Adventures in Suzhou!

I’ve mentioned how Maddie really knows how to travel. She’s getting quite flexible in her old age! Today she managed a two hour car ride to Suzhou which is a canal town northwest of Shanghai. Maddie checked us into the Sheraton (hey, it’s all about the airline miles!) which is a gorgeous hotel that is built with pagodas and authentic Chinese architecture. We then traveled via taxi to the Yang Yang Shui Jiao Guan restaurant which serves the cheapest and best dumplings ever… well, next to Ms. Zhou’s of course! Maddie chowed on dumplings filled with beef/coriander, shrimp, and other mystery meats. The only struggle up to this point was the lack of a sit down toilet! She used to be really go at going anywhere, but she’s getting very opinionated in her old age and refuses to go in a squat toilet no matter how clean it is. Thank goodness you can distract her from almost anything if you just ask her to write her name. She wrote her name by herself for the first time a few weeks ago and now she just loves to show it off!

After a trip to the DVD shop to purchase a new movie, Maddie took us to the Suzhou No. 1 Silk Factory. She was able to pick up silk worm cocoons and shake them to hear the worms inside. The coolest part for Maddie was watching the women work the machine that pulled the silk off of the cocoons to make reels of silk thread. Somewhere between 8-10 cocoons had their threads started and then were pulled through a single hole in the machine up the spinning reels. What’s funny is that we went there to watch the workers, but the workers spent much of their time watching Maddie! In another part of the factory, Maddie watched women soak the cocoons in water and then tear them open to take the worms out. The women then stretched the single cocoon into a 8” x 11” sheet. The sheets were dried and then were made several layers thick. Four other women then took the dried sheets and pulled them out so that they were as big as a king size bed. The pulled several sheets to make duvets of varying thickness. It was amazing to watch! To top it off, we could walk out of the factory with a silk filled king size duvet for about 600 RMB… that’s less than $100!

After a short rest back at the hotel, we ventured out again to the Quanjude Roast Duck Restaurant. You know you’ve found a good place when you walk in and you are the only foreigners there! The meal started off with a man filling our team pots with what looked like an oil can with a very, very, very long spout. The tea mugs had dried flowers in them so he added hot water to make a very earthy tasting tea. Maddie has recently become a tea addict and she couldn’t get enough of it! Barbara and I ordered for the table so we ordered the traditional Beijing duck. Beijing duck is made my filled the ducks with air so that the skin detaches from the meat. Then the air is sucked out of the duck to bring the skin back in. The whole duck is then roasted and brought to the table so that it can be carved right in front of you. You then take the carved duck and place it into a rice tortilla, put thinly sliced radishes inside, and top it off with a sweet Hoisin sauce. WOW!!! Maddie had one but ate mostly the baby bok choy greens!! She made it back to the hotel and had an “after dinner drink” of apple juice before heading off to bed. She’s out cold after her day of adventures in Suzhou!