On the Road Again

Me Ken and David set off Saturday morning for a quick trip down to Wuzhen, a river town known for its old section and for being the birthplace and setting for a famous Chinese author. Wuzhen is close enough that it's certainly possible to go on a weekend, but it's also pretty difficult. It takes maybe 7 hours door to door and you have to do that both days, so the story of this trip is basically the story of the traveling as much as the being there. We took a first but to Jiaxing which is most of the way toward our destination. This bus was your standard Greyhound type bus with maybe the exception of the nice gentlemen who sat in front of us high out of his mind sipping on some sort of opiate.

It was pretty cold out but he had his window open for some reason and his head pretty much out of it. After some people asking for him to close it got no noticeable response the bus driver actually came back moved his head inside and partially closed the window. Now it was still incredibly windy in the back so Ken tapped his should to try and motion for him to close the window but he wasn't able to figure out who had tapped his should despite looking around and went back to intensely staring at the crack in the window. Ken said he was taking sips out of some container and must be high, but I thought he had to be drunk. Eventually though I saw that the container was way too small to put any real alcohol in and contained some weird green liquid which must be some sort of opiate. Ken eventually just almost totally shut his window, I don't think he noticed.

Out bus let us off in some really random part of Jiaxing and we stopped to have some lunch. I wasn't that hungry since I had eaten a big breakfast earlier so I just wanted to order some small spring rolls I saw on the menu. The people there kept insisting that one ridiculous and I should order two. It looked in the picture like there was three to an order but I figured that it must just be one per order so I got two. When they came it was three per order so I ended up with six. They just couldn't get over that I might want something smaller then a normal sized lunch. We walked to a close by bus station and got the next ticket to Wuzhen which wasn't for two hours so we walked around for a while. Ken had something called a Flat Stanley, a cut out of a person you send some one and they take picture with it and send it back, so he was looking for some good pictures. We took one near a motor vehicle; I wouldn't call it a car that looked like a cardboard box with wheels stick out of it. The owner of it came up while we were taking the picture but thought the whole thing was pretty funny.

We finally got on a bus for Wuzhen I was surprised to find that the bus was basically an old city bus. I do mean old to some of the seat were in bad condition and the whole things smelled like fish, though in China that could mean someone was carrying fish with them. We got seats but they just kept putting people on until they had to bring out benches and stools for them to sit on so every available inch of the foot was covered in people or bags or both. This bus rumbled on for about and hour until we arrived in Wuzhen. Immediately off the bus we were surrounded by people trying to sell us rides or take us to their hotel but we just decided to walk. One really persistent woman followed us for quite a while and when we stopped in a park was talking to Dave and convinced him that she could get us a good deal on a hotel so we got in her car like device and went on with her. Here's a video of the ride:

She did eventually find us a hotel and a really good marked down price about 60 RMB each or about $8 a night. We didn't have to pay her either though I'm sure she gets a kick back from the hotel. A lot of the hotel had hourly rates so the joke was that maybe we got such a good deal since it was only for an hour and they thought we were a couple of homosexuals in for a quick romp. Our room was nice with three beds heating and a real toilet, though there were some holes in the wall covered by a page of a magazine. We put our stuff down and went to find the old section of the city. We weren’t sure where to go so we got in the bicycle rickshaws and I thought going up a small hill the old guy pulling me and Ken was going to have a heart attack. The place we were going was actually really close but by the time we got there it was already getting dark. We walked around for a while and took some pictures but soon decided to get something to eat. Ken and Dave wanted to go to the smallest most rustic looking place and soon we sat down. Here's a video about ordering dinner:

On the video I mention it would be funny if this meal was actually more expensive then the nice restaurants. In China so far everyone has been so nice to me and so honest about money that I let my guard down and didn't think to ask before hand how much everything in the meal would cost. The meal was pretty good, not great, and we figured it would be something like 45 total, they tired to charge us 120. That's really the crew the foreigner’s price. We may be new in China but we didn't just fall of the truck. We tried to argue a little but lacked the language so we called up Steve who argued with them in Chinese for a few minutes until the lowered the price to 80 which is still too much but probably as good as we were going to get. We tried to find to find someone in the town to complain to but it probably would have been to little avail since I'm not sure this place really has an address and if it does we didn't know it.

On Sunday we went back to the old section of the city and got a boat ride around. The city definitely has a nice old look to it and while there were quite a few tourists, none American, there probably would have been a ton more in season. We walked around for a while looking at the old streets and buildings. We went to the Ancient Bed Museum, but all the beds looked the same to me. We saw this old guy hanging out in a corner of the street who we think the city might pay to stand there and Ken got a picture of him holding Flat Stanley. The guy got a big kick out of it as did all the Chinese tourists. We saw some bendy impossible looking pole that people climb as a spectacle but since it was drizzling there was no show. The town itself is nice and the streets in the old sections are impossibly narrow. There was another section of the town but you had to pay again to enter and it was getting late so we decided to head back. We got aboard the old school bus back to Jiaxing. We made it about half way before smoke starting coming out of the side and we had to pull over at a gas station. Dave explains the rest:

We did eventually flag down another bus and got to Jiaxing but there were no buses to Changzhou from what we later learned was only one of two bus stations in Jiaxing. So we got a bus to Wuxi which is close to Changzhou. Once there we got another bus back arriving back at the hotel at about 6pm. I have a lot of photos up form the trip on flickr and I'm happy to have mom and dad back so someone will click on the ads, opps I'm not supposed to say that.