Last Sunday morning we all met at Lindun Lu station, it was hot and sticky and the humidity was very high………just standing there made you break into a sweat but the weather didn’t deter today’s group. There were familiar faces and of course when you go to an Album of Suzhou event you will always meet someone new.

Our first port of call was the Zhuangyuan Museum which is just a short walk from Lindun Lu, I’ve passed this beautiful building many times and I have been meaning to stick my head in here to see what it was all about and today I got the chance

We were met by Viola, who looks after the museum and she was kind enough to be our guide for our visit and this was very lucky for us, she is fluent in English and so the many foreigners that came were very privileged and lucky to have such a guide this morning.
It’s a fascinating little museum and I will return here again to have a second look. This wonderful small museum really explains the journey that the scholars took and the difficulties faced, it even show’s examples of some of the more enterprising scholars that created cheat books to help them on their travels through this mental obstacle course. But apart from all of that the building itself is stunning and the architecture and the design is compact and elegant. The many subtleties around the building were pointed out by Viola and this for me is what I enjoyed the most.
We were also allowed to try on some traditional clothing and try to see what we would look like if we were lucky enough to be chosen to be scholars, although in this hot Suzhou weather they were not the most comfortable clothes to wear, but ideal for winter I would say.

We left here and then after a short stroll through the back streets around Pingjiang Lu we made our way to the China Kunqu Museum. I had been here before with a friend and I was lucky enough to actually see a performance, but today we were given a tour of the museum and again we were lucky to have a young guide that could explain to us in English.

There were so many details that I was completely unaware of, but again for me it is the architecture that I find the most interesting.

Today’s walk with the Album of Suzhou team was a short 3 hours and to be honest on such a hot day it was perfectly timed. My friend Lydia and I went off to have lunch before we returned to the beginning of our tour, and back to the Zhuangyuan Museum, but this time we popped into the small cafe and gift shop adjacent to the entrance where we had one of the best cups of black coffee you will have in Suzhou and if you are a lover of coffee, don’t waste your time going to Starbucks, come here and experience a wonderfully smooth cup of coffee and relax after your visit to the museum.