Excursion today: the Humble Administrator's Garden. I would've placed an exclamation mark at the end of this phrase, but this was perhaps the least of my favorite gardens. This was mainly because I don't remember seeing all that much that I hadn't already seen in photos or had studied elsewhere, perhaps, or because