The Gentlemen Hotel

We are currently ensconced in the very swank Gentlemen Hotel in Suzhou. We got here because last night's hotel was not very swank. It was sort of the opposite. The bathroom had so much mildew my kids refused to take showers. The cot James was supposed to sleep in smelled so bad he slept with me. A young woman down the hall was awakened by a large rat falling out of the ceiling and onto the floor next to her bed. The rat then ran into her bathroom.

The staff seemed relatively unperturbed by this turn of events. The young woman said she thought it seemed that there were people running in the halls, but once the rat fell through the ceiling, she realized it was rats running. She and several other people left the hotel for another place to spend the night. The kids and I slept through the entire event.

However, today, after discussions between the university and the travel agency and the local tour guide, tonight we have lovely accommodations. We live in fear of where we'll wind up staying in Shanghai tomorrow night, but that's a problem for another day. Tonight, we are staying in a stately converted old fashioned British men's club, complete with card room.

Shuzhou is great. It is called the Venice of China, because of its historic use of canals. It has something like 130 bridges in the city spanning these little canals. It has lovely temples and the famous "Humble Administrator's Garden," which is a World Heritage Site consisting of 6 hectares of Zen garden. I also love the sound of Humble Administrator, and have decided that I'm going to see if my office will change my title.

Shuzhou is a historic city with low rise requirements, so although there has been plenty of construction, it is not full of high rise buildings. It has been a silk producing area for a couple of thousand years, and today we visited a silk factory and James and the other children were given silkworm cocoons, complete with dead moth. They told us that there is 1500 meters of silk in a single cocoon.

The food was spectacular today, I must have eaten 8 different kinds of vegetables, 2 kinds of fish, 3 kinds of tofu, 2 kinds of duck and watermelon. Maybe group tours aren't as bad as I thought.