Wu Zhen Tour

Today we went by car about two hours from Shanghai, to a town called Wu Zhen. On the way there, though, check out this photo on the left. The little kid, being held by the girl on the back of the bike, is sound asleep, and this looks so dangerous. This would be SOOOOO illegal back home!!! Anyway, Wu Zhen is what they call a "water town" because most of the town's buildings are built on rivers that run through it. According to a legend told by our tour guide, it started because a successful merchant doing business from his home needed room to expand, but there was no land. So he extended his home out on to the water. I don't know if that's true or not, but it sounds good so I'll go with it!

It's still an active, functioning town today. Of course today was a national holiday and it was REALLY crowded, but I'd have issues with tens of thousands of people strolling past my home and gawking at my neighborhood! Or "boating" by my home like you see in the picture here (we took one of these boats, too).

The town was filled with various museums and what not, including a museum that feature all kinds of beds built in the day. You'll see some of those if you click through to the photo links. We even got to see a cute little Chinese shadow puppet show (pics and video via the links). Oh... it was a bit weird, too, because the entire day we saw just about one dozen non-Chinese (whereas in Shanghai westerners are very common!).

Finally to the left there is a picture of our Shanghai crew on this trip: Mark Atkinson, Nicolas Schulz, Areil Cai, Barbara Bernad, and moi. To see all 71 pics/videos I uploaded, please click here for Flickr, or here for Facebook (not all posted on Facebook).