WUXI

After the afternoon in shsanghai, we load the bus and head to nearby city Wuxi (woo-shee), where we will visit a garden, a lake and pearl factory. Our tour guide explains on the trip over that this is a small city in china … it is not like shanghai. we ask how big …. 5 million says tony. That kind of tells you the scale of just how huge china is … shanghai has 18 million people, so to them, a city of 5 million is a sleeply little burg. (for perspective, NYC has 8 million, and we consider that huge).

Last year I saw several people relieving themselves in public in China. I thought maybe I just caught the country on a bad week or something, but as we’re pulling into our hotel driveway a little kid runs into the driveway, pulls down his pants and relieves himself right there. Good times.

We head to a lake in the morning …. Our tour guide tells us it’s the third-largest freshwater lake in china! She then tells us which is first and second, and their average depths and sizes. Someone points out that they love to measure and rank things here. Everything is the “number one place” for something … and if not, they will tell you it’s second or third. We’d love to get our hands on this master ranking list … it’s fascinating!