This weekend a friend from GT invited me and my roommate to meet her at Suzhou. The city is located in the south of Jiangsu Province and 42% of its area is covered by water hence it’s known as the oriental Venice. It’s was a very nice and relaxing weekend. Suzhou is definitely on the top of my favorite places so far. The city has a lot of its old buildings and meticulous gardens well preserved that make it a very charming place. It was like Yuyuan garden being the whole town.
One of the streets we walked around, Pinjian Lu) was surrounded by canals over 800 years old!
Suzhou is one of China’s most famous place known for its silk. All along town there were stores selling silk. So in the afternoon after some sight-seeing we went to the Silk Factory. It’s amazing how they can make such elaborate fabrics from the filaments of silk worm cocoons. Each thread is so delicate and thin, the results are amazing! If real, the fabric is super soft and smooth. They told us one of the ways to distinguish between real and fake was to burn a piece of the fabric. The fake ones (made of polymers) usually melt and curl inwards like when burning plastics. Real silk should turn immediately into ash and should smell like burning hair. By this method you can easily identify fake from real silk, however, it’s probably hard to test it out when buying something!
I can’t believe how fast time went by! There’s only two more weeks to go before the program is over. So the next two weeks will be extremely hectic! I have midterms, finals, papers, presentations not to mention two whole novels to read!!!
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