Suzhou is a city that is renowned for it’s gardens. There are various gardens to visit, nearly every one of them offering magnificent scenery and endless pleasant perspectives. So many impressive gardens can be found here that, by comparison, the so-called “Garden State” of New Jersey is made to look even worse; needless to say the film Garden State is still a piece of crap.
Anyway, Suzhou was the latest city in Jiangsu Province that I visited. I arrived by way of Wuxi–the city dubbed “Little Shanghai,” although only the “Little” portion of this moniker is appropriate. I took a fast train to reach Suzhou. This train from Wuxi put me in Suzhou in a mere twenty minutes. The same train is capable of running from Nanjing to Shanghai in just one hour. I’m considering this train route as a possible grand finale tour of southern Jiangsu Province (Nanjing-Wuxi-Suzhou-Shanghai-United States).
Focusing on Suzhou now, the place is also quite famous for canals. In fact, the canals are so prevelant that any walking, driving, cycling, or rickshaw route must accomodate for the numerous bridges and waterways. The canals are so much a part of daily life that they can even prove to be the ultimate end of one’s life. I draw on example here, for my friends Colm and Rachael had arrived in Suzhou one night ahead of me and they saw a grim sight in one of the canals upon arrival. They had just finished booking accomodations in a hostel in old Suzhou when they came across a crowd gathered by a nearby canal. They followed the curious eyes of the crowd to see a boat in the canal, and the drivers of the boat were in the process of pulling up a body from the water. I don’t want to begin to speculate on the morbid circumstances of this unfortunate fellow’s demise, but there are numerous ways to end up in one of the canals. The bridges are so many and the safety measures so few that any careless individual could easily lose their footing and fall into the water.
Rory Keane is an American-born teacher and writer who has logged nearly two years in China, and is working on another year-long stint in the Middle Kingdom. He writes about travel, sociopolitical issues, health, entertainment, and culture, among other topics.
