The Monkey Kings 美猴王

In our last week in Suzhou, right before Spring Festival, the monkey royalty was visited by my queen’s mother and sister. We went to the Master of the Nets Garden (网师园) and Shan Tang Street (山塘街), both beautiful places, took countless photos and left for Fuzhou.

We spent Spring Festival in Fuzhou, the Monkey Queen’s hometown, listening to firecrackers (sometimes at 4 in the morning and usually giving me a headache), giving money (红包) to kids and relaxing. Next, we are off to Yunnan, and after that, Canada once again.

Having left Suzhou, I am discontinuing this blog. If you still want to hear from me, you can follow me on my old blog, menso.wordpress.com. I may still use this blog for things such as business, putting in links and advertisements, but otherwise, the tales of the Monkey Kings are at an end. Thank you for reading.

There is something happening in Suzhou. When we came to Suzhou seven months ago, when we came back from work we would usually see one or two old people begging at the bus stop. They are annoying, especially to foreigners (being white is being loaded, of course), but they do not do any harm. We work around one of the main centres of Suzhou, Guan Qian Street (观前街东) and a lot of Chinese people give beggars money there. And if my economics is right, that is the reason there are so many more beggars there now.

It seems strange to think that, in just half a year, there would be an explosion in begging. There were two or three beggars before; now it is difficult to count them. They have spread out: at first one would come to the bus stop and beg and that was it; now they are on both sides of the street, some sitting, some looking scruffy but happy, some looking pathetic, some with children. At the intersection near the train station one used to see one beggar walking among cars with a cup, knocking on windows. Now there are several old men and women carrying infants. Where did all these people come from? Where are their families? And how much money are they really making?

There are even some who look like students and who write something in chalk on the sidewalk, then sit, looking pathetic, in front of what they wrote. They do not look poor or maltreated, they simply sit there with their heads down. Another blogger, who was passing through Suzhou, noticed the phenomenon as well.

I could not find any information about beggars in Suzhou except from government controlled newspapers but my guess is that they are being drawn by kindly but ignorant locals and tourists. They are made to feel sorry for those who put on a sad face and, because they are nouveau riche, the locals feel guilty and give them things. My guess is that these beggars make as much or more than some of the hard working people on bicycles carrying wood and metal or the ones with wheelbarrows carrying garbage around.

What to do? Well I certainly do not like the idea that the police should arrest them or push them around. Unfortunately, being the easiest solution it is probably the one for which the government will opt. But I suggest that the people simply stop giving money to them. When you do not give beggars money, they find other ways to survive. Perhaps there could be some kind of donation-funded homeless shelters. If we could make people realise that there are better charities to give to, they might be tempted to try them. The problem is that, in China, you could not possibly start such a charity without the big hand of the government in it. They would insist on funding and controlling it, and turning it political. And if you think that is good, perhaps you should ask why this very powerful government has not actually eliminated poverty.

Do not expect a real solution any time soon. Until it comes, I will give my money to charities that I trust and not to people on the street I do not.

Today Joy 女王 and Chris 猴王 went to Taihu Lake (太湖) and West Mountain Island (西山岛) and ate jumping shrimp.

First we went to a long, wooden pier that leads out over the lake. You can see big schools of tiny fish among the seaweed in the calm lake water.

For lunch, we drove by a number of 农家, farmer’s homes that are partly converted into restaurants. There were about six of them by the road, and being such a quiet day, one farmer’s wife was outside each house frantically beckoning us to her restaurant. We ate big platefuls of delicious seafood, including one dish of shrimp that were still alive! They were cooked but not so cooked that they actually died. The shrimp were semi transparent and soaked in a liqueur that drugged them long enough that they more or less stopped moving after a few minutes. At first of course I was wary, but they turned out to taste really good.

I also ate 螺, which is a kind of snail I ate several times at Joy’s house in Fujian. They don’t have a lot of taste but they come in a really good sauce. To eat them, you take a toothpick, stick it in and slowly pull the snail out of its spiral shell. If you are skilled enough and in a hurry you can eat about ten in a minute. At that rate it would take you an hour to fill up on them.

After lunch, we went to Shigong Hill (石宫山), a park by the lake with a small Buddhist temple and a playground. We went in the temple and saw the four god kings that you see when you go to most Buddhist temples in China, and big Buddha and his big belly. In the yard was a number of stumps for those training in kung fu to step on. You are supposed to close your eyes and balance or walk from one to another. I could do it a little but I think I need more practice. The playground had old swings and some rope things that are hard to cross but worth the exercise.

