We just finished our fifth week, which was busy as always; we had two class sessions on Monday to make up for the class we missed during the Dragon Boat Festival, two lectures on Chinese culture and economy, our second and final calligraphy class on Wednesday, and a day trip to Suzhou on Saturday. It was also our last week with our language partners home for break, so they should be back for this coming Friday. We've had some free time in the afternoons to check out new areas around Hongkou, so we've found some new family restaurants we like and explored some of the tourist areas we'd like to go back to sometime before the trip is over.
Speaking of which, it really is hard to believe how little time we have left--as of today (whoops, it's Monday because I'm bad at updating on time :/), we only have 13 days of classes left. We're definitely planning trips back to some of the bigger shopping areas in our free afternoons, especially to see the Bund at night.
Anyways, the most exciting part of the week was our trip to Suzhou, a city in Jiangsu Province. We visited the Humble Administrator's Garden, a silk embroidery museum, and took a boat tour down a canal surrounded by one of Suzhou's neighborhoods (the picture on the right is of a collapsed bridge we saw from the canal). I do wish we would've had the time to see more of Suzhou (and the same goes for Hangzhou and Nanjing), but the spots we did get to see were interesting--The garden was fairly similar to Yuyuan, but it was definitely greener and more open. We happened to go on a very busy and rainy day, so navigating was a little hard, especially considering how huge the garden is, but it was beyond beautiful and an interesting area to see. The silk museum was also amazing--there are only twelve silk embroidery masters at any given time who embroider lifelike images of people, animals, landscapes, and even calligraphy. Unless you were inches away from it, it was incredibly difficult to tell it wasn't a picture or drawing. Personally, I also think Suzhou had the best food of the provinces we've visited so far--as someone who doesn't do too well with spicy food, I appreciate that most of the dishes we tried were lighter and sweeter.
Well, I guess that about sums up this week--these past two weeks we've had the least free time we'll have on the trip, so we're hoping to do some more traveling and exploring (and revisit some of our favorite places) when we have time in the next few weeks. It's hard to believe how quickly the trip will start winding down, so we're definitely trying to make the most of our last three weeks. In any case, thanks for reading if you've made it this far and I'll post again next week (hopefully not on Monday again rip).
P.S. There was a bird at the silk embroidery museum and I thought he was neat so here he is.
