Jinan and Suzhou

We arrived in Jinan yesterday, and headed to the thousand Buddha Mountain. It was really cool, but took us like five tries to find the correct cave. Every mistake ended up costing us 5RMB, so it was a pricey hunt. However, it was well worth the hunt. Inside this cave was 20,000 hand carved statues of Buddha. 20,000 was the number quoted to me by several people, and by the brochure, I obviously wasn't able to check. The cave was spectacular, and not only had all of these statues of varying sizes, but also had elaborate paintings all over all of the walls and ceilings. Most of the stautes were life size people, or bigger. What made it even cooler was that the humidity in the cave was so thick that it created this haze all over, which combined with the darkness of the cave made this very creepy dungeon feeling that only added to the experience. I think I found this to be more impressive than the Terracotta Warriors. The sad thing was that apparently during the cultural revolution Mao wanted to move on past this era of Chinese history, so he ordered many of the statues destroyed. So, you could see that some of them were damaged, while others went untouched (apparently Mao's army didn't do too good of a job). Honestly this may be next to the wall as my favorite site in China thus far.

After the mountain we headed out of Jinan. Sadly, we couldn't get a train to Nanjing so we just went straight to Suzhou thinking that we would just add an extra day to Shanghai (I hope the Chinese Government doesn't read this). Suzhou was sold to us as the Venice of the East, and let me tell anyone who wants to visit, the person who told us this had obviously never been to Venice. The streets are dirty, and the air is terribly polluted. The pollution was so thick you could taste it in the air. If you look at the picture at the very bottom of this it has spots, not because of the lens, but because there are particles of pollution in the air that my flash reflects off of and makes those spots appear. Overall the air quality is just gross. The pats ways are filled with horrible people selling sickly ducks or frogs for people to cook. There are very few restaurants, and only one block of nice looking touristy area. Overall the place is a dump. However, there are canals, and some beautiful gardens. We went to one, and it was nice, overpriced, but nice. As for the canals, they exist, and you could go on a gonadal ride, but it's more dirty and poor than cool and exciting.

At night the city kind of came a live a little more. The one block which was nice along the canal was lit up by lanterns, and some other parts of the city were kind of nicer at night. The only issue was that the make shift taxi drivers kept trying to take the three of us to prostitutes. We were harassed by no less than 4 people on separate occasions trying to tell us they could take us to brothels. Obviously this didn't bode too well for the city in general. The nice touristy part also shut down at 9, which was odd. We were trying to have a late dinner along the canal, and couldn't because everything was boarded up at 9pm. In the end I would recommend this as a day trip from Shanghai if you want to come. Come around 4-5ish see a garden see the canal a little and get out of here; there is really nothing worth touring, and the pollution is disturbing.