Soo…

Lots of pictures of Shanghai and Suzhou, and no explanations. How very un-me.  I’m not going to wax lyrical extensively about how much I love Shanghai; it’s just a really awesome city and for a cotton-clad, sweaty Guangdonger, it’s just another excuse to regain a little of that lost urbanite sophistication.  Let’s just say I spent a little too much money, er, I mean time, in Zara…

If you go to Shanghai you have to make sure to go to Dapuqiao.  It’s a little rabbits’ warren of shops, bars and artist studios that is not unlike a mixture of the Brighton Lanes and Camden Market.  We ate (and got a tad tipsy) at Kommune, which was nothing but pure awesomeness; owned by a tall lanky foreign guy in bother boots, knitted tank top and 80s New Order hair, it serves glorious smoothies in tall glass jars and is decked out in the old Socialist aesthetic – see my first gallery post for one of the wall murals.  I cannot wait to go back.  By the end of the holiday we’d decided rather firmly that Shanghai was the place to be, and made the obligatory slightly-drunk jokes about moving there.  Lol, what a financial disaster that would be, given our complete inability to control either our own, or each other’s, purse strings.  Still, life’s for living eh?  *books flight*

We went back to Suzhou for a couple of days and it was jolly interesting to see it in a completely different light – literally.  The first time I set eyes on it was in 2009, when Toni and I were travelling for the Spring Festival, freezing our nips off in minus 2 temperatures and pottering around the ancient canals and theatres wrapped up like Yettis, with obligatory fluffy mittens strung through the arms of our coats.  Hell yeah, old school.  There were very few people around, so the packed side-walks and buses that I encountered this time were a bit of a shock to the system.

Toni lives in the new Industrial Park, which is really clinically weirdly un-China.  It was built in partnership with the Singaporian government and you can tell immediately that they were involved.  Everyone drives properly, it’s completely clean, the air is significantly fresher than downtown, and there are loads of foreigners.  It is a bit in-the-middle-of-nowhere, but I was quite too busy stuffing my face into an enormous plate of American pancakes and maple syrup to focus on that sentiment.  So much nicer than anything in Guangzhou.  

The last gallery, by the way, is Tiger Hill Park in Suzhou old town.  It’s the resting place of an old ruler and the pagoda itself is China’s equivilent of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, which I found quite comical.  The park itself is gorgeous, and if you pop up your parasol to saunter under the nesting crane-filled canopies, then you can expect a thoroughly pleasant stroll.  It was a national holiday, so the place was packed, but it was still quite lovely.  I fell in love with one of the garden complexes; there were walls around it, but it was as though the woods outside were seeping and creeping through them to fill the inside of the garden with an extension of the beauty outside.  I immediately thought of the Chelsea Flower Show.  Maybe pseudo-Chinese garden design is worth a flutter…

Right, I’ll shut up now.  Tata.