We planned a day trip to Suzhou over the Dragon Boat Festival long weekend. Suzhou’s almost 3 hours if you drive, but the new express train gets you there in about 45 mins. How cool is that?! Been meaning to go for a few weeks now but never got round to it, so figured the long weekend was the perfect time to go, and fortunately it wasn’t too crowded.

We kicked off at the Humble Adminstrator Gardens, which has a totally strange name, but China tends to name things very oddly. Well, there’s really love meaning behind the Chinese names of the places, but once you translate it to English, it loses its core meaning so ends up sounding a bit weird! These gardens were pretty big, and filled with ponds and bridges and lots of trees. Was lovely, and gave us much needed shade, because the day was HOT HOT HOT!!

Tried to find this specific “Old Suzhou Restaurant”, but when we did, they’d just closed for the afternoon – and it was only 2pm! Arghhh. Fortunately, on the way there, the cabbie pointed out another Suzhou restaurant (name unknown) nearby, so we walked over there and fortunately they were open. The waitresses were giggly and sweet, and recommended a couple of dishes that we blindly agreed to 😛 They recommended well, the food was awesome!

At the humongous Shanghai Train Station

Grabbing breakfast at “Mister Lee”, some Chinese fast food restaurant

Beef noodles, was delish!!

Getting on the new D-train Express

Whizzing from Shanghai –> Suzhou

Travelling First Class, for only 5? extra!

Wandering around a long market street

Guy carving inscriptions in wood

At the Humble Adminstrator’s Garden (Zhuozheng Yuan ???)

Gorgeous flowers in bloom

Hot guy alert!

Climbing up the path

And up amongst the rocks

Trying to be a geisha girl, ROFL!

Chris is…. very excited

They had tons of these pavillions around the gardens

Chris ponders the meaning of life

Lots of little ponds and bridges

Showing off my Tokidoki for Hello Kitty fan 😛

Me, wondering why the water is so murky. Can’t they clean the stuff?!

LOL

A cute pic of us 🙂

Stopped by a traditional Suzhou restaurant for some lunch

It was so local that there was no English/photo menu. So we just asked
them to bring us their best dishes!

Some sorta green veg cooked in garlic. It was delish!

Boiled shrimp with a splash of vinegar. Ooooh these were awesome.

A huge mound of pork, with fat wobbling away

All carved up – look at that (unhealthy) luscious goodness!!!!!!
It was hands down the best pork we’ve had in our lives.