Theresa Goes Shopping Downtown

 I've mentioned before that our official address is in the Suzhou Industrial Park...or the SIP.  The SIP has been around for about 10 to 15 years.   Just to the West of SIP is the city of Suzhou, or what the locals refer to as "downtown".   Suzhou City has been around for 1000 to 1500 years... or even several thousand years longer, depending on how you choose to measure. 

Living in SIP is like living in Houston or Indianapolis or any other Western city.  But the true China is only a 15 minute cab ride away, in downtown Suzhou.

 Last Friday, Theresa and a group from the Expats' Association went on a shopping trip down town.   These photos show a couple of stops at the meat market and at the spice market.  Do you need a little pig snout to flavor that recipe?  Well then, you can find it in downtown Suzhou.   And the spice market is filled with bags of the good stuff that Colombus was looking for when he set out in 1492.  Theresa says that the smells in the spice market are overwhelming.  Breathing is difficult if you have a good set of lungs.  Do not go if you are asthmatic.

 The scenery out and about is also different to the SIP.  In SIP we have sky scrapers.  Downtown, they have pagodas.