Tongli is another small town that is about an hour by bus from Suzhou. I went there with a tour group. I realized that a lot of these groups don't take you to the best places. The first place we went to was the Garden of Self Reflection, something like that. I don't really remember it. After seeing the Humble Administrator's Garden yesterday, I think all the smaller gardens are nice, but just okay.
Lunch was done family style, which was nice because I got to try a lot of different dishes. Most Chinese restaurants are family style, so it's harder to eat as a single person. One of my favorite dishes is pork leg--apparently it's a specialty here. You see them in stores dedicated to cooking them, shining and glistening--just by looking you know that it's going to melt in your mouth. I normally wouldn't order it because it's unhealthy and a huge portion, but since it was part of the lunch, I ate it happily. I think people are always surprised at how much meat I can consume, because the table was looking at me while I pulled a huge glob of skin and fat and put it in my bowl. It's okay, let them judge. A nice granny helped spoon stuff onto my plate.
After lunch, we had free time. Being on these tours makes me feel a bit like I'm in school again. There are bathroom breaks, lunch breaks, and "free time." I think in general Chinese people respond well to instructions, so everyone proceeds to go on the bathroom break, and everyone returns on time to the bus, waiting patiently like a row of ducks. It's nice that it's so organized, we always leave on time. This also makes me anxious though, since I'm often one of the last ones to arrive and the tour guides have made it quite clear that they have already been paid and they will leave late comers behind.
Tongli is a bit bigger than Luzhi, but I still had a nice time wandering through the alleys and along the canals. I went to Genle tower, a Ming dynasty complex with 50 rooms or so, which was really interesting. I misunderstood the tour guide in chinese--there is a place called the Pearl tower, and it is named after a story about a guy who gave a tower covered in pearls as a dowry for his daughter's marriage. I thought that there actually would be a tower covered with pearls, but that's wasn't the case.
For dinner, a local Suzhou person showed me a nice restaurant, with chicken feet, turnips, some vegetable I don't know, crispy rice, and a sticky rice cake--some of my favorite foods. My grandpa was from Suzhou and he loved chicken feet, I didn't know that chicken feet is one of the specialties here.
Now I am on the bus to Hangzhou. These people take better care of their bus. The driver came on and sniffed and said, "someone is eating something. Don't you see the sign? No eating on my bus!"
When we stopped at a rest stop, the guide said, "go in and use the bathroom. You will notice that there is someone selling stinky tofu by the entrance. Stinky tofu is NOT allowed on the bus. I repeat, stinky tofu is NOT allowed on the bus, please eat it outside."
Of course, these two old ladies walked onto the bus with two bowls of stinky tofu, and the driver and guide both went nuts. "No! Put it in a bag and seal it!" And a bunch of other angry words in Chinese. "We said no stinky tofu!!"
The old ladies didn't seem to care that they were so upset, and just put it in a bag (probably opened it later anyway to eat). So funny.
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