Lunch - Suzhou

Suzhou is famous for producing silk in China and has many silk factories in the area. 

After learning about the silk production process at the Silk Factory and shopping for silk...

 

Unraveling silk worms from their cocoons

Stretching the silk

We went to the top floor for lunch: 

Top dish is pork belly and lotus root and bottom dish is choy

The sauce in the pork belly dish was slightly bitter with all the other ingredients, but the pork belly managed to mellow out the taste of the sauce. The pork was juicy and good. The choy was simply cooked in oil and it was okay as well.

Sweet and sour pork and scrambled eggs

The sweet and sour sauce was good, but the pork had a weird gummy texture to it (sort of like mystery meat). For the eggs, they used some light white sauce to scramble it and it was different.

Noodles in soup with salted vegetables and in the back is the tofu dish

I really liked the noodles: I probably could have eaten a bowl of it by itself. The dish seemed out of place since our lunch was served with a huge bowl of rice. 

The tofu dish was okay, I wasn't a big fan of the sauce in which the tofu was cooked.

Tofu and choy soup

Very oily, but the tofu was good. 

Dried tofu strips

This was a strong aromatic dish with a spicy sauce. 

Squirrel fish and lettuce (Chinese coleslaw?)

Fish was delicious but the sauce was a little saltier than the fish from the night before. 

The lettuce was bland.

Conclusion: It was a decent meal - the Suzhou squirrel fish is amazing!

Howard Johnson Wuzhong Business Club Hotel Breakfast - Suzhou

Another newly built hotel: Howard Johnson Wuzhong Business Club Hotel Suzhou

Breakfast area

They had a waffle machine! I was really excited to have waffles with maple syrup only to realize that they only honey and chocolate sauce as topping options. The waffle was soggy and the chocolate sauce didn't save it.

Omelette

Probably the best omelette of the trip: tomato, peppers, mushrooms and ham

Noodle soup

A change - they had mushrooms! Noodles, bok choy and Mushrooms in a clear chicken broth - pretty good way to start the day.

The Croissants here were amazing: super buttery inside and nice and flaky on the outside. 

I also liked the sushi: a tad salty but solidly wrapped and consistently appetizing.

The fried noodles were slightly spicy, but still good. The one thing I didn't like was the spring rolls that they made here. 

Another croissant, an apple danish, sushi (again) and a ton of fruit

The apple danish had cinnamon and was flaky outside. I thought the sushi was really interesting the second time around. The piece on the right had green roe and daikon (which was a little salty).

Fruits were abundant! Yellow watermellon was sweet and had a more solid texture than normal watermelon. It was really delicious and ripe. Watermelon was fresh; oranges were super sweet and juicy; Honeydew and cantaloupe were good but not as ripe as the other fruits. The disaster was the pineapples: in China, they are usually soaked in salt water making them salty pineapples instead of sweet ones. 

Overall: Great breakfast! I'm ready to start my day :D

Website: http://bcclubwuzhong.hojochina.com/wuzhong-sz-home.html

Dinner - Suzhou

One of my favourite cities on this China trip was Suzhou. 

It's a beautiful city with 2500 years of history. You can't help picturing yourself thrown back in time to Imperial China when you stroll in Suzhou's beautiful Classical gardens and enjoy a boat cruise on the scenic Grand canal while being serenaded with Suzhou Pingtan.

Lingering Garden's iconic rock "Auspicious Cloud-Capped Peak"

(There's a hawk's beak at the top of the rock and a turtle at the bottom)

 

The Grand Canal Cruise

After the Cruise and the Suzhou Pingtan musical performance, we walked from the dock to the restaurant: 

Chicken cubes with potatoes and carrots

Interesting dish and quite good with rice. The potatoes didn't fully absorb the flavour from the sauce.

Tofu in egg sauce

Not really appetizing - the egg sauce was kind of bland.

Eggplant

This was super tasty! The eggplant were perfectly cooked & juicy and the sauce was really good.

Squirrel Fish in sweet and sour sauce

This type of fish is a Suzhou specialty and it was delicious! The fish was deep-fried awesomeness since the little fried rectangles of meat were tender on the inside and packed with flavour and crispy from the outside. The pineapples and carrots added great colour to the dish and sweetness to the sauce. 

Ham and Fish soup

A little on the salty side, but still really good. 

Ham and Egg Pancake and Pork Knuckle

The pancake was crispy on the outside and yummy overall. 

The pork knuckle was amazingly tender and succulent: it was melt-in-your-mouth goodness. I even tried to polish off the fatty meat (which was even better since it totally soaked in the flavour of the sauce) - Delish!

Another soup with tomato and egg

Choy

Definitely not as oily as some of the other places. 

Overall: In the words of the Suzhou dialect, the meal was "Ai Che" which means delicious. 

Snacks: 

 

Roasted Ginkgo biloba known in Chinese as 白果 (White fruit) or 銀杏 (Silver apricot) are a popular snack in Suzhou

The first thing I noticed when I bit into the nut was the waxy texture outside the nut. As I kept chewing, I got more of the soft nutty taste, but then at the end, the nut quickly shows its bitterness and you're left with a lingering bitter aftertaste. 

Our guide also told us the history of the ginkgo tree: the leaves with a cleft in the middle (making the leaves look like pants) are from a male tree and the leaves that look like a dress are from a female tree.

White peach

Huge, really sweet and delicious!