Six months ago, with job offers from various cities throughout China, we had to choose a city that would serve as our "home". While floating in the middle of the South Pacific aboard our home Terrapin, we did the best we could at researching where we should settle. One quick internet search of Suzhou revealed pictures of a gorgeous city with several World Heritage Sites and only 10 million inhabitants (that's rural for China!) and we knew we had a winner!
We finally resisted the gravitational pull of our huge couch (for 4 years while living on our boat, a spacious couch is the one thing we really missed) and set out to see the sights in person. Our first tourist stop was Tiger Hill which boasts "The leaning tower of China".
Fun Fact: The famous pagoda at Tiger Hill is both older and taller than the Leaning tower of Pisa. Tiger Hill was amazing and far exceeded our expectations.
While most people probably take a water taxi the 2 miles from Tiger Hill to famous Shantang St. we chose to walk the road less traveled.
We absolutely loved seeing for ourselves places that we had seen only on the internet that led to our decision to move to Suzhou. Another Suzhou fun fact: Suzhou is comparably an affluent, educated, middle class city with a big tech sector and services industry. The city produces more lap top computers than any other place in the world, and the people have the third highest per capita income of large Chinese cities.
Suzhou is located on the Yangtze River and the Grand Canal (just one of many canals) runs north and south through it, helping Suzhou to live up to it's nickname. "Venice of the East."
It felt great to be back out exploring. Next weekend we take the train to Bejing and can't wait to see the Great Wall!
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