After five days of touring Xuzhou and celebrating the new year with Benson, Bridget and I decided to take advantage of the opportunity to hop a train to nearby Suzhou, an ancient city famous for its classic gardens. Several of them have even been declared UNESCO world heritage sites.
Finding that Suzhou has an ample supply of funky, cheap, centrally-located youth hostels to choose from, we easily convinced ourselves that the stressful second-language phone call to book ahead wasn't necessary. Well, it was. After dragging our suitcases down ten blocks of thousand-year-old hand-cut paving stones to our hostel of choice, the Mingtown, we were told that all their beds were booked up. The receptionist took pity on us and obligingly called around until she found us another hostel to stay at - the Suzhou Watertown Youth Hostel. We hailed the first cab we found and were there before we'd even ticked up one yuan on the flag fare. Although not as impressive as the Mingtown, which is in a richly furnished traditional courtyard house overlooking a canal on the most charming thousand-year-old street in the city, the Watertown is also a traditional house (in an ancient alley rather than an ancient canal street) and is walking distance from nearly everything worth seeing.
Still, we really had our hearts set on experiencing the different flavour of the Mingtown, so we went back and booked the next two free beds they had for tomorrow night, our last night in Suzhou. It's a bit of a hassle to pack up and move again, but it's also kind of cool to be getting a taste of a few different places and localizing ourselves to a couple of different bases while we're here.
There are many things in life where you get more for less, and hostel life is one of those things. For a fraction of the price of a hotel, a hostel can provide you with accommodation in an authentic, traditional house, complete with charming decor and gardens, antique furniture, a multilingual book and DVD library, wireless and broadband, a kitchen, a cafe, travel information, and a great base for meeting people. Hostels rock.
Chinese word of the day:
箱子
xiāng zi
Suitcase
No comments:
Post a Comment