Day 6 - Sunday

Woke up a little early today to do some work that is due this week. I had a hard time getting motivated, but made decent headway. We met downstairs at 9:15 then to walk to the bus stop to meet Paul, Anna, and Jack. We took the #68 bus for 1Yuan ($0.14) to downtown Suzhou. We walked north along Moye Road along the eastern side of the city. Along the way, we stopped for tea at an old tea house (seen in photo). I'm not a huge tea fan, but I had a strawberry tea and it was really good. We continued to Dongbei St. and went to the Humble Administrator's Garden for a tour. There was a "tour guide" offering his services in English, so we took him up on it. It was a nice tour, we learned about some of the history of the gardens, and the gardens themselves were beautiful. It was a perfect day to be outside as well, not too hot. After the gardens we found a local restaurant that had English on the menu. We had some basic Chinese dishes; cucumber, Kung Pao chicken, pork ribs, spinach dumplings, mushrooms, .... It was pretty filling like most of the meals we have had. We ended up just walking around for a little while and then split-up and Mike and I headed back to the hotel. We decided to just take a cab back which is usually straight forward; we carry businesses cards for the hotel which we can show to the cab driver so they know where to go. This time, the cab driver didn't seem to know where he was going and at one point he made a turn that I knew wasn't correct. Luckily, I had a map on me and I was able to clarify on the map where we needed to go. As we were getting into the turn lane, a police car pulled-up beside us and pulled us over. Two other police cars came up behind and on the other side of us. We couldn't understand what they were saying, although it seemed pretty civilized. We ended-up paying our fare and walking the rest of the way which was pretty close. Still not sure what was going on.

I did some more work this afternoon and was debating about just eating left-overs, but Mike called me and I needed a break from work anyway. We met up with everyone else and went to Zapatos, a Mexican restaurant in Rainbow Walk by our hotel. It was really good. We stopped at Coldstone for ice-cream afterwards; the area is very westernized! Now I'm back here, do a little bit more work, and then call it a night.