Fuddland

Day-trips and the like.

This category is a subcategory of China.

Last month I was treated by my nursery school to join them on a daytrip to Shànghǎi Wild Animal Park. Having had a pretty bad experience with the zoo back in Běnxī, I was a little apprehensive, but thought that a modern, wealthy, progressive city such as Shànghǎi might be a little more clued-in animal-welfare-wise.

Can you guess what’s coming?

To be fair, the animal enclosures were of a decent quality: good sizes, and the animals [for the most part] looked to be in fairly good condition, which is surprising once you witness the general public’s complete disregard for any and all prominent notices [of which there were many] imploring them to not feed the animals.

It was simply amazing: children and adults alike, gleefully throwing bread to the red pandas and offering cake and biscuits to the ostriches, or trying to pet birds doing the best they could to avoid the out-stretched hands whilst tied to a perch by a six-inch chain.

One mother couldn’t seem to accept the fact that alligators generally don’t do very much apart from sit on rocks for most of the day, especially when the weather is on the chilly side, so she decided to lob a plastic bottle at them so they’d get up and do an elaborate five-minute song-and-dance routine for her precious son. Sadly for her, the bottle just bounced off their tough hide and they barely even raised a scaly eyebrow. [One of the teachers decided that they were not, in fact, real alligators, but statues, although if she could have been bothered to stand still and simply look at them for a few minutes, she would have seem them blink and move everso slightly.]

But all that was left in the dust by the grand finale: a 45-minute long animal show, featuring, amongst other things:

• an elephant performing acrobatics with two girls, being encouraged to stand on its hind legs through the use of a metal spike on a stick

• three monkeys on chains scurrying up and down poles

• a chimpanzee dressed as a shoe-shiner engaging in slapstick routine with his handler [who, for some reason, was dressed as a Frenchman]

• a bear riding a bicycle, and later being made to walk upright with cymbals strapped to its front paws, whilst two other bears [also upright] took part in a wedding ceremony, attended by the elephant, monkeys, a llama, and a zebra.

Still, at least: the kids were pretty cute; I got to see white tigers for the first time; and, most importantly, there were many fine examples of Chinglish on display, my favourite of which was in the stay-in-your-vehicle stage, and said,

In case of breakdown, please dial 61180113. In case of no communication equipment, please whistle for a while, our working staff will tow out your troubled car.

After the disappointment of Dīng Shān (丁山) and Zhānggōng Dòng (张公洞), I wanted to go somewhere I knew I’d enjoy, so I asked a few friends if they fancied taking a picnic lunch up to Hǔ Qiū (虎丘), Tiger Hill. To make the day extra special, we decided to journey there by boat along the canals — on my previous [solo] visit I simply took a cab — little did we know that even arranging a boat would be an adventure in itself.

Read the rest of “Tiger Hill — revisited”…

Just outside Dīng Shān (丁山) is a series of caves open to the public, the largest of which is Zhānggōng Dòng (张公洞), set in a small park with the usual offerings of ponds, rocks and winding pathways.

The caves would be a lovely place to spend some time exploring, admiring the stalactites and listening to the drip-drip-drip of water echoing around the chambers as you ascend — you actually climb a hill, but from the inside — except they’ve been ruined [in my opinion] by obtrusive, unsubtle lighting, bathing everything in either yellow strip lighting running along the celing, or the same bright green spotlights that they’ve lit the trees with in every city I’ve visited here. [The fact that everything was well-lit made a mockery of the torch I’d hired at the cave entrance.] Fake cement columns have been dotted here and there for no good reason, and stairs have either been added or simply carved out of the existing rock.

I might still have been able to enjoy the caves despite these things, if not for the fact that I continually felt the urge to keep moving due to the other visitors deciding it was more fun to ignore the natural sights and instead yell, “Hello!” at me at every given opportunity. Now I’m all for being friendly, but when the same group of people follow me around, shouting and asking to take my photo, I tend to get a bit annoyed, so I chose to sod foreign relations and curtly refuse their requests. My apologies if this has set the Anglo-Sino relationship back at all.

Walking back some of the way to Dīng Shān, I saw a lot of independent pottery works: each house seemed to have its own small-scale clay-pit in the back garden, where they’re been digging out the clay for years, bringing it back to their personal kiln and working and firing it into the various types of pots that lined the front of the house. Most of them also had hundreds of bonsai trees in the garden — I couldn’t tell if they were for sale or simply decorative — as well as small watermelon plantations [as in, small plantations, I’m sure the watermelons were on their way to being watermelon-sized], or whatever the correct term for an area growing grapes is [a grapery?].

In part prompted by a brief visit by my mother, I’ve visited a number of popular tourist sites in Sūzhōu (苏州) over the last few weeks, which made a welcome change from the usual routine.

Tiger Hill

Hǔ Qiū (虎丘), Tiger Hill is probably Sūzhōu’s most famous attraction: a park just outside the old city, it’s like a wilder, much larger version of the classical private gardens, well worth visiting more than once. Its central feature is the pagoda, unusual due to being constructed of stone rather than wood, and with a pronounced lean. Built in the tenth century, it predates Italy’s Leaning Tower of Pisa by a couple of hundred years, although it didn’t start leaning until around four hundred years ago. The signage nearby claims that the pagoda is taller than the Tower of Pisa, but some cursory fact-checking reveals this not to be the case.

In the 1950s an effort to stabalise the tower by pumping concrete into the soil revealed several artifacts, including a casket containing Buddhist scriptures confirming the construction date. Legend has it that an ancient king is buried beneath the pagoda along with thousands of swords, but the precarious lean means that excavating underneath it is impossible without destroying the tower.

As well as the pagoda, there are acres of space to explore, and I happily spent a good few hours just wandering around, not minding one bit when I occasionally found that I’d doubled-back on myself. The bamboo forest was particularly lovely — very peaceful, I could happily sit in the central gazebo with a good book for a couple of years.

The Master of the Nets

So-ironically-named because the government official who used it as his residence after retiring declared he’d rather be a fisherman than a bureaucrat, however bad — Wǎngshī Yuán (网市园), Master of the Nets Garden is one of the smaller gardens but still gives the illusion of being spacious thanks to some clever layout and the strategic use of a single mirror.

Sūzhōu No.1 Silk Factory

This exhibition-factory has a fully-working silk production line, demonstrating the whole process from raising silk worms to weaving complex patterns. The most interesting thing to learn was that ten percent of all cocoons contain two worms, their threads so intertwined they are impossible to unravel; instead, these are pulled apart and layered — thousands upon thousands of layers — to form beautifully soft, light yet warm quilts.