A Brief (some would not say brief enough) Stop in Suzhou

me holding a silkworm
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Thursday May 22, once we arrived in Suzhou, we first took a tour of the area surrounding the Leaning Pagoda.  The Pagoda is built on top of a hill and half of the pagoda was built on soil while the other half was built on rock.  It now leans kind of like that famous building in Italy...  Anyhow, there is an emperor's tomb hidden somewhere beneath the pagoda (the pagoda was built about 500 years after the emperor's death by some monks) and legend has it that there is a collection of several thousand swords in his tomb.  We saw what we thought might be an enterance, and thought it would be fitting if a group of Purdue Students would be the ones to discover the tomb.  Then we reconsidered because we didn't want to knock over the pagoda.  In front of the pagoda there was a sword-testing stone where the emperor would make sure that the swords were sharp enough by cutting through a huge boulder.  Also in front of his tomb was a large flat rock that was called 1000 Men Rock.  The emperor did not want the architects of his tomb to live after they completed construction so that the treasure he was buried with would be safe.  All 1000 architects and builders of his tomb were killed just after its completion.  We also went to a silk factory and the Net Mater Garden.  At the silk factory I held a silkworm and touched a silkworm cocoon.  It's really neat because the silkworms make a cocoon out of one very long, very thin strand of silk.  The one thread can be up to a mile long.  In the evening we had a welcoming dinner by the Suzhou Tourism Bureau.  One of the hosts got very drunk by individually toasting each one of us individually, and some more than once.  It was a delicious dinner and I tried shark fin, which is by far my most favorite new dish that I have tried since being in China.

Net Mater Garden
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Friday, May 23 was REALLY HOT and REALLY SUNNY!  The Suzhou Tourism Bureau did not want us to leave so they prepared an activity for us.  They called it the Imperial Examinations, which was a test to see which of us could embroider our name the best into a fan.  They meant well, but some of our students were very upset to be arriving in Shanghai later than originally anticipated.  I found it very funny that while we were embroidering our fans, a lot of people gathered around us and started taking pictures of us.  Some tried to get us to take pictures with them but security pushed them away.  We were literally an American zoo exhibit.  My fan was AWESOME, but I didn't win...  haha.... on to Shanghai...