suzhou

Suzhou: The Oriental Venice

• Suzhou is a small town located in the center of the Yangtze Delta, in the south of Jiangsu Province and at the west of Shanghai . Since 42% area of the city is covered by water, including a vast number of ponds and streams, it is praised as the 'Oriental Venice'.

• We spend one day in this charming city walking around the river and we took a small boat with a "shifu" who is a local driver to visit all the canals of this small Venice. During our trip the driver was singing sometraditionnal suzhou songs and he told us that he was a collector of foreign money such as euros and dollars! We gave him a few euros and we learned later that this money is used to make some fake copy of those notes...

• The last thing we visited in the city of love made in China was a very beautiful garden with its lake, its trees in flowers and all the rocks that were compouding it. Its name is the Humble Administrator's Garden (拙政园/拙政園; Zhuōzhèng Yuán).  With more than 51000 m², it is the largest garden in Suzhou and is considered by some to be the finest garden in all of southern China. Zhuozheng Yuan, along with other classical gardens of Suzhou was proclaimed a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1977.