The Lion Grove

What's this strange door?

Better go investigate.

Into the rock.

Through the rocks we found a pagoda and a large lotus pool.

We were in the Lion Grove Garden. The garden is famous for its rock maze. Some of the rocks look like lions. 

    

How many lions can you find in these rocks?

How many lions can you find in this picture? Rrrrraaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrr.

The maze was very complicated and besides who's never cheated in their life? 

It took me a long time to get up there and was terrifying to jump down so I hope every one saw that because I will not be doing it again.

 

For rocks they were quite comfortable.

After the lion garden and after a very "Chinese" bowl of noodles we went to the Lingering Garden with two friends Jason and Gina.

After walking in the regular garden we decided to check out the bonsai forest. They had lots of different sizes, shapes and varieties.

Notice how this one looks like floating land.

This one seems to be growing on a rock.

This one has a large chunk in it cut out.

 

This is a miniature mountain.

Different styles of bonsais have different meanings. Here is a website that explains about the meanings of bonsais. http://www.bonsaiexperience.com/TypesofBonsaiTrees.html

After we left the garden we got a taxi and headed to the train station.

 And now to top off today’s adventure ­with the red moon.

Here's Pam with just a couple more thoughts.

Chinese gardens are supposed to be tranquil settings for contemplating nature. But it's a little difficult to catch that spirit these days, because the gardens are very popular with tourists and tour groups. There are a lot of Chinese tourists everywhere. For many years, Chinese people weren't allowed to travel freely from place to place. They had to get permission to go anywhere. It would be like if we had to ask permission from the government to go visit New York or Charleston.

Anyway, because Chinese people weren't allowed to travel, a lot of them never got to see their own country. Now that they are allowed to move around more, they're all eager to see the famous sights, such as the Suzhou gardens. A lot of people come in tour groups, like the group of old men in red caps we saw at the Lion Grove garden.

One thing you get used to in China is signs in odd English. I don't like to make too much fun of them, since I certainly couldn't make signs in Chinese, but I thought these two, which we encountered at the Lingering Garden, would be good vocabulary builders. Usually you can figure out how the mistakes got made, as in "It is forbidden to remove photographs," but these are something of a mystery. What do you think might have happened? What do the big words really mean?

If you'd like some real-world experience with the challenges of translation, you could visit the Google translator at www.translate.google.com and ask it to translate an English sentence into a language that someone in the class speaks, such as Spanish or Vietnamese. Then you could try it in reverse. It's often pretty funny.

The Suzhou Teahouse

Here we were in Suzhou, China's most loved garden paradise. We sat in a tea house across the river from our lovely hotel drinking fine assortments of awesome tea. Suzhou is a water town near a big lake just outside Shanghai. There are lots of canals, like in Venice, running under some of China's oldest stone bridges. The town is more than 1,500 years old and it's famous for the gardens. I'll write more about the gardens later. 

Staring across the canal I observed the scene with a journal (freshly bought homemade leather and yellow paper) a camera (Nikon DX third class) and finally respect and dignity.

The reason I have a journal is because I just read Harriet the Spy. For those of you who didn’t read it last year it's about a young girl named Harriet and she wants to be a writer or a spy and she keeps notes in a journal and spies on people.    

Here’s a clip of the journal.

Chapter One: Class Explorer of the World

Sniffing the cool autumn air I lay back and take a sip of oolong tea. Here I am forced against my will to go to someplace I never thought I'd have to go again. China. That's right people the other side of the world. I look across the river and see a lady returning from the market. I notice the grocery bags in her motorbike. The river flows by silently. I see a boatman pass me. A chubby middle-aged man sits on the front. 

Why am I writing without much friskiness? This is not like me. Maybe the Zen of China is finally getting to me.

I was looking out to the street across from the tea house and accidently took 3 pictures. I looked at them and saw people moving. It was interesting. I decided to make a stop motion video. 

I thought about getting the atom bomb tea but got the blooming flower tea instead. It was a ball that you dropped into the tea and it bloomed. Usually it wouldn’t taste like anything but this one was good. (We're sending you a package and will put a couple of blooming tea balls in it for you to try.)

This is Pam. We sat at the tea house a long time. It was nice to be away from the hustle and bustle of Shanghai. Parker got bored after a while and went off on an expedition, but I didn't mind sitting. Peter worked on a watercolor of the buildings across the street.

