Today was my day off so we decided to go to the ‘Master of Nets’ garden and check out the supposedly great shopping area nearby. The garden was meant to be the most beautiful in Suzhou and also the smallest. Well it was certainly small! Everything was packed tightly in together but without seeming too crowded, which was the general idea! The buildings were all of similar size and style to the other gardens, but the ‘garden areas’ were all very small and mostly rock, although you could tell it was spring as the odd flower had begun to push through and the small pool that it had wasn’t iced over. We thought it would have been much better to do this garden on our first day when we went to Humble Administrator as we did it pretty quickly and without getting too cold! The shopping area was a bit of a disappointment, or we didn’t find it. It’s always hard to know. Sichuan Jie was meant to be the area and that just turned out to be the bar street we go to pretty much every Saturday for Q’s. There little lead up to the garden had the usual tourist trap shops but as these ones were full of lovely things and there was no-one else around we tried our luck at bargaining saying ‘winter price!’ each time we said a lower number. It worked well and we got 4 fans, a couple of table runners, 2 purses, chopsticks and placemat set and a few other bits all for about a tenner! (100 yuan)
I wasn’t feeling too good so when we went for lunch we chose the Cantonese place that we went to on the 13th but even that couldn’t tempt me to eat much. We went home early forgoing the rest of the shopping trip and I piled myself high with duvets and turned the AC up full hot. Sadly it was too late, I already had a virus 