If you’re considering a family trip to China, put Suzhou on your must-see list. This traditional city is just far enough off the tourist track to feel like a bona fide discovery, yet its modern infrastructure makes a visit with kids easy.
Suzhou is one of China’s loveliest urban locations. Situated on a series of picturesque canals, it has earned the moniker The Venice of Asia. A boat ride along its waterways is a definite kid pleaser.
Famed for its gardens, time spent in Suzhou presents the chance to commune with nature within the limits of a bustling city. Thanks to strategic planting techniques, something brilliant is nearly always in bloom, except in the depths of winter.
If your family likes art and handicrafts, Suzhou is respected for its colorful embroidery and high quality silk. Visit a silk factory and embroidery studio and watch the skilled artists at work.
Though this city of approximately 10 million inhabitants is by no means small, it is quite manageable and practically peaceful when compared to massive Shanghai and Beijing. You can get here in a brisk 30 minutes from Shanghai via high-speed train. Read on to get a glimpse of its treasures and you’ll see why you’ll want to make the trip.
The Venice of the East
A gondola-style boat ride along Suzhou’s urban canals should be one of your first activities. Even more delightful is a visit to one of Suzhou’s nearby water towns. Tongli is an ancient water town where time seems to have stood still. Spend an afternoon here and you’ll get a glimpse of what China was like before lightening-paced growth and development charged in and urbanized much of the country. It presents a quieter, gentler China that harks back to yesteryear. The absence of cars adds to the serene atmosphere. Take a wooden boat down the waterways festooned with red lanterns and stroll the shady cobblestone streets that meander alongside the canals. Here’s a preview in this brief video:
How Does Your Suzhou Garden Grow?
Cities and towns around the globe have gardens, but nine of Suzhou’s are designated UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Classical Chinese gardens strive to create miniature landscapes that highlight the delicate balance between man and nature, and Suzhou’s unique gardens take this yin and yang philosophy to the next level. Each elegant garden is a combination of four elements: rocks, water, trees and plants and pavilions. Don’t expect wild, rough and tumble spaces: these gardens are manicured and precisely landscaped. Once the sanctuaries of the aristocracy alone, locals now flock to these fragrant, public wonders. A visit to one of the gardens is great people watching. You’ll see multi-generational families taking weekend strolls, enjoying the beauty and each other’s company. The pathways are paved, so it’s a stroller-friendly activity.
The Humble Administrator’s Garden
Suzhou is home to dozens of gardens, so the biggest tourist hazard is garden-overload. You could spend your days exploring many of them, but the walled Humble Administrator’s Garden is an Oasis no visitor should skip. It was built in 1509 during the Ming Dynasty (1368?1644). In traditional Suzhou style, water is featured throughout, with gently winding streams, pastoral duck-filled ponds and a serene lotus pool. The natural landscape of pine forests, green lawns, dense bamboo and flowering trees are photo-worthy. Manmade structures, such as elegant bridges and iconic moon gates, are sprinkled throughout. Rock formations big and small complete the four essential elements.
The Leaning Tower of Suzhou?
Pisa, Italy is not the only city with a leaning tower. Tiger Hill is where you will find China’s Leaning Tower, the Tiger Hill Pagoda. Built during the Northern Song Dynasty (959?961), this seven?story structure has leant 359′ to the northwest for the past 400 hundred years. It is an off-center vision that is fun to see.
You will also find and eye-catching collection of Bonsai trees at Tiger Hill. The ancient art of bonsai tree growing originated in China. It’s fun to watch the gardeners lovingly pamper these diminutive delights.
Get Crafty
China is said to have two needles: One for acupuncture and the other for embroidery. Suzhou or “Su” embroidery is one of the oldest embroidery techniques in the world with origins stretching back more than 2,000 years. Its style is characterized by brightly colored silk embroidered with well?proportioned representations of almost any pastoral scene, person, animal, or object. At the Embroidery Institute, we got a first-hand look at the creative process. The talented craftswomen (they are all women) who work here spend hundreds of painstaking hours meticulously creating each uncluttered work of art.
Watch the Worms at a Silk Factory
China is synonymous with silk and Suzhou’s silk gained a worldwide reputation from as early as the Tang and Song dynasties (618?1279). What makes the local silk so special? Suzhou is surrounded by mulberry trees and mulberry leaves are silkworms preferred food. The well nourished silkworms produce a very high quality silk. Visit a silk factory and watch the technical process from cocoon to finished product. We were allowed to hold the live worms and pull the silk into a paper-thin sheath, so it was quite hands-on. The gift shop sells a range of quality silk products.
Ride the Tallest Ferris Wheel in Asia
As traditional as this city is, Suzhou Industrial Park — or SIP — is the epicenter of modern?day Suzhou. For families, the big attraction in this part of town is the tallest Ferris wheel in Asia. Take a ride and be rewarded with a birds-eye view of the city. If you visit SIP on Friday or Saturday evening, try and be there by 8 pm, when a 30-minute waterscape show will delight even jaded tweens.
