What makes these gardens grow? Part II

Inside the Humble Administrator's Garden, one can be fooled into thinking that heaven had touched down to earth in this precise location. This sprawling garden occupies 5 hectares. There are ample vistas to intoxicate the senses, there are numerous pavillions to offer shade and pleasant views, and there are oversized goldfish meandering about in the miniature lakes. There is literally poetry everywhere in this garden. A poem will be written onto the pillar of a pavillion, and somehow these displays are utterly tasteful and not obtrusive in the least. Perhaps I--being a foreigner--can gloss over these poems with ease due to my illiteracy in Chinese characters. But for native speakers, they must afford an additional source of inspiration in this eden-esque garden.

I said that this oversized garden was heavenly in character, but then there are the crowds. The Humble Administrator's Garden is the largest and most spectacular garden in all of Suzhou, so it always draws a crowd. And a substantial crowd at that. The highest concentration of foreigners I've encountered since Beijing was in Suzhou, mostly within the walls of this fantastic garden. It is true that people come from all over the world to see this garden. And for me, this only reaffirms the notion that the greenest thumbs on earth are often yellow.

What makes these gardens grow? Part I

Suzhou is a city that is renowned for it's gardens. There are various gardens to visit, nearly every one of them offering magnificent scenery and endless pleasant perspectives. So many impressive gardens can be found here that, by comparison, the so-called "Garden State" of New Jersey is made to look even worse; needless to say the film Garden State is still a piece of crap.

Anyway, Suzhou was the latest city in Jiangsu Province that I visited. I arrived by way of Wuxi--the city dubbed "Little Shanghai," although only the "Little" portion of this moniker is appropriate. I took a fast train to reach Suzhou. This train from Wuxi put me in Suzhou in a mere twenty minutes. The same train is capable of running from Nanjing to Shanghai in just one hour. I'm considering this train route as a possible grand finale tour of southern Jiangsu Province (Nanjing-Wuxi-Suzhou-Shanghai-United States).

Focusing on Suzhou now, the place is also quite famous for canals. In fact, the canals are so prevelant that any walking, driving, cycling, or rickshaw route must accomodate for the numerous bridges and waterways. The canals are so much a part of daily life that they can even prove to be the ultimate end of one's life. I draw on example here, for my friends Colm and Rachael had arrived in Suzhou one night ahead of me and they saw a grim sight in one of the canals upon arrival. They had just finished booking accomodations in a hostel in old Suzhou when they came across a crowd gathered by a nearby canal. They followed the curious eyes of the crowd to see a boat in the canal, and the drivers of the boat were in the process of pulling up a body from the water. I don't want to begin to speculate on the morbid circumstances of this unfortunate fellow's demise, but there are numerous ways to end up in one of the canals. The bridges are so many and the safety measures so few that any careless individual could easily lose their footing and fall into the water.

Casual leave of absence

This one comes direct from a student in one of my business english classes. Enjoy.

Dear Teacher:
I would like to know if I can ask for a casual leave of absence for the classes. Because I have a stomach. So I want you can permit it. Thank you very much!

Your student: Angela
April 3rd 2009