OLD SUZHOU MARKET: SHANGTANGJIE

This is my favorite picture of ShangTang
(all photos by Cameron Ishee)

My host family took me to a famous street in Old Suzhou called ShangTang. We stayed there until it got dark, and then the whole place lit up in a dozen colors of light. It was beautiful, this slightly bewildering mix of the very old and very new that's everywhere in China.

This is my second favorite picture from ShangTang

I took this as the sun was setting, filtering through the trees and backlighting the rooftops.

If anyone has the slightest idea what this fruit thing is, please let me know! There are trees all over Suzhou that are dropping this red flower-like thing, and nobody's been able to tell me what it is!

This is the ceiling of a small ice cream shop tucked into a corner of ShangTangJie. People from all over the world come to write their wished on...well, really on anything. 

There were currencies from a dozen different countries, playing cards, tickets from busses, trains, planes and boats, and an overabundance of sticky notes. They are taped to the walls, shoved into the wickerwork of the chairs, left propped on the windowsill...and taped to the ceiling, stapled to each other in long, fluttering, downright kaleidoscopic chains that blow in front of the lights and make the room flicker and shimmer whenever the wind blows.

I didn't write a wish, for a fairly silly reason: I want some tangible reason to return to Suzhou. Aside from the abstract, emotional reasons that are hard to lay out and make sense of, I feel like I need to leave some specific thing conspicuously undone, as a kind of insurance that I will come back here. 

The canal that ShangTangJie is sort of based around seemed perpetually full of people in boats. They use these long, rectangular vessels to transport everything from trash to people. Swishing a tiller around in the back, like a paddle, is the most common way to propel the boats (after electricity), but when it comes to landing or pushing off, the...sailors (canal-ers? Is this sailing?) like to use long wooden poles, not unlike those used in the West in times gone by.

Carroll, this is a clue for you, as to your present that I'm bringing back :)