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.