While we were there, we read some more Chinese poetry. Since we were sitting by a canal, we looked for poems with rivers in them. Rivers are an important theme in Chinese poetry because they were the main means of transportation for thousands of years. They can symbolize journeys, which can also be connected to separation and loneliness. They can also symbolize the passing of time. I liked some lines especially well.

Li Zhiyi (11th century)

            I live at the upper end of the Yangtze River.

            You live at the low end of the Yangtze River.

            I miss you, day in, day out.

            We drink from the same river.

Yu Xuanji (9th century)

            How do I miss you?

            My thoughts run like

            the water in the West River,

            flowing eastward, never-ending,

            day and night.

Su Shi (11th century)

            Golden waves of the moonlight fading,

            a jade handle of the Dipper lowering,

            we calculate with our fingers

            when the west wind will come,

            unaware of time flowing away like a river in the dark.

As we sat there, I became interested in the reflection of a tree in the canal (the longer you sit in a place, the more you notice). The reflection went all blurry when a boat went by and stirred the water, but then cleared up again as the water grew calmer. I decided to try to write a short poem about it. I carry a notebook like Parker does, but smaller because I usually just write short notes. I started with the reflection that I saw, but the rest of the poem is imaginary.

Suzhou Reflection

            The reflection ripples in the water

            like the memory of a tree.

            The river is moving south

            endlessly passing

            like time flowing by.

            But the reflection, steadfast

            does not move

            except to waver

            as the boatsman's oar stirs the depths,

            as the breeze troubles the surface,

            as raindrops begin to fall.

            When the storm passes,

            it will be there as before

            like my memory of you.

Continued From Last Week: "We Will Get an Apartment"

Last Thursday we moved into an apartment complex.

It has around sixty buildings in it. Each building has six stories (no elevators). 

We live on the second floor of building forty one. 

The door is usually locked on the bottom level so you press the button with the number of your apartment on it. The wire in the door leads to a phone at the door of the apartment. There is a button on the phone that unlocks the bottom door. Our apartment is small and cozy and full of light.

The sidewalks are perfect for skateboarding, and there's a convenience store and fruit stand right outside the complex. We plan to get some bikes later but we're still working on that.

There are cats everywhere and in the weirdest places. I saw a little kitten sleeping  on a motorcycle as if it was dreaming about riding it. The person below us has close to fifteen cats. The black one likes to hang out on the roof of the building next to us. Others prefer the hedge and several like the bushes under the shady pomegranate tree.

SNAP BANG

ratatataatatatatattatatatatattatatatatatattaatat

We didn’t mind the sound. We had heard it all before. It just meant something like a wedding was happening and they were setting off firecrackers. The locals acted like they didn’t even hear it. It turned out to be a Laundromat across the street that was having its grand opening.

(The reason I recognized the sound: the day we moved in I was skating around the complex, turned a corner, and saw the biggest firecracker show in my life about to go off two centimeters in front of me. I skated home and told mom and dad to cover their ears and sure enough there was a BOOM BANG snip snap snip snap crackle BOOM ratatatatatatatattatatatatatatatatat.)

The firecrackers stopped popping just before we got to the street. All that was left was red paper remains. 

We were headed to the market near our house. The market had a strong smell of tobacco because lots of the people there smoked cigarettes. They sold fish and plants, as well as little antiques and flutes and knifes and crickets and some plain old boring things like hoses and belts.

The market is located along a sidewalk. The vendors usually come and roll out mats and then place their items on them. 

Customers squat down to look.

 

Some vendors prefer tables.

Or motorbikes.

We decided to look around at bonsai trees.

Bonsais are basically miniature trees and sure enough we got two of them. One was a miniature boxwood. The other was a miniature juniper. The man who sold us the bonsais was very nice. His smiling face behind a small boxwood bonsai reminded me of a sweet cup of oolong tea.

The day we moved into the complex I made my first friend. He was new, his age was fourteen and his name was Xu (pronounced like "Shoe").

He had a Playstation Two like most of my friends and apparently we both like the same video game such as Burn Out 3, Ace Combat, Metal Gear Solid and grandtheftauto. We plan to hang out on Saturdays. He speaks good English but I still have to say some things slowly to him. I am reassured and don't get as homesick as before BUT THAT DOSEN'T MEAN I DON'T MISS YOU AND CAN'T WAIT TO GET HOME.           

signed

Parker

broadcasting live from Shanghai China