom (sakura), but mostly I don’t know what kind of trees they are; kinda wish I did.
China culture shock: English on signs
The holy grail of Chinglish, for me, would be to see in person a sign saying “Carefully Slip And Fall Down“.
Since the English on signs in Hangzhou is not by any means so terrible on average, I’m still looking.
Meanwhile, I’ve spotted quite a few other amusing signs in Hangzhou.
Have a guess… what kind of store advertises its products as “cheap, fresh, quality, intimate”? See below to find out!
Zhijiang Bridge
This is the seventh of nine bridges over the Qiantang River in Hangzhou.
Which of the photos below is your favorite?
I like #26, but #25 is unique. All the blue sky ones are nice. Sometimes the red part looks like steel grey… #23 has the weirdest color.
Not in Kansas anymore
I feel like Dorothy when she says, “Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.”
Why is that? Because unlike Singapore, Hangzhou has SEASONS!
Hangzhou Tollbooths
This tollbooth in Lin’an is exactly what you’d expect a Chinese tollbooth to look like, isn’t it? Well, they don’t all look like this.
And they don’t all look like the viral photo of a huge traffic jam at a very wide tollbooth. That’s a photo taken during Chinese New Year, which I imagine causes the most and biggest traffic jams anywhere on the planet. Chinese New Year, known in China as Spring Festival, is when Chinese people all go back to their hometowns. (If you’re American, imagine Thanksgiving traffic, with about four times as many people involved.)
See below for more photos of tollbooths. The third one will surprise you! Continue reading Hangzhou Tollbooths
