Shanghai

At the end of the day we flew from Beijing to Shanghai, a city in southern China where our boat was now docked.  While I was in Beijing it had sailed from Hong Kong to Shanghai, and I met it in another part of China.  Shanghai is an amazing city, with lots of skyscrapers that light up at night.  I got to go up to the top of one of the tallest and see the whole city at night.  It was a beautiful sight, but a little scary being so high up because the floor of the top storey was made of glass, so I could see all the way down to the street 100 floors below me!

While I was in Shanghai I went of a day-trip to Suzhou, a very old city near Shanghai that is famous for its gardens. There used to be hundreds of private gardens all over Suzhou, but now some of them have been opened up to the public.  The ones I got to see had lots of limestone rocks that had weathered into interesting shapes, and they were combined with water features and lots of trees to make a beautiful garden.  All through the gardens were lots of little paths, and some buildings where the family who lived there could spend time.  There were not lots of open spaces or flowerbeds like there usually are in American gardens, because the Chinese have a different idea of how a garden should look.  While in Suzhou we also got to see the Grand Canal, which was built thousands of years ago by one of the Chinese emperors who wanted to create a waterway between southern China and Beijing in the north.  I was very impressed that they could have dug such a large canal by hand such a long time ago, and that it lasted and is still in use today.