And on the way home, we looked at some expensive villas that are for rent and for sale. Some of them are empty and can be rented by the night, so we thought it would be a great idea to rent one for Christmas and have our friends come for a party. We will ask our friends (contact me if you want to come!) and have a big Christmas party at Taihu! 好兴奋啊！

Zhouzhuang is a town outside Suzhou. I hesitate to call it a tourist town but the tourist spots were all we saw. We went there for the day and saw this charming little old town and had a great time.

Monkey royalty Chris and Joy went with apes Ivy, Sharrif and Chris (from China, England and England) to Zhouzhuang. If you have ever been to Shantangjie (山塘街, you have a good idea what Zhouzhuang is like. It is mostly narrow, cobbled streets with little shops on either side, and canals running through the town. The canals apparently form the character 井, which means a well (although that is presumably incidental).

The town is sprinkled with attractions like big houses for lords, parks, a daoist temple and, of course, the canals. In case you have not been to Suzhou, it has canals running in each direction through it, running alongside main streets and necessitating bridges everywhere. It is my favourite part of living in Suzhou, in fact. And in Zhouzhuang, the canals are even more obvious.

They are full of boats waiting to take tourists, but they are organised so that not everyone is yelling at you to go with them. We went through the town on a boat that rocked perilously left and right as we moved. The old man rowing was singing in the local dialect, which some of us didn’t like but I loved. He asked for a tip for the song and even though, for some reason, there was a sign saying we should not give him tips, I handed him ten kuai (a dollar and a half). He raised two fingers, asking for twenty kuai, and I laughed and said no. He kept smiling anyway.

The boat ride was my favourite part of the day. It was peaceful, musical and interesting at the same time. We got to see the old walls of the houses lined up by the canal, the banks, the boats, the bridges and the birds.

Traveling to Zhouzhuang was a bit more expensive than last year’s trip to Qinhuangdao and Beidaihe (in Hebei, when we lived in Beijing), and it was quite touristy, which can be really annoying in China, but overall it was worth the time and money. We would also like to visit Tongli (同理), near Zhouzhuang and, so they say, far less touristy. Guess that’s our next stop!

苏州乐园很好玩！

The Monkey Kings, Monkey Queen and Monkey Friend Shelley went to Suzhou Amusement Park and had a great time. Here were the notable things we did. (*** is excellent, ** means fun and * was not really worth it.)

* 4D Cinema: Boring. A show (in Chinese) about the future, with some 3D effects. We thought, at 2kuai, it can’t be that bad. We were wrong.

* Video Tele-Combat: Disappointing. I usually never have expectations but the name made me think this would be some kind of sci fi fantasy video game, like laser tag, or light sabers, or the Back to the Future ride at Universal Studios. It’s a good amusement park, but it’s Suzhou, not Los Angeles. It is really just small spaceships that fly around that can supposedly kill each other on these really cheap video game screens. Don’t worry too much about this one unless you are with preschool children.

* Merry-go-round: The ladies enjoyed it but the Kings were only really there for the ladies. No surprises: it’s a merry-go-round.

* Small World: A copy of the It’s a Small World attraction at Disney World, minus the singing (which is a good thing) and minus the quality of craftsmanship, animation and size of Disney World. Again, it’s Suzhou, not Orlando, but I’m not sure what children would think of this ride because some of the dolls looked like vampires. And the dolls were a bit jumbled: there were Transformers next to Snow White and the dwarfs on one side, and ancient Chinese legends on the other.

** Cable Cars: Nice view, slow meander over the lake and forest up the hill. Not really worth it if you are not going to take the Gliders down (see below).

** Sky Shuttle: Like the cable cars, the Sky Shuttle rises really high over everything and you get a great view of the park and a lot of Suzhou, too. Too slow to be a ride but still worth it.

*** Bumper Cars: Bumper cars! I could have rode on them a hundred times (so we rode on them twice).

*** Flying Carousel: Better than I expected. You sit on swings that rise ten or twenty metres and go around pretty fast. You fly over a building and the lake, and I kept thinking I could leap off, James Bond style, and onto the roof.

*** Top Secret: You walk into a big, round room and stand in the middle. When the show starts, you see tv screens all around you–a video captured with a 360 degree camera plays for 10 minutes. The show was partly Imaxesque (slow pans over mountain tops) but mostly following the Tour de France in a car, all around the country. You could really get into the action, especially since the floor was moving with the camera. Fun and exciting.

*** Space Adventure: Like Space Mountain, just not as long. In case you have never been on Space Mountain, it is an indoor roller coaster, where everything is dark and you can’t see much in front of you, you just get scared.

*** Suspended Looping Coaster: The three stars is taking into account the 40kuai it cost us each to ride. This is what amusement parks are all about–the crazy, looping, flying, freaky rides like this. If you like roller coasters, take this one, and ride right in the front like we did. Watch your feet!

