A Day in Changzhou

On Sunday morning we were in Changzhou, which is the hometown of another student who goes to my old high school. Her father is the one who helped my family arrange a lot of thing on their trip. We traveled about two hours by car to his hometown, which I'm forgetting the name of at the moment. It is famous for this huge lake and Jony, the father of the student claims that its famous for its delicious foods, though I would beg to differ on that one. When we arrived we took a boat ride to get to other parts of the little island/ lake area. It was a beautiful day, so it was fun to get to ride on a boat. Little did I know, that I would also be getting a lot of exercise exploring the park. There was plenty of things to do and see there, but it ended up taking a long time for us to get back to the original site where we started from. By the time we got back, it was about 3 p.m. in the afternoon and everyone was starving. We were originally going to go to this hotel and have lunch but it had already closed, so Jony called a friend of his who apparently owned a restaurant in the town. Boy, did we have some very different cuisine. Our meal consisted of pigs feet, snake, pigs stomach, and a lot of other things that I can't recall. It was one of the most lets just phrase it "interesting" meals I've had since my time here. I definitely enjoyed it, but it wouldn't be a meal that I could get used to having on a daily basis.

We ended up arriving back in Changzhou on Sunday night. I was so unclear as to whether I'd be taking the train back to Shanghai at night or in the morning. I didn't really feel like getting on another train, but I also felt like I didn't have much of a choice in the matter. Luckily I was able to take an early train the next morning .

Even though we were all still very full when we got back to Changzhou, Jony and his family wanted to take us to one more restaurant. He told us "We're going to go have snake" and my family is like "Oh goodness, not more snake, I think we've had our fill for the day". Little did we know that he actually was saying that we were going to have a "snack at a restaurant" but his pronunciation sounded like "snake". We ended up going to a very chic restaurant that had some delicious food, even though we weren't actually very hungry.

After our long day, we ended up going back to Jony's home, I slept there for the night and got up early to face the morning of reality " back to school for me!"