Suzhou

Suzhou is my second destination for my China trip. We usually eat in the hotel restaurants a lot, because they're usually big, nice, and have enough room for all the guests. I met Cindy’s dad and he's really nice. So anyways, we always eat with about 5-8 people. Last night we ate in a hotel restaurant with friends of Cindy’s dad and I could understand a lot of the conversation, and sometimes when they talk about me haha. I'm picking it up pretty quickly. The only thing I'm still stuck on is reading the Chinese signs, advertisements, and businesses because you can't tell how to pronounce a word by seeing the character. You have to know the "pinyin" or the romanized pronunciation guide. So 龙 is said "Long" and means "dragon". There's no way to tell how to say it from the chinese character. But the speaking and listening is coming to me quickly.
I'm going to take a video of some of the driving here, because most people in the US would not believe me. It's unbelievable haha.
So the touring- we woke up and Cindy said we were having a western style breakfast. Actually it was eastern but had bacon and fried eggs haha. After that Cindy and I went to the Administrators Private Garden. Another ancient garden. Suzhou is known for all the ancient garden estates here. Some of them are really old too. They have people tend to the gardens to keep them looking nice for tourists. It was a really beautiful and relaxing place, with a couple different buildings/houses. The big plant in the main picture is called "o" and the root is delicious!
We were pretty tired after this (lack of sleep and working out). So we went back for lunch and met Cindy’s dad. After we ate we checked out and Cindy’s dad's driver drove us to Wuxi. It's about an hour from Suzhou and it's on the way to Nanjing. It has a newly built Buddhist Temple attraction with an enormous Golden Palace and statue. We toured through the palace where you had to wear shoe covers, then saw a play/movie about Buddha. The palace was enormous, it must've cost 10's of millions at least. Everything was decorated and it looked beautiful I couldn't understand any of it because of the accent the narrator used, but I'm ok with that haha.

When we finished that we went to meet another of Cindy’s dad's friends and his wife. The man runs a tv station and his wife is one of the anchors. The man was really interested that I play drums because he majored in music at college. His wife spoke English really well so she's the first person I got to know. It's funny she said she only speaks a little English, but she understood everything I said. In America, people like to say, "oh I speak 3 languages" and then you find out they only know phrases. People outside the US are too modest about it.

This was probably the most exotic meal we had yet. We had a type of bamboo root, pork, shrimp, fish, snake soup, and a bunch of other things. The snake was actually pretty good.

An interesting thing Chinese people do is that they never take out the bones of a fish, even the small ones, so you have to find them yourself. Also, they bring out the whole fish, skin and all, just dead and chopped into slices. But they always leave the head.

After dinner we drove the rest of the way to Nanjing, the third stop for my China tour. I fell asleep in the car since it was a two hour drive. Now I stayed the night in a hotel about 5 minutes away from Cindy’s house. They said today can be a rest day if I want since I was so tired yesterday. But I slept well. I have to go get breakfast now in the hotel before it closes. I'll tell you how Nanjing is later :)