Barb and Bill take their first tour of China together, along with Kate Garrett and her Mom, Mary. This post covers Suzhou.
Monday, November 7, 1988
After checking out of our nice hotel in Shanghai, it was back on the bus for an hour-long drive across town to the Shanghai rail station. Once there, we got to wait in the “soft seat waiting room,” equivalent to the first-class lounge in a classless society. There were only a few “regular” Chinese folks in the lounge, but the ones that were there had stacks of luggage, the spoils of their shopping trips in Shanghai, no doubt.
Then it was onward to the train, first navigating a long set of steps down to the tracks. Lacking an escalator, Kate and Mary paid a “porter” 3 cents to carry their luggage down the steps.
Our 90-minute train ride to Suzhou was quite pleasant. The seating was comfortable, the sights out the window quickly gave way to intensive agriculture and a few other trains.
The Suzhou train station was, like much of China, still under construction. We were happy to clamber aboard our bus, considering the alternate modes of transportation available. Once on board, Barb got the honor of presenting our driver and local guide with cartons of cigarettes to smooth our travels.
Suzhou was a more human-scaled city and immediately felt less hectic, more Chinese, and less Westernized, than Shanghai. Suzhou is famous for its gardens, canals, silk and beautiful women, among other attributes.
Beisi Pagoda driveby 
Street scene 
Our first glimpse of the Grand Canal 
The red lines are rivers. Our hotel is #1!
Our first stop was lunch at a restaurant that was actually so good the whole group called out the cook for a round of applause. One of the best meals that we had on the tour.
Next we headed to a silk factory which turned out to be fascinating, though the place smelled terrible due to the boiling cocoons. We saw each step of the process from silkworms to raw silk braid, a beautiful end product out of a generally disgusting environment.
We zipped across town to the Tiger Hill Pagoda, a leaning tower dubbed China’s Pisa. It was mostly a quick photo op, no chance to climb the tower and we were not given much in the way of history.
Who’s leaning? 
James cornered by Chinese tourists
We walked by a shop featuring engraving on a hair. Seemed like some sort of super-secret technology. We were not allowed in.
One more stop that afternoon at the National Embroidery Institute. We found it most extraordinary. The quality of handiwork — and it was all by hand — was nearly indistinguishable from the paintings that were their models. Barb considered giving up needlework forever, and in fact she eventually did (though maybe not as a direct result of this visit).
Our favorite pieces were the remarkable double-sided embroideries, for which the institute is justly famous. The one below of Charles and Diana is a hokey example, but others were jaw-dropping. Too bad we didn’t actually purchase an example, they’re evidently quite prized now.
The drive to the hotel took us through Suzhou’s rush hour. Note the vast number of bicycles vs. the few motorized vehicles. That’s not the case today, I bet. We were fascinated by the stoplights that had a countdown to the seconds before the light changed from red to green…just like drag racing. I’d be interested if these are still in use.
The lovely (sarcasm) Soochow Hotel is our home for the evening. We’re greeted by a couple of cockroaches that Barb dispatched all by herself, proving that she’s already getting used to being in China. The hotel was nicely situated on a river and was an example of China’s aging tourist infrastructure dating from maybe the 1970s but already showing a lot of wear. They were trying their best but it would not get more than two stars from a AAA hotel evaluator.
It had been quite a while since our good lunch, so the gang of four girls from Long Island hosted a beer and cheese cracker cocktail hour in their room. These four were an odd bunch. We kind of figured they were Jewish mafia wives. They were very distrustful of eating any Chinese food or getting sick, bringing a suitcase full of snacks including tuna fish, cheese crackers, peanut butter, their own chopsticks and more.
Two of the Long Island girls and two of the nicer Canadian girls. 
Joe checks out hotel card; cheese crackers arrayed on toilet paper to his left
Dinner at the hotel was poor; glad we’d had the happy hour. Afterwards we ventured out on the street for evening shopping. There seemed to be more than 100 storefronts all offering the same light industrial bric-a-brac. A few were tourist-oriented but most were for domestic goods, kind of a low-end hardware store spread laterally among many different shops. They all seemed to be privately run and willing to bargain.The basic markup seems to be 10x-20x cost so there’s plenty of room to haggle. The shopkeepers were generally very polite — capitalism at its least aggressive. We got the sense they were just playing at this new game of capitalist aggrandizement, in case the pendulum swung again against them. Or perhaps it was a minor league training ground for budding shopowners.
By 10pm we were back in our room, and switched on the “No Bother” light.
For good measure, here’s a shot of Suzhou’s skyline today. Not quite the same as when we were there.
A word about the currency. From 1980-1994, tourists (and all foreigners) had to use an alternative currency called Foreign Exchange Certificates (FEC). We were not supposed to get our hands on Chinese Yuan, the domestic currency. It was another way to restrict foreigners from infecting China, though I can’t say we ran into any particular restrictions using them. Then again, we didn’t have a whole lot of opportunities to use cash for much of anything other than shopping in approved Friendship Stores, hotels, factory shops, or roadside hawkers at specific tourist locations.
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