Zhouzhuang, The Venice of China!

So I meant for this post to go up at the beginning of the week, but I have been pretty busy getting everything ready for my move to Tianjin. I finally have a little bit of time to blog about my trip to Zhouzhuang 周庄. This beautiful little city is located just an hour away (by bus) from Shanghai. It's almost halfway between Shanghai and Suzhou.

We got up that morning at just past 6, ate breakfast and headed to the bus station (conveniently located at the Shanghai Stadium). After we purchased the bus tickets (which set us back 150RMB each, including entrance tickets to the city), we boarded our bus. The weather was pretty crappy that day (foggy and rainy), which is a shame when compared with the day before, but we told ourselves we wouldn't let that stop us from having a good time.

The bus dropped us off at the entrance to what we thought was the main part of the city and told us we needed to be back by 3pm if we wanted to get back to Shanghai. The new part looks like it just got done being constructed. Most of the buildings were vacant, and the town seemed deserted. We decided to follow the crowd which made its way over to the mansion compound of Shen Wansen. Shen Wansen was pretty famous in this region. He started as a poor farmer, but then became one of China's wealthiest people after he became successful in China's silk trade. It was a pretty nice compound that had a lot of interesting information about Mr. Shen's life.

Our next stop was this really cool place called CS Area. I really wish the weather would have been better that day because there would have been more people and we could have actually played this game. It was this really fancy laser tag game that reminded me of Counter Strike. There were replicas of all sorts of famous guns (ak47, m4, mp5, etc), and they even had a sniper rifle. The worker there was really nice and let us take some pictures with the gear and guns. After that we made our way back into the newly constructed part of the city.

By this time we were all wondering why we had gotten up so early only to be rained on in some mostly deserted really tiny city. So we decided to make our way across the street and follow some of the crowd that we lost after visiting the CS Area. This was what we came to see! It was beautiful! There were so many narrow, cobblestone alleyways that would end up along the water roads that connected this little village. All of the buildings looked old and original. After wondering around for a bit we managed to make it to a ticket check-point (it's a good thing we didn't throw away our tickets) and came across the main commercial street. There were hundreds of tiny shops selling everything from souvenirs to food. We stopped at a little art shop and all of us got suckered into buying some nice framed paintings (at what we thought were unbelievably cheap prices compared to Beijing). Don't get me wrong, they're all beautiful works of art. Had we just waited a few hours we would have come across more art shops that were a little bit harder to find with much cheaper prices.

So we wondered around the village snapping hundreds of photos and visiting all of the sites that we could find that I read about online before leaving for Shanghai. I think my favorite place was the beautiful Buddhist Temple located on the north side of the village. The scenery there was absolutely stunning! There was this beautiful pavilion on the middle of the lake and the two main buildings of the temple were also in the middle of the lake connected by arched bridges. It was a really serene atmosphere.

On our way back to the bus we stopped at a little restaurant to eat some chao mian (or chow mein to all of you back home). If anyone visits this place (which I highly recommend) please do NOT eat in a restaurant here. They are all spectacularly dirty (they even made some of the dirtier restaurants in Beijing seem like 5 star establishments). I ordered some chao mian with fried eggs, and Julian and Ludwig split a couple of other dishes. This proved to be my downfall as I got food poisoning later that evening. So, I would have to say aside from the food poisoning I got from the chao mian, Zhouzhuang was a pretty amazing city to visit!