Venice in China

As Harry decided to sleep the day away, Yuin and I went to what is described as the "Venice of China". Much to our surprise it was just that. We took a taxi ride about an hour out of the city to a town called Zhouzhuang.

We once again found ourselves a little confused about what to go see. We were at the entrance where tickets had to be purchased for entry. They had different levels of tickets which included different attractions and once again the attraction names were not accompanied by explanations. We went for the one that seemed to include the sights we would be interested in.

This town is basically like Venice. It's streets are water and small houses are on each side of the water with little paths along side. There was a plethora of little stores which all a seemed to be selling rice bombs (big bags worth to each native customer). Have I explained rice bombs? (I named them that). They are balls of extremely sticky rice mixed with either peanuts or meat, wrapped in leaves and steamed. Apparently they are the traditional food of the Dragon Boat Festival.

Anyhow there were a lot of cute stores selling homemade taffy, cookies, rice bombs and of course many touristy junk stores. The town itself was in its original form and from ancient China. Unfortunately a lot of the towns people were kicked out to allow tourism... but Yuin and I got lost and ended up away from all of the touristy stores and such. We were amongst old homes with pretty gardens in closed by gates or wall barriers all along the off shoots of the Yangtze river (which were the streets of water). It was really nice to wander around this part of the town which seemed to be extremely authentic and untouched. It was calm, pretty and a simple way of like.

The way we found this area was trying to follow the map we were given with the postings of the sights we had paid for. I feel redundant in saying this... but here is another great example of how the Chinese just get tourism WRONG. One sight was called something like: "Tour of Rice and Patty fields"... sounds cool, right?! It turned out to be a room which had people made of straw (yes think scare crows) to represent the field workers. They also had these same straw people sitting around a table in a replica kitchen depicting people eating rice. Yuin and I took many photos to accompany our many laughs and wonderment of what the hell they were thinking doing this crazy instillation.

We also went to the Jade and ancient pottery museum. No. They had some old clay pots with zero to none explanation and the Jade pieces were just little charms on string.

The other sights are not even worth mentioning. The charm of Zhouzhuang is just walking around. We avoided the over priced gondolas and just walked around as we built up an appetite. We tried to buy some Rice Bombs as there seemed to plenty around. For some strange reason no one would sell us any... we would soon find out why.

We got a taxi home and it was truly an enjoyable day. What was just as enjoyable as our walk through the less touristy area was the fact that we made it there and back. Yuin and I both don't speak Chinese and it felt amazing to venture out of the city and actually end up successfully where we wanted to go.

A funny mention about Yuin. As you may have guessed he is of Asian decent. He however is British to the fullest. He knows not a lick of Chinese, but by looks you would think he does... even the Chinese think so. Aggravating for Yuin, everyone tried to speak Chinese to him. It seemed to be most frustrating when we would try to get directions... seeing Yuin's repeatedly annoyed reactions were priceless.