Where to Stay in Suzhou
We stayed at the luxurious Shangri?La Hotel. Its central location, excellent service and English speaking staff helped to make our stay extremely comfortable. The breakfast buffet was a morning treat and the Olympic-sized indoor pool was a great diversion from sightseeing. Rooms are large, clean and modern.
Tips Before You Go
Note that public bathrooms vary in quality and cleanliness. It is a wise to carry toilet paper with you.
Throngs of international tourists are not as common in Suzhou as they are in Shanghai and Beijing, so your presence may attract attention. Enjoy your sudden celebrity. Redheads seem to be the most in-demand for photos, so they deserve fair warning.
For additional information, visit TravelToSuzhou.com.
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I poured my heart and soul into this!!! Hope you people enjoy! =)
Wow, this is wonderful! You are so lucky to have gotten this opportunity. You looked absolutely gorgeous at the show and the red carpet. Thanks for sharing this, it really made me smile. I used to have the biggest crush on Joe Jonas.. hahah!
Amazing trip!
I hope that my story will inspire and enrich your lives; even if it doesn’t touch you as much as it has touched me. I hope that this will be passed on and that people will take a few minutes just to read what I had to say and try to be in the mind of these children. Try to change your day and see your house, your possessions, your income, and those many great things that you possess and find a way to share them with others. We all need a wakeup call sometimes, a message to straighten us out and look at the life we were given. I hope to go back next year to repeat the experience all over again and try to change myself even more, I love those children and I love their compassion and selflessness. Words can’t fully express what I felt or what I witnessed but my words are clear, these people see the world much differently than us, they treat possessions differently and they know how to work as a community.
This is about when my family and I took a trip down to Central Florida for our Family Vacation.
Hope you enjoy!
This was a vacation that taught me a lot about how my religion is organzied and gave me more appreciation for it.
I will never forget the time I spent in Germany.
I hope you guys enjoyed my story!
Best luck.
South Africa is this amazing country that not only is beautiful for its animals and scenery but for its people and for its ability to overcome the greatest oppression: apartheid, the discrimination of the majority. I am so glad I was given the gift of traveling to South Africa. It is an experience I will never forget!
It was a great trip!
I hope everyone who takes the time to read The Awakening enjoys learning about my bus ride to reality.
My typed essay about my vacation in Vietnam. It seem poorly written or should I say typed :\
Bryan Gray Europe Tour.
My vacation to Panama became suprisingly meaningful, contrary to what I had initially expected.
Thank you
This was a fun and yet difficult project i truely have enjoyed sharing my vaction with you.
Mahalo,
Have you ever been to Maine? What did you like best?
This is such an amazing story and essay!!
Their were many more memories from this trip that impacted me as much as the ones that were included, but I just didnt have enough room. So, I shortened it and tried to write the best description of the trip without exceeding the word limit. But the trip was, indeed, as remarkable as I said it was.
Washington is a really nice place. It has many museums and historical places. it also has very delicious foods. Chinatown was my favorite place to eat.
Thank you for this scholarship opportunity!
IB York was a great experience, and a great opportunity to explore new ideas and innovations
So now I head to college without my classmates but i will always have this wonderful experience.
🙂
This is one of my many travel adventure stories from my trip to Europe in the beginning of the summer. Besides Prague, I traveled to Berlin, Munuch, and Nuremberg in Germany, Innsbruck in Austria, Liechtenstein, Switzerland, and France. My favorite place was Switzerland, but my favorite story was the one I shared. I hope you enoy reading it as much as i enjoyed experiencing it!
I want everyone to be able to expericence something like I did.:) Everyone desevers happines!
I hope you enjoyed my travel blog and I hope you plan to take your mom to the Peaks of Otter Lodge for the best brunch you will ever eat. For more information click on this link:
http://www.peaksofotter.com/
Finished product. I love PERU!
This eye-opening opportunity has shaped my conviction toward making change and developing the community. It is a great pleasure to meet all those Leadership Award Honorees and other49 ANNpower fellows from 24 states in the U.S. I will continue to make change and build a dynamic community, excursively to ethnic, social, political gender aspects of advantage, as my milestone to become a great leader!
This eye-opening opportunity marks the culmination of my junior year. I am so glad to meet all those wonderful women leaders from all around the world and 49 other ANNpower fellows from other 24 states. I will continue to explore the world and make change with eagerness and confident, and overcoming disadvantage exclusively toward the milestone of a great leader!
I hope everyone enjoys my trip to Catalina and Ensenada!
This trip was the best trip regarding family time. It is unforgettable.
To see more photography from the trip, check out my photojournal: http://www.facebook.com/pages/A-Photojournal-of-My-Grecian-Travels/213497035367351.
