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Thanks to May holiday I was lucky enough to have a long weekend starting from Friday and ending on Monday, back to work on Tuesday. We were invited to spend the weekend with our friends, an Israeli couple who live in Suzhou. They live at a beautiful complex called ” Join in the Grand” next door to the Suzhou Crown Plaza.

We spent Friday touring by ourselves. We went to the old city and walked around. The old city runs along a long canal and consists of many little alleyways with small shops. Near the entrance it was full of tourists, mostly Chinese, but as we ventured deeper and deeper it became more and more like the true old towns of China.

From there we went to the Suzhou museum and walked up and down the museum walking street. From there we had a late lunch at TGI Fridays and called it a day.

I discovered the true beauty of Suzhou the next day when we went for a walk along the lake. The Chinese have come up with some genius ideas and making this lake is deffinately one of them. After the erection of the SIP – the Suzhou Industrial Park, where many well knows companies, mostly hi-tech, built factories and facilities, many engineers from China and abroad moved to Suzhou. This brought a lot of money into the city which was invested wisely by the local government in many things one of them being this lake.

The lake is surrounded by bridges, boardwalks and restaurants and is extremely pleasant for day or evening walks. When it gets dark all the surroundings of the lake are lit up by different color neon lights and it is a beautiful sight.

Every night on weekends at 8 and 9 pm sharp  there is a 30 minute public fountain show with music, fire and fireworks. Here’s a short video:

Suzhou Public Water fountain Show

 This show was unbelievable and makes the Las Vegas fountain shows seem amateur. Even more amazing were the crowds that gather and push and shove to get a closer view of the show. Moreover, they all feel it necessary to record the entire show on their cellphones.

Besides the face that our Jonathan wasn’t to keen on sleeping anywhere out of his bed in Shanghai and therefore didn’t let us get much shuteye, we enjoyed Suzhou very much. If I could choose where I wanted to live in China, Suzhou would be one of my top picks. It is by far one of China’s most beautiful cities.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 5th, 2010 at 00:35 and is filed under Mandarin Chinese. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.