Her Car - His Car

You don't see bumper stickers on cars in Europe.  Nor do you see female silhouettes on the mudflaps of European semi-trucks.  I figured that was an American thing....treating your vehicle as an extension of your personality.

It seems the Chinese also have that "thing" for their cars.  Not so many bumper stickers, though you see one from time to time.  What you really see a lot are the decals that stick on side panels and windows.  The most common one is "baby on board".  A couple of other examples are provided above. 

I'll let you know if I see one that says "God Bless Texas".

Central Park

The Suzhou Industrial Park is is planned city.  Twenty years ago, it didn't exist.  The city planners laid out the infrastructure of roads and utilities first.  Then the businesses and the residences followed in strictly choreographed construction projects.

 I've been told that this is fairly common in China.  Since the opening of the economy in the 1980s, hundreds of cities have been expanded or built out of whole cloth.  You see, China was (and still is) a predominantly rural country.  It's like the U.S. or Europe in the 1940s.  Urbanization is one of the top goals of the government.  By attracting the poor workers to the cities from the countryside, they can kill two birds with one stone.   The first bird is that urbanization creates concentrated pools of low-cost labor to attract foreign investment...and foreign investment generates tax income.  The second bird is that it is much easier for the government to provide social benefits such as medical care, housing assistance, and transportation to a dense, centralized population. 

 Anyway, like I said before, Suzhou Industrial Park is a planned city.  But the local folks all say that it an exceptional planned city because the city planners have stuck to the plan.  Most cities, they say, suffer because the bureaucrats responsible for the city plan turn over every few years or so.  When new ones come in, they all make changes to improve it.  Each change is a deviation from the original master plan and before long the city becomes a confused jumble.  SIP, however, has stubbornly stuck to it's original master plan.  There is logic to the organization of industrial and residential and public spaces.

You've seen those high-end subdivisions where the developer comes in and builds a nice little community of houses and a playground and a golf course and a shopping area?  Suzhou Industrial Park is like that.  Only it's bigger.   A lot bigger. 

One of the nice things that the city planners did was to carve out a few acres for Central Park.  Central Park is about halfway between the Old City of Suzhou and the recreation spaces on JinJi Lake.  It is an island of trees and water and bamboo groves and flower gardens in an ocean of concrete and asphalt. 

Above are a few photos of Central Park.   There is a bus stop to the North of the park and another to the South of the park.   Let me know if you need the numbers of the buses which visit there.

Bus Stop Mapping

I've taken up a new hobby.  I photograph bus stops.

You see, there are a lot of buses in Suzhou...tons of them.  And there seem to be a lot of people happily moving from place to place on them.  I wouldn't mind being one of those happy people.  Especially now that it is the rainy season and empty taxis have become scarcer than the sunshine. 

Unfortunately, all the bus route information is in Chinese.   (Or at least all that I've been able to find. )  No maps of the bus routes either.  You can find maps with the subway lines on them.  Too bad that the subway doesn't open for another year.

So now whenever we go any place, we take pictures of the nearby bus stops.   Then we go home and I plug the bus stops and the bus numbers into a big matrix.  (Actually, an Excel spreadsheet).   Slowly, with each added bus stop, a picture of the buses and their paths begins to emerge.

I don't expect to map the whole city - just the stops at the places where we most commonly go.   Besides, they change the bus routes from time to time. 

Tiger Hill

If they had barns in China, then the roofs and walls would be painted with "See Tiger Hill".  Tiger Hill is the Number 1 Sight to see in Suzhou.   That's what all the tourist maps say.  About 900 years ago, the poet Su Shi said, "It is a lifelong pity if having visited Suzhou you did not visit Tiger Hill.".  The local tourist board has been quoting him in their advertising ever since.


