Garden of the Master of the Nets

By the last day of our China tour, everyone seemed to be moving a little slower.

Lunch stretched on so long that Julie and I went outside to walk around.  It turned out to take about 15 minutes before everyone else filtered out.

Eventually our bus carried us to the Garden of the Master of the Nets, a significant example of the Classical Gardens of Suzhou, another UNESCO World Heritage Site.

As with the similarly honored Dowager's Palace we visited in Beijing, these gardens have been redesigned with successive generations.

Chinese gardens include art and architecture as well as landscaping replete with trees, bushes, flowers, boulders, streams and ponds.

It was originally designed in the 12th Century during the Southern Song Dynasty, and at one time it was called the Hall of Ten Thousand Books because of the massive library spread among three studies.

Passing through several owners, it slowly fell into disrepair.

In 1765, a wealthy bureaucrat in the Qing Dynasty refurbished the Garden, reimagining it to represent the simple life of a fisherman, which is how Song Zongyuan said he always thought of himself.

This desire by wealthy people including royals to live "simple lives" in elaborate idealized recreations of a more basic reality away from the intrigues of ornate palaces seems rather common, bringing to mind the ill-fated  French Queen Marie Antoinette's escapes to Petit Trianon in Paris.

The Garden of the Master of the Nets is the smallest of the Classical Gardens of Suzhou, but many consider it the finest.

Confucius say, "Good things come in small packages."

Okay, I can't find where he actually said that, but I'm sure it must have been in a fortune cookie I read. Speaking of which, did you know fortune cookies are not Chinese, but rather are California products?

Fortune cookies are based on a similar cookie made without fortunes in Japan, a country that also has a temple with a tradition of giving out random fortunes, but it was American ingenuity that brought them together, though companies in both Los Angeles and San Francisco claim to have the original design.

In any case, we had no fortune cookies during our many multi-course Chinese meals, because attempts to introduce them to the Chinese market brought rejection of the cookies as "too American."  We have no such qualms about borrowing from other cultures, as evidenced by our adoption of dim sum, pizza, tacos and spaghetti.

The Dian Chun Yi inner courtyard at Master of the Nets has been copied as the Ming Hall at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

During our visit, a wedding rehearsal happened to be taking place.

I wouldn't call this a typical Chinese wedding by any means.

The traditional dress of the participants seemed like a ceremony for royalty in a bygone era rather than something in line with modern China.

The costumes and pageantry were beautiful, but tourists jamming the walkways to watch obviously took away from the ambiance.

I assume the gates must be closed to the public for the actual ceremony.

By the time we completed the long bus ride back to Shanghai, we had only a few minutes to freshen up before heading to the gala farewell dinner.

At a nice restaurant, we enjoyed another delicious family-style meal.

Our guide Yuan bought bottles of a local spirit for us to try, but I stuck with just the beer, not wanting to meet that early morning alarm to get to the airport on time with a hangover.

In the morning, the hotel furnished boxed breakfasts, but it was just too early to eat, especially after the big meal the night before.

Our early morning flight from Shanghai took us back to Beijing's modern airport, where we settled in for a five hour layover.

This being the "L.A. Express" with an absurdly low price that made us wonder how Gate 1 could have furnished anything beyond air and maybe a few hotel nights at that price, we weren't complaining.  We knew what we'd signed up for, and the flight to LAX gave us plenty of time to relax before catching the bus home.

"Better service leads to better trips!"