Day 2 - Shanghai to Suzhou

After a lovely relaxing first night at the Shanghai Hotel, we were collected in the morning by our hostess, Giselle, and her parents....whose names we were never actually told. They don't speak english and we don't speak Mandarin, so names were not really a priority. We headed to Suzhou, which, as well as being a well known tourist spot because of it's lovely gardens, it is also a mecca for brides-to-be. The drive was a good 2 hours, most of which was at a snails pace, and the other time was spent speeding at about 140km in pouring rain! Suzhou is quite old and looks very rundown, but it is not as polluted as Shanghai. They have interesting traffic lights that are worth a mention. They have a countdown on them so you know how much longer you have to wait before the light turns green or red. It's quite clever, except that no-one actually seems to pay any attention to the colour of the light and they just drive around each other. My first glimpses in the dress shops were quite frightening....lots of very frou-frou gowns that looked like they had been inspired by haute couture designs and combined with their own ideas. As well as very wearable dresses, there were also interesting creations you would only expect to see on a Paris catwalk. I started to wonder whether buying my dress here was such a good idea. After a couple of hours of looking through shop after shop in alley after alley, I had found everything I wanted to order - wedding dress, 2 bridesmaids dresses in different styles, 2 flower girl dresses, and 2 evening dresses for me. Not bad going for a couple of hours work! I could not possibly have done that without the help of a translater.

Next was lunch. When we had first arrived in Suzhou, a girl followed us for a while wanting us to eat at her restaurant. When we were ready to eat, she was still there, so we followed her and were taken to a separate room upstairs at the restaurant. Everything seemed fine. We ordered and food started to come...and it kept coming...and coming...and coming! We discovered that each dish we ordered was actually 3 dishes. Giselle's father complained and when he was not given a satisfactory outcome, he got very angry and went downstairs to have quite a heated argument with the management. Giselle went after him to keep things under control, followed by her mother. John and I sat there looking at each other, looking at the food going cold on the table and decided the only thing we could do was dig in! It was an interesting first public meal to say the least.

Back to serious business...shopping! We went back to certain stores and placed orders for the dresses then headed off to our hotel. Our hosts left us to stay with relatives. After checking into the hotel, we both were exhausted anad hungry and thirsty. What??? No mini bar??? And apparently no room service either. Or internet. So back on with the shoes and off to town we went in search of food and pinjian...one of the only words in mandarin I know....beer! The amazing thing is, despite our absolute fatigue, we still managed to shop. We found a department store with a massive shoe sale. We were in heaven! John and I bought 2 pairs of shoes each!

The bed was hard as a rock, but we were so exhausted it did it's job!