Day 6
Breakfast buffet @ Grand Metro Park Hotel in Suzhou. The dining area is very nice and spacious. The decor is very fancy and the seats are super comfy.
What I ate for breakfast. Oily food, but the Chinese donuts tasted pretty good.
The very first stop of the day, "Silk World" in Suzhou.
The tour-guide would tell you that you will now go to a place where you will learn how silk is produced. HOHOHO. Later on this tour-guide will become an "EXPERT" in silk. When you enter the building, you will notice some workers performing the tasks in the manufacturing of silk. Since this is not an actual silk factory, these workers are just performers.
For the inside of comforters.
They will demonstrate how a 10"x10" piece of silk yarn? can be stretched to 200cmx200cm. After the demonstration, the manager would lead you to the shopping area for silk comforters and pillows. It is here that the tourguide, manager and some sales ladies swarm over you and pressure you to buy the comforters indicating that you will NOT get better quality and better pricing than this. My mother wanted to buy the comforters and I was very much against it. I've been telling her this is a tourist trap, but my mother just kept on telling me to shut up. I was beyond peeved. She doesn't understand that if she buys two comforters, it would already take up 1 whole luggage. The girls behind the counter were very unprofessional, they were on their phones chatting and surfing the web. I can see the tourguide pressuring some of our members into buying the comforters and other products saying she can knock off this much money if they buy this and this. Wow, who knew she had the power to give discounts on merchandises.
Afterwords, the tourguide shooed us upstairs to do some more shopping, but this time it was for clothing and accessories. My mother wanted to buy something not because she likes it but because she doesn't want to leave empty handed. The sales lady at the stores won't stop following us, we were just looking at scarves and the sales lady asked my mother do you like this, how about this. In the end, my mother chose a $210RMB = ~$38 CND silk scarf (which is probably not even real silk). She told me that she will wear it all the time, but this whole year she had not even wore it once, even in the winter. I did not buy anything for myself during the tour, not because there's nothing that I like, but because we are only taken to tourist areas where everything is tripled in price.
Just before heading out to Hangzhou, the bus experienced a technical problem. The door would not close, so we had to drive to an auto repair shop.We ended up in a back-alley auto repair shop and the area is very different compared to the rest of Suzhou that we had been to. This was a nice experience, the real lives of people in Suzhou and the environment in which they live. Here's a man eating lunch outside his house. One of our tour member had to go to the washroom so she went to the autoshop to use a squatting one. She came back and said it was the nastiest toilet ever. Everybody was too afraid to go.
After what seemed like an hour, we started our journey to Hangzhou. A couple of hours on the bus and we arrived at the next attraction "Cruise on the West Lake."
This the the boat that we got on. Apparently, it couldn't fit two groups so people had to squeeze together.
Too bad we didn't get on those kind of boats :(
That temple looks like the ones in Japan. So pretty.
This is the place that we stopped at on the other side. A garden. It feels like we been to a lot of gardens during this tour...
Viewing fish at Flower Pond.
Peony garden
Wedding photos, I took some sneaky pictures. heh heh heh. That guy caught me, but what can he do? I'm on the other side of the pond- would probably take him ~5-10 minutes to run after me.
The last shopping area for the day was a tea shop in Mei Jia Wu Village.This village produces tea from scratch.
You can see hills of tea leaves.
Many statues of teapots.
Not sure who this dude is.
Once we got to the village, the tour-guide (a new one) gave a brief history on the village and how tea are made. She then brought us to a room where another a sales lady talked about tea leaves. I have no idea what she was blabbering about since it was in Mandarin. They gave us one tea leaf each to try, and they also served us tea.
At the end of the presentation, she tried to sell us tea leaves. I can tell you it was not cheap at all. It was too expensive, even though we wanted to buy some for my dad. They claimed that the tea is carefully controlled and selected and it is authentic since they are grown right here. We were eager escape the room, but it feels like we were locked in since there were salespeople blocking the door, preventing us from escaping. After a while, I think maybe 1 or 2 people bought some tea and we were able to get out. I was holding in my urine for hours! Once outside, we rushed to the washroom and good thing there was an actual sitting toilet. yay!
To exit the village you have to go through their souvenir shop. They sell over-priced souvenirs. A Chinese fan that you can find for a dollar in the dollar store cost 50-100RMB here. And the sales people are always following you non-stop, quite peeving actually.
After dinner, we went to watch a dancing performance "Night of the West Lake." The opening had some kungfu and then there was some dancing and acrobatics.
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