Venice of the East

We are now is Suzhou, the "Venice of the East", which is a canal town about an hour outside of Shanghai. It is very beautiful and a nice break from the big city lights. Last night, we took a walk around the city and the canals and bridges were illuminated- very romantic. Also, in some of these public spaces along our walk, older women were performing these simple choreographed dances to music blasting from a boombox. A man rollerblading by us told us the women do this frequently "for healthy". Today we took a bus out to a smaller canal town Luzhi this morning and it was very picturesque with cobble-stoned streets, quiet alleyways and aging canal boats. We ate lunch in the modern part of town and, as I followed S out of the restaurant, he was stopped by 3 of the waitresses and they all posed for pictures with him. They kept giggling and showing him the pictures. Once they saw me, they took one with me but then went back and took several more with S. This evening we are having dinner with a girl ShuLu from Suzhou that we met through couchsurfing.
We had an excellent time in Shanghai and our hostesses Sarah and Becky were so wonderful . As a thank you for hosting us, we took them to this delicious vegetarian restaurant where they tried their first fake meat dishes. As we left their apartment, they gave us the little blue mascot for the Shanghai Expo 2010. The Shanghainese have a lot of pride about the upcoming expo- they say it is the 2nd most important world event after the Olympics. There are posters about the expo and pictures of blue man Hei Lu is everywhere. What they don't realize is that nobody cares or knows about the expo. Sarah and Becky say that all of their schools have countdowns to the event posted and the kids are working on projects about the expo.
Tomorrow we head to Hangzhou where we will visit the West Lake, a popular tourist destination for the Chinese, and meet some couchsurfers for coffee.