Day 16 - Zhouzhuang, China

Day 16 – Hers

Another good night’s sleep and I awoke ready to go.  I seem to have finally conquered the jet lag.  We breakfasted on the last of our coffee and some ‘French-style breads’ – which are sweet buns, little cakes really, and delicious.  We caught a public bus to the long distance bus station and took a (blessedly air-conditioned) long-distance coach to Zhouzhuang – ‘China’s 1^st Water City’, according to the sign.  The scenery in this part of China is quite different to the more northerly regions we visited earlier on.  We passed rice paddies, lakes and rivers with sections netted off for fishing – often tended by large-hatted fishermen in sampans – orchards and neatly tended roadside gardens.  Small groups of equally large-hatted gardeners and cleaners worked diligently in the glare of the morning sun.

Zhouzhang is a town of around 500,000 people, with willow trees and buildings dating back as far as the 12^th century lining the canals.  It became popular with artists in the mid-twentieth century and subsequently with tourists.  As with St Ives in Cornwall and Montmartre or Honfleur in France, once the tourists moved in, the artists moved out and the entire town is now full of restaurants, souvenir shops and sampan ‘gondoliers’ trying to earn a living. We visited two houses of 13^th century merchants – this was, after all, the Chinese end of the Silk Road and a fabulous Buddhist temple set within a lake with bright red prayer flags hung from trees outside the main prayer hall. We also visited a Communist propaganda museum where you could have your photo taken in uniform with ‘Chairman Mao’.  We had a similar lunch to yesterday’s (despite Tory’s attempts to get us to eat the local specialities of pig’s foot and river snails) at 3 times the price – still a bargain in our terms – a fantastic sampan ride, our boatwoman serenading us as we floated along the canals (‘She will want a tip,’ warned Tory.) and were lucky enough to arrive at the ‘oldest opera stage in the world’ just in time to see a beautiful performance of ‘The Rose and the Peony’.  Trying to copy the performers’ graceful movements, we sauntered (okay, staggered, given the searing, sweaty heat) back to the bus station. A fantastic day.

Day 16 – His.

I am a fish God! All the little fishes think I am a God. They follow me everywhere. When we were in a large aquarium in England one day – Pole hill garden centre I think - they sell fish and have a warehouse full of them. Row upon row of tanks filled with Koi and gold fish and other kinds i couldn’t name. There are thousands of them and you can walk over the tanks on steel walkways to choose your fish. Patti and I went there just to look and as we walked along the walkways all the fish followed us. It was a bit freaky to be honest and i began to feel a little like the pied piper of the fish world. When Patti carried on and i turned around and the fish still followed me, well, i decided I was a fish God. This was confirmed today. We went to the Buddhist temple at Zhouzhuang. In the middle was a lotus pool – actually a mini lake that the temple was in the middle of and reached by stone bridges, as we crossed the bridges the golden carp were literally jumping out of the water to greet us. I am not exaggerating here. There were thousands of fish two or three deep crowding as close to us as they could get. I seriously began to think i was a fish god again until Patti pointed out they were doing it to anybody who was throwing them a few crumbs and I have to admit i was chucking pea biscuits at them.

I can’t remember if i have mentioned the peas so i am going to talk about them again. I have always thought peas have a rough deal in England. They have too sweet and delicate a flavour to be relegated to the status of mere vegetable as is the case in England. Really they deserve to be elevated to the level of fruits like the strawberry and served as dessert. It seems the Chinese get this as they use peas in a kind of dessert, as an ice cream flavouring and as an addition to biscuits when you fancy something different to chocolate. The pea biscuits here are delicious and we eat quite a lot of them – well i do – i am not so sure that Patti is as impressed.

So, we spent a little time feeding pea biscuits to crazy fish sitting on rocks that you could fry an egg on in a day that made you break into a sweat just by standing up. The temperature here is 39C. Bakingly hot. Patti is always going on about not having enough hot holidays – so i have been sneaking looks at her all day watching her gently melt into a pile of sweat and bad temper and i think this is hot enough even for her.

 We walked as slowly as possibly in the heat. A kind of balancing act between sweating too much and walking fast enough to qualify as walking as opposed to crawling and made our way around the historic water town visiting various museums, theatres, temples and 12th century merchants’ houses where i was impressed by two main things. The first being the general architecture. If only we had enough room in the back garden – i would build a Chinese style house there. The second being the money god in a merchant’s house where we spent several Yuan trying to toss coins into the middle of the coin shaped alter – i have to admit i didn’t succeed.

For dinner we wandered around a market area of the city and tried several types of the street food which mostly consisted of ‘meat’, heavily spiced and weird fruits i couldn’t name but were oddly sweet. The guys we were with wanted to eat in a restaurant, one of them is a veggie and the other one didn’t trust the hygiene of the street vendors – which i find odd as the little stores we ate at were probably as hygienic as the street cafe we went into. We sat with them and had a sushi plate to share as they ate. Ordering was a huge pantomime of pointing and nodding until the bemused waitress and helpful locals, who decided to try and help us get our order right, finally got the message and our dinner arrived. Eating out with Michael and Irfan is a bit like going for dinner with Felix and Oscar, if you remember the odd couple, and always great fun. After dinner we came back to the hotel to shower – again – and write the blog and sleep – Shanghai tomorrow.