A Gondola Ride in China

Today we took a day trip to Qibao (chee-bao), an ancient water town that kind of looks like a mini Venice planted in the middle of a small city. It was about 5 or 6 train stops away and a short walk and then a huge ornate gate jumps out at you in the middle of the street.

We didn't really know what to expect at first. All of the pictures online show this quiet, scenic town surrounded by water, but when we walked in, all we saw was a huge bustling market crowded in to one tiny street no bigger than a US alley way would be. People were yelling, trying to sell you their stuff which is always "cheap for you". We quickly realized that a lot of the stalls had the same stuff, and bought a couple things along the way.

These are the souvenirs that Joe, Bryan, Liz and I bought from one of the stalls. You pick out the type of stamp you want and which carving and then they etch your name or initials into the bottom to make it a functioning stamp. We thought it was pretty unique and have considered maybe stamping our graded homeworks for the class we teach for instead of initialing each one like we usually do.

After you make it through the bustling market, you finally get to the bridge that's in all of the pictures. It's an awesome sight to see that the whole town is broken up by this river with huge bridges going across.

One of the tourist options we let ourselves get sucked into was to take a gondola ride along the river with an old Chinese man. It cost just about a dollar and only lasted 10 or so minutes, but it was well worth it and we got some cool pictures along the way.

Once you get across the bridge, you see another street to go down which is even busier than the first. I'm honestly not sure I've ever seen so many people in so little space before in my life. Turns out, that was the food street which was occupied by the same 4 food vendors repeated over and over again. They had fried tofu, fruit on a stick covered in carmelized sugar and all sorts of animal parts being skewered and fried. 

While walking around, we noticed a temple in the distance and decided to walk over and find it to see if we could go in. It turned out to be pretty cool and very ornate everywhere. Unfortunately we couldn't take too many pictures  because we didn't want to offend anyone.