Tuesday and Wednesday were pretty uneventful days. I even forgot my camera for both lunchs because we were so busy at the plant. Wednesday I was at work until 8:15 PM, and when I made it back to the hotel, all I felt like doing was sleeping. And so sleep I did!
Yesterday, the 13th was pretty sweet. There were items we needed to buy at work to get some the ball rolling on a couple of issues and so our project group got together and went out to the "manufacturing street market". This place was really interesting. Most of the time, if you want to buy equipment in the states for manufacturing purposes, you have to buy through a supplier. It's rare to be able to get a lot of equipment directly at a store. But in Suzhou? Very common. They had everything. Surface Mount electronics reels of resistors, soldering stations, even CNC machines. 1 foot long tweezers? No problem. ESD safe airpens? Got that in check. IR temperature gauges? It's in stock! Within two hours we had bagged a good quantity of goodies.
Our next stop was to buy a Lizard cage. You'd be interested to know what for, but if I told you... Id have to... well it's just boring. But trying to find the lizard cage brought up to an animal/plant market in Suzhou. Swalling how bad the smell was, there was just about everything anyone would want from a pet store. Fish, insects, reptiles, rabbits, cats, dogs. You name it. I'm not so sure about how they treat the animals after talking with Roger. That's actually still in my head.
After work, Roger took me to the old style section of Suzhou. There was a massive stone gate with a small fort type building on top leading into the "town". From afar I thought the gate was a castle, but he indicated that it was more along the lines of a structure from which to have a vantage point with archers. Nonetheless it was bad-ass and totally epically lit.
Dinner before anything else! Never make decisions on an empty stomach (or so they say). For dinner, we stop at a traditional Chinese restaurant and luckily the menu has pictures so I can take a look at some of the items. We end up ordering:
Vegetables (that look like meat). Supposedly there's a shrine in China where monks can make any single type of meat dish and you would never guess it's made of veggies. The taste, texture, all of it identical. I'll have to look into it, I'd like to try that. Sure beats those Tofu burger things in the States.
A meat dish. Beef, Chicken Liver, Tofu, some type of skin, and underneath is good ol' tripe. I actually stay away from this dish.
Beef an Vegetables. I think this might be the closest thing I've had resembling American Chinese food yet. After all this consumation over the past week, I've seen just how irrelated American style and Chinese style Chinese cooking is. This sauce was slightly close to brown sauce in the states, but was still tastier and lighter. I feel like they cook with maple syrup in the states.
Fresh local fish. Suzhou has a great lake next to it and as such is famous for it's fresh fish. This one (not sure of the name), was very delightful and had small sections of bacon placed between the slices to add flavor. With a bit of tongue twisting to remove the bones (which were plentiful near the tail), the fish was consumed quickly.
After dinner, we headed to the old town streets. The old town was really a nice experience. I felt like everything really slowed down for once during my stay in Suzhou. The bustling network of plants and shops connected by scooters and suicide taxi drivers seemed to melt away and a much more comfortable relaxed feeling overtook me. The lighting was spectacular. We even passed by a pavillion with a live band playing traditional music. We stopped for a bit to listen.
The shops along the street had many traditional crafts. A type of glass blowing where they deposit metal inside really took my eye. There was some serious sandalwood carving in one area. I found a carving going for 280,000 RMB (over $20K). The detail, wood, and setting were wonderful. Preying Mantis stalking another insect.
Before we knew it, it was around 9:45 PM. Roger and I decided to call it an earlier night with how much walking we had done during the day. Plus, Roger was not playing his long awaited Expansion pack for World of Warcraft. And I could tell he wanted to.
Was in bed by 10:30 and snoozing in no time.
A bientot!
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