Day 4: Garden, Ice Cream and Intro to Haggling

Today we visited the largest garden in Suzhou. The Humble Administrator’s garden was built in 1509 and was famous for its massive bonsai collection. They had some 500 bonsai trees or something crazy like that, including one that was 400 years old and a handful that were over 100 years old. Except by the time they get to be a couple hundred years old they’ve grown so big it’s hard to call them mini trees anymore. It also had a bunch of wonky rock hills. Man are they into their wonky rocks, and there were tiny little hidden stairways and we got to climb over them and under them and it was great fun.

Bonsai collection at Humble Administrator's Garden

It was raining out that day, like it did many days in the first two weeks. Our guide told us the wise man appreciates the rain. As we were walking along the lake Ryan commented how cool the water droplits were when they hit the water. I told him he should have been the wise man sitting by the lake composing haikus. He was quick to retort that haikus were a Japanese thing. But then he came up with his water haiku.

“Watching the water
Doesn’t he have stuff to do
What a big loser.”

We left the garden and left Suzhou. It was a two and a half hour drive to the next city Hanzhou. We took a break half way at a rest stop. At least, they called it a rest stop but there was like a whole mall in there. It was obvious I wasn’t the only one suffering from sugar deficit, there was an ice cream stand and, even though it was only a few degrees above freezing, at least half of our group flocked to that ice cream stand. They did well that day.

When we got to Hangzhou we got to visit some markets after dinner. Gump introduced us to haggling. He said all the stands here have different prices, they have the local price and the tourist price, and the tourist price is about 100 times what they actually paid so never pay what they ask for. Always haggle them down, if they say 100yuan you offer them 50 and then you’ll be able to get them to a better price. We wandered around the markets for about an hour. It was hard to fully enjoy them with the rain, but they had some interesting things. 

Ryan and I only had one watch with us (in this technological age I always use my phone to tell time and my phone wasn't going to work in China!) and with so many deadlines every day we decided to buy a cheap pocket watch for the other person. We started looking at some and the lady said 65yuan. Or rather she typed the number into her calculator. Turns out my minimal effort to learn Chinese before I left was completely useless. Even the stand owners who couldn’t speak English at least had calculators to negotiate with. We haggled her down to 45yuan for the watch and we walked away feeling pretty good with ourselves. After all, 45yuan is only about $8 and we got a really awesome pocket watch! How silly we were, if we had been in the same place at the end of our trip we probably could have gotten that watch for 10yuan. Oh well.