Click on images below to enlarge:
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| Pretty flowers (though I quickly left this spot because of the number of
bees here).
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There were reliefs of various animals (birds, fish, etc.) inset in stone
on the floor throughout the garden.
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| More Suzhou
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| The canal that parallels one of the main streets downtown.
| Looking in the other direction. I took this picture to get more of the
canal, to get the carvings on the bridge (the birds actually make me think
of crabs), and the astounding number of scooters parked on the left.
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| Lunch at Wang Si Restaurant
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| Wang (or grand/great/king/best) (wang2) Si (or west) (xi1)
wine-shop/restaurant (jiu3 jia1), our lunch choice.
| Bamboo shoots. We peeled them and ate the center. Neat.
| The bamboo shoots are the last item on the list. They translate as
hand (shou3) shuck/peel (bo1) bamboo shoots (sun3). I guess they mean you
have to finish peeling them yourself.
| Eggplant, peeled. Good. Served cool. :)
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| The eggplant is the third item on the list. It says oil (you2)
stewed/cooked-like-a-casserole/cooked-covered (men4) eggplant (qie2 zi).
| Shrimp, fish, and asparagus. I liked the fish the best.
| The menu entry: asparagus (lu2 sun3) two/pair (shuang1) tasty (xian1).
The text below helpfully says 75 grams of the main ingredient and 75 grams
of the secondary ingredient. Yes, there's no explicit mention of the
shrimp or the fish.
| Pea shoots. Okay.
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| The pea shoots are the last item on the list. They're called raw (sheng1)
stir-fried (bian1) pea shoots (dou4 miao2).
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The waiter poured tea out of a long (3 feet?) sprout. Pretty cool. :)
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| Downtown Suzhou
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| Suzhou has two main, parallel pedestrian streets downtown. This is one of
them, I forgot which one. It's a pretty representative shot of this
street. (The other is lined with more buildings on both sides. They're
both equally wide.)
| A 360 degree panoramic movie of the square in front of a temple (the main
temple downtown, just off the street in the previous picture). The crowd
visible in the side courtyard eight seconds into the movie were watching
someone sell jade pigs.
| A sample picture of the other main pedestrian street.
| One of Suzhou's famous snack shops.
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A small sample of what's inside. (The shop was at least five times bigger
than that you can see here.)
The crowd visible at left is watching
people make (and is buying) a huge variety of rice cakes.
| Another sample of the selection.
| Another shop's colorful rice cakes. (Less crowded => easier to
photograph.)
| Yet another shop's unusual-looking sweets.
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| The right side of the display cabinet. The colorful red and green things
in the middle are called hyacinth cakes; they're tall and shaped like
flowers. The next furthest items, which look kind of like pot pies, are
called plum cakes. Dotted with all sorted of strange things (just like
the hyacinth cakes, but you can't see the strange things on the plum cakes
in this picture) and caramelized sugar, they were filled with red bean
paste and were great. The hyacinth cakes were similarly filled but just not
as good. I think it's because of their different texture: the hyacinth
cakes seemed baked, which we didn't like.
| We liked the plum cakes enough to buy one for each of us.
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We also shared a bag of sweet pine nut candy that S and Di Yin
thought was good. It slowly dissolved in one's mouth. Candy's not my
thing.
| I bought winter melon juice from this shop. The winter melon was chopped
in front of us, then mixed with pear juice, lemon juice, and perhaps some
rock candy, and blended. It was sweet and sour.
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Also downtown, we walked by a shop that specializes in selling scissors.
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| Lion Forest Garden
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| The central bridge in the Lion Forest Garden. I like how each piece of
greenery on the left is so distinctive in color.
| Looking out from a cave-tunnel at the bridge.
| Wisteria atop a colonnade. Lovely.
| Another perspective on the colonnade.
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