Bullet Train Ride!

On the 5th of December, we were supposed to take an earlier train from Hangzhou to Suzhou to meet up with the rest for dinner. Unfortunately, we underestimated the Chinese crowd and couldn't get any tickets for the afternoon trains. We caught the 4pm bullet train and arrived in Suzhou at 5:30pm.

Hangzhou Train Station

Bullet train ride!

By the time we arrived at our hotel, everyone had already gone out for dinner with our tutor, Stan Fung. The three of us had to have fast food meal at the nearby shopping area where as the rest got to enjoy steamboat dinner. :(

Rice Set Meal

After dinner, we met up with the rest at the hotel and were told that we had to wait till 12am for an email from Stan regarding the itinerary for the next day. The email came while we were enjoying a late night supper of Portuguese egg tarts from a nearby KFC. :)

The email was very thorough. It explained quite a complicated system regarding our early-morning presentations. The 'audience' were split into two groups and each presenter had to present twice - one time for each group. We found this very hard to understand in the beginning.

Anyway, on the 6th of December, we were all up and ready by 8:30am for breakfast in the hotel. By 9:30am, we were all readily seated in Sam's hotel room. (I was in the Group 2 - which means an extra 15 minutes to prepare!) After the first round of presentations, we realised that this was actually quite an effective method as we do not have to be all packed in a single hotel room and the presenters had a chance to 'rehearse' before presenting from the second time to Stan. Furthermore, Stan has very good time-management skills as everything went according to schedule! None of the presentations exceeded the time limit.

At 10:30am, we were all gathered in the lobby and headed to our first Suzhou Garden visit, which was Yi Yuan, also known as Garden of Happiness. Apparently, this is one of the smallest and least impressive garden. David and his team was appointed to do a short presentation for this garden.

Garden Presentation

'Tourist' shot!