Wuxi 无锡

On our last weekend, we visited the Chinese friends we made on campus in their hometown Wuxi （无锡）. They had left Suzhou University a couple weeks before, because their summer program had finished. We left about an hour and fifteen minutes before our train was going to leave. TIP: Allow PLENTY OF TIME!! However, we took the bus going in the wrong direction. We figured the bus would just make an extremely long loop around the city, but there was actually a dead end. We had to transfer buses in order to keep going on the same route, route 10. By the time we had arrived at the train station, we had definitely missed our departure time. We stood in line for what seemed like forever to exchange our ticket only to find out we needed to get into another lengthy line. This instance caused me to be able to apply what I had learned in class about tickets! In Chinese I told the ticket officer I wanted to exchange our tickets, what time was available, and did she have a 10:30am ticket for the four of us? She understood me and acknowledged that indeed she did. I felt like my language attempts were becoming successful near the end of our stay in China. From that moment on, I felt more confident about listening to clerks selling clothing, food, and other products. Here is the Suzhou train station, always crowded:

By the time we got to Wuxi, the girls had been waiting for us for nearly 2 and a half hours. They told us to meet them at a hospital (an easy general location for everyone to find). The only strange thing about arriving at the hospital was we didn't know why the taxi driver had taken us there. I had been asking the taxi driver to take us to .... the entire time but didn't know I had been saying the word hospital. It was an odd location to arrive at until we knew why we were there. The girls took the four of us American girls to eat lunch in a buffet style restaurant where you pay for what you grab. Afterwards, they surprised us by taking us to a very nice "place of interest" as they call it. It was an old style park for tourists. We enjoyed walking around the park despite the heat. Then they took us to two different shopping districts which were both fairly modern, located in the center of Wuxi. I was expecting Wuxi to be a much smaller town, because Sarah's hometown Zhang Jia Gang was nearby and very small but it spanned over three hours of land by car. That day we took 5 busses, 4 taxis, and 2 trains!