*** Gliders: We finished off the day with a ride on the hang gliders. It really did feel like we were flying. It was scary at first, but once you are past the forest and over the lake, you just glide like a falcon. Exhilarating.

We went on a sunny day when there were hardly any others there. It would have been fun even if there were big crowds, and there were almost no line ups. Great, great time had by all.

Last night the Monkey Kings and Queen went with our agent and friend, Maggie, to a Xinjiang restaurant called 北疆饭店. The food was delicious! Almost all of it was spicy, but not too spicy. The bread with meat in them (新疆肉夹馍 I guess!) were fantastic, and we also had a big stew of meat, potatoes, ginger, and other things. The only thing that was disappointing were the mutton skewers–good but only as good as you would get on the street. Either way, the food was good and so was the company.

We met some people from… well, hard to say where they were from, as they had lived all over the world. They had lived in Thailand for the past five years, in China for two years before that, and other places before that. We ate with a little white boy who, if you asked him his nationality, would say Thai. It was an interesting example of what AIESECers and others call nomads. They (eg. my mother) always say that moving around too much screws children up, but I asked them and they seemed quite well adjusted. You gain much flexibility and understanding of the world when you live in different places. We will do more research on the question before we have children and move all over.

After dinner we went to the Suzhou Sheraton, just across the street. The rich know how to travel! We expected it to be flashy, of course, but we did not realise quite what it would look like. The front is of a city wall and old Chinese pagoda. Inside is an art store full of beautiful paintings and other works, and a waterfall that changes colour. My favourite part, however, was the garden. It was rocks and grass, with a stream running through it, and a beautiful pool that I would have loved to swim in. Makes you want to get rich, doesn’t it?

The Kings of old went to Tai Lake, or Tai Hu Lake, whatever they call it. It is a big lake just down the highway west of Suzhou. We went with two of our students (Ken and Christina) and one of the tutors (Tracy, all pictured below) from Web. We got to drive through a couple of districts we had never seen before and saw mountains, rivers partly covered by grasses and lilies, and a long bridge across the lake that leads to the three big mountains. We didn’t climb them–not this time–but we did go to a restaurant overlooking the lake. To get there, you walk along winding paths with streamlets on either side full of goldfish. We even picked pomegranates. It was a great way to spend our day off. As soon as the weather cools down we will do more traveling around Suzhou.

Suzhou Web Toastmasters held its demo meeting on Saturday. Over forty people attended. Many people held formal roles like evaluator and timer, others gave speeches and everyone seemed enthusiastic about being a Toastmaster. Our meeting was a bigger success than I expected. Our volunteers did a great job and so did the speakers. If this is what we can expect from the club, we will be really successful.

So far, we need more people volunteering for this week’s meeting, including for giving speeches. The club, so far at least, is based entirely at Web English school, so all we need to do is ask our students and teachers if they would like to do anything at the next meeting.

And since it is at an English school, I would like to put extra emphasis on English learning. That would mean giving the grammarian (the person who helps us improve our English at each meeting) extra time to learn more things, and lowering the bar for membership to those who might not have very good English but are still anxious to be Toastmasters. I’m really looking forward to seeing what can happen in the months to come.

I just became a member of China Advanced Toastmasters, or CAT. Having completed the first Toastmasters manual by giving ten prepared speeches, I am a Competent Communicator in Toastmasters. CAT is a club designed for advanced speech makers, where you can get the feedback and the opportunities you need to clear all the last hurdles to your mastering public speaking. And an unexpected bonus was that it was the cheapest Toastmasters I’ve ever found.

I am also strongly considering starting a Toastmasters club at my company, Web International English in Suzhou. It would be a boon for the teachers and students. I’ll let you know how things develop.

The Monkey Kings and Queen went today to the Humble Administrator’s Garden (拙政园). We weren’t there long, as it started raining (as it does every day in Suzhou, it seems), but this was our day off and we were determined to see one of Suzhou 75,000 gardens. The administrator didn’t seem that humble.

The garden is very big and very beautiful. The walkways were all little, round stones. There are long, thin canals running through the garden, with walkways and bridges all around, some of which go down to the water. The canals are like long ponds, with big, fat goldfish and wide lily pads. The Monkey Queen said she used to use such lily pads as umbrellas when she was younger. Some of them could have covered her whole family!

The garden also has a small bonsai garden (彭景苑)–lots of little trees growing out of pots–an art gallery (like all Chinese tourist spots) and a lot of little pavilions. Though the price was high (70rmb ($10) each), and we cut our visit short for the rain, we felt it was worth it.