Don't get me wrong, Tiger Hill is a site well worth visiting.  Suzhou is known all over China as the city of historic gardens and Tiger Hill is the most famous of them all.  Tiger Hill is a knob of about 5 or so acres on the Northwest corner of old Suzhou City.  The country side around Suzhou is so dog-gone flat that any type of hill would merit tourist attraction status.  But Tiger Hill has history to go along with the geography.  The Tiger Hill Pagoda (shown above) dates back 1100 years or so.   The Suzhou Museum has artifacts from the site that date back two or three thousand years before that.

Surrounding the pagoda are lush forests and gardens and terraces and temples.  Many of the buildings are reconstructions, I'm sure. But still, the feeling of oriental mystique is strong and authentic.   The place reeks of history.   You can't help but feel a little knot in your stomach out of awe.

A scholar could probably spend a week exploring Tiger Hill.  For your average tourist, a half a day is more than enough.  There are bus loads of average tourists that come in the morning and afternoon.  Bus loads.  Tiger Hill in the morning and the Pearl Market in the afternoon.   Or maybe the Silk Factory in the morning and Tiger Hill in the afternoon.  Tourism is a great way to make a buck, whether your peddling Tiger Hill in China or Rock City in Tennessee.

The Tiger Hill pagoda is also known as the Leaning Tower of China.   Perhaps you can see why in the photo above.

And of course there is a bit of Buddism in the history.    

The Public Art of Suzhou

Suzhou, or at least the Suzhou Industrial Park, is salt and peppered with pieces of artwork in its public spaces.  Most of the art pieces are statues of people or animals or insects.  Other pieces are more difficult to recognize, which I guess makes them sculpture.

Here are a couple of examples.  Above are some park benches that sit outside the Cultural Center building.  (aka...the ""Bird's Nest").  Below is an example from Hubin Park on JinJi Lake.

I'll put up more examples from time to time.  There are a lot of these things around.  And they make for quick and easy blog posts when things are otherwise dull.

There Will Come Soft Rains...*

I think the rainy season has arrived.

Locals and expats alike have been telling us that June is a month of rains.  Not exactly the monsoons.  Not torrential downpours.   More like constant drizzle broken only by periods of heavy rain.  They call these the "plum rains" because they come at the time that the plum fruits ripen.

You'd think that people would look forward to the end of the plum rains.  They don't.  After the rainy season comes the two hottest months of summer.  Many of Theresa's expat friends are fleeing the country in July and August to escape the heat.   It's kind of unsettling to see them off... like waving goodbye to lifeboat passengers as they are lowered from the decks of the Titanic.

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* Regarding the title for this post....
It rained all day on Friday.  ALL day.  The rain drumming softly on the windows recalled this phrase "there will come soft rains".   It was the title of a short story in our high-school literature book.  Freshman or Sophomore year I think, though not sure.

So I stole it for the title of this post.  Pretentious, I know.   But it's my blog.

I had to do some internet searching to fill in the large gaps in memory.  Thankfully, Wikipedia is there to help offset the toll taken by the years.  I learned that the title of the short story, by Ray Bradbury, actually comes from a poem by Sara Teasdale.:

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pool singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white

These first four lines seem rather apt for the plum rains.  The remaining 8 lines of the poem get decidedly more depressing.  You can go HERE and enjoy it for yourself.

Again, it was the Ray Bradbury short story that we studied in literature class, not the poem.  The short story was written in 1950 and later became part of Bradbury's book The Martian Chronicles.   It's only 4 or 5 pages long.  I'm sure the textbook authors were attracted by it's brevity.  Also, this was back in 1975, the age of Aquarius and all that.   I suspect they thought it cutting edge for them to include a study in "Modern" science fiction in a high-school textbook. 

You can read Bradbury's story There Will Come Soft Rains by clicking on this link.   It's 35 years older than it was when I first read it.  Bradbury never saw the coming of digital electronics.  But if you forgive him that, his 1950 predictions of future technology are not too ridiculous.   I hope that I hold up as well when I am 61 years old.

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.