The Last of Suzhou

Nǐ hǎo and welcome to the last post about Suzhou, my home for the past year and a bit. We started working in March 2013 and our contracts officially ended on March 1st 2014. However, because our school is dreadfully disorganised, even with us giving them more than 2 months official notice that we would be leaving, they were still unable to hire replacement teachers in time for our departure. This means that, had we left on March 1st, our classes would be without teachers and either have to be cancelled, or dumped onto the already busy schedules of our co-workers. As it happened, we had already paid our rent for part of the month and decided to stay in Suzhou until the end of March to get the most out of our money. By that point we’d decided to do some volunteering and had a position set up in April, so we had time to kill until then. In the end, Sasha extended his contract for a few weeks at full time, and I carried on a couple of my classes on a part time basis (I was so sick of that place there was no way I’d extend full time!) This helped out our co-workers because it bought the managers a bit more time to find a replacement or two, and it also meant that we had a bit of money coming in for those few weeks while we were waiting to go travelling.
Our last week in Suzhou was a mad flurry of social occasions, packing and cleaning. I found it much harder leaving Suzhou than Hangzhou – this year I’ve made more friends and, though work has been a bit of a pain at times, I’ve got on with most of my colleagues and enjoyed my working life. I’ve also had a gorgeous apartment and enjoyed living with Sasha so, all in all, it’s been a pretty nice life this year and not easy to walk away from. Much of the month where I was just working part time I spent visiting friends and saying goodbye.
We made time in our last week for a final ‘garden day’. There were a few more gardens on the Suzhou list that we hadn’t ticked off yet (there are so many gardens in Suzhou you’d need a long time to see them all) so we had one last outing and squeezed in as many gardens as we could. We started our day by going to see ‘the man’ by the Master of Nets garden – we’d promised him one last visit to buy all those things we’ve been wanting all year, like the massive scroll painting that will make an entire wall feature. From there it was a short walk along Shi Quan Jie and down Ren Min Lu to the Surging Waves Pavilion.
This was a lovely little garden, cheap entrance and very quiet within. There were some rockeries that you could clamber over and a picturesque pond filled with fish. One room at the back of the garden housed a collection of antique furniture, all made of dark, glossy wood that was bent and gnarled as if the tree had grown into that shape naturally. Some of the doorframes through different parts of the garden were cut into ornamental shapes like curved vases that a more portly person would need to slip through sideways.

From there we caught a bus straight up Ren Min Lu to the Joyous Garden. This tranquil paradise is right in the middle of the city. One minute we were walking along a bustling main road, with diggers and workmen pulling up the tarmac and barriers blocking off construction next to the busy subway entrance, then one turn to the left, not even down an alley, just right there at the road side, was the garden. The welcoming courtyard was adorned in glass lanterns boasting bright red tassels, framing the circular doorway into the garden.
The garden itself was quite big, with a large pond in the middle and rockeries all around it. Blossoms in light pink were shedding petals that gathered and swirled together on the surface of the glassy waters. The ‘Facing Wall Pavilion’ was of particular interest as it had a large, outdoor mirror (which I’ve seen before in other gardens). The inscription read ‘On the north of (the) pavilion is a mirror inlaid in the wall, reflecting a wide view of the landscape. It carries deep connotations of the Zen Buddhism because it is associated with Dharma meditating for 10 years facing the wall.’ I thought that having a mirror on the wall would kinda defeat the object of staring at a wall for 10 years, but apparently not.

Leaving the Joyous Garden we walked along East Gan Jiang Road to the Twin Pagodas. These identical towers were built by some students in honour of their favourite teacher, and are still in good condition, despite leaning quite noticeably due to collapsed foundations. They were mustard yellow with details done in a sort of puce colour, with the roof edges at each level flung out and pointing towards the sky. This place wasn’t really a garden as such – aside from the pagodas there was little else to see there. I saw a few glass display cases holding some carved stones, like decorative tiles and parts of pillars. By this point in the day I was quite glad there was little to see – three gardens in one day are more than enough!

Suzhou – what a city. My favourite place in China, without a doubt. It is modern enough to buy cheese in the supermarket and go out to Starbucks and Pizza Hut (if you’re so inclined) but also old enough to enjoy protected areas like Ping Jiang Lu and visit gardens and pagodas that have been around since when Suzhou was little more than a village. It’s a big place (with a population of about 6 million in the city) but it never feels stifling – I think that’s due to the different areas: the centre of town (where you find shopping malls but also gardens and older areas), SND – Suzhou New District (my neck of the woods – the buildings are older and it feels like a ‘lived in’ area) and SIP – Suzhou Industrial Park (the new part of the city, stuffed full of sky-scrapers and expensive restaurants and foreigners). There is always somewhere to go and something to see in Suzhou, you never get bored. The climate there is also good – not too cold in the winter, not too warm in the summer, just right. I was sad to leave it and look forward to returning, in many years’ time, to see what parts of the city survive as it keeps expanding and growing.
So where am I now? Well, as I said, we set up a position to do some volunteering for a few weeks before our grand travels start. We had planned to work at a hostel in the same area of China we had been living in – the notice for it on Workaway (a volunteering website) sounded quite good, but when we actually spoke to the person who ran it, we weren’t so keen! Workaway has strict rules about how much work a volunteer can be made to do each day, and the hotel easily broke those rules, asking volunteers to contribute working hours of 8 or more hours a day, and work for 6 days a week. So, quite sensibly, we declined that offer.
Where we ended up is Shan Dong Province, which is higher than Suzhou but lower than Beijing. The weather is a little cooler up there – it had just started warming up in Suzhou when we left so we were disappointed to return to the temperatures of early Spring – and we were based near Yan Tai, which is a city on the sea. Actually, we thought we’d be in Yan Tai, not near it (we were actually in this tiny little town called Nan Shan which is so small it basically doesn’t exist) but I’ll save that story for my next post! We were there for a month volunteering and are now travelling in Western China. I’ve been almost 2 months trying to get onto Blogger to post this, but soon I’ll have time to catch up and update you as to my voluntary work and travelling. So until next time, zàijiàn!
P.S. to finish off, some pictures of my lovely Suzhou students :D