What a testimony!! Thanks for posting. You don't know how impactful this is. Let Jesus keep using you for His glory. 😉
I was saved in August of 2009. I was in my parents's room and we all prayed for m, becuase I was tired of not having a desire for God. There I gave my life to Him and let Him be my Lord. I already excepted Him as Savior, but though it was a license to sin. Thatt day, though I wanted to repent of my sin and let God lead me. Lord and Savior go hand-in-hand. My life is changed. Now I have convictions and am learning so much about seeking God, because He is seeking me. It's awesome to live in the security and hope of knowing I will see Him one day in heaven. I am so glad He lives in me, because my goodness outside of Him is nothing. I don't know what I would do without Him.
Jesus used that park to bring you and your dad back together. How beautiful 🙂
Each place I go, I leave a peice of myself. And everyplace I go leaves a peice of itself in me. The people I have met along the way have changed me in the deepest way. Their lives have touched mine and I can never return to life as was usual. Likewise, my life has touched many along the way. It is my hope that nobody I meet along the way may return to life as was their usual. This is how each thead pulls coth and fabric together as we the people of the world cover it like a quilt. We must double stitch each peice so not to fall apart or leave holes. We need one another.
To whoever reading this, I am the person wearing blue shirt and white shorts, sligtly leaning on the panda bear statue.
My essay that talks about my experience traveling to Lima, Peru aims toward encouraging others who are not too familiar with it to visit and appreciate the fun life changing experience they're gauranteed to get.
What a great contest! Hope to see lots of terrific teen travel stories here!
It was difficult for me to type a 600 word blog about an amazing experience I had in the month of July. It was also difficult for me to choose certain pictures from the ones that I have chosen, so I uploaded the pictures of my time at NeiHu elementary school. I really wished that I could have used more sightseeing photos, but unfortunately, those were too big to upload.
This trip was amazing and it also tested who I am becoming as a person. Seeing the woman in Central Park living out her dream, to the woman selling fruit throughout the day; New York is made of dreamers and hardworking people. I loved it. Hope I get the chance to go back.
This was an amazing experience! I am so grateful for everything it taught me!!
From research, I believe the ice cream shop was called Eisdiele Eddy. More information about the exchange program can be found at http://www.aatg.org/study-trip-faq as well as at the bottom of the page at http://www.aatg.org/NGE-awards.
These Picutures are both of my own creation (one being an acrylic painting). When I took this picture at the western wall in Israel, the man in the photo was crying his heart out wearing a tattered down bath robe, I thought it would make for an intersting picture. So it did, it also inspired to me to create a painting in which I showed the world what I believe he really is. A man who is down on his luck but seems to still find peace in his life.
My sophomore year of high school I went to Donner Pass in California with a group called The Woods Project (www.thewoodsproject.org) . I had to apply to go , I was really anxious and scared that I wasn’t going to get. When I got my acceptance letter I was excited. I was also nervous because I had never been away from home for more than a week and The Woods project was going to last for two weeks. I had chosen to go to Donner Pass because I wanted to experience something new. I was going to go backpacking for one week and hiking the other. I had never gone backpacking before. When I told my friends that I was going backpacking they started to laugh because I am the smallest girl in my whole school and they didn’t think I was going to make it. Getting that response from my friends made me super scared of going to the trip. I thought I was going to die while backpacking!
My dad went to go drop me off at the airport and then he left. I was already scared and freaking out at the fact that he had just left me there and I did not know anybody! . I got in the plane to California and I was already regretting going on the trip. I was going to be with complete strangers for two weeks! When we got to California we all got split .There were three groups going to different places, one to Yosemite, another to Marine Headlines and then mine, to Donner Pass. I got in a van and that’s where I met the people who I was going to spend two weeks with. We were in that van for hours! When we finally got to our cabin we had to go up a hill to get to the door.
The first cabin we stayed in was named Clair Tappan Lodge. It was really nice . It was made out of wood, had a pool table, personal chef, jacuzzi and hot water in the showers. I loved it there! Too bad it only lasted for two days then it was time to go backpacking. They gave us our backpacking materials. I tried on the backpack and almost fell over. My backpacking week had started. We went up and down mountains, through rivers and lakes, and I thought we were never going to set up our tents. When it started to get dark we finally started cooking. The food we had was not good at all. We couldn’t bring a lot of food because of the bears and other animals. My second day of backpacking went better than the first. Everybody in my group started to know each other better and soon we became really close. We would sing while backpacking to make time pass faster and at night we didn’t want to sleep because we would play games. While backpacking I got to experience many things I hadn’t before. Even though I was the smallest girl going backpacking I was always the leader of the line because of my stamina.
When our backpacking week ended it was time to hike. I had gotten the hardest part of the trip over with so I knew hiking was going to be a piece of cake. We would hike in the morning and hanged out at night. It was the best experience I had ever had! When it was time to go back home I didn’t want to because I knew I would miss my friends.
To watch my video go to : http://youtu.be/FLd7W71EnyU
My experience as a first time camper.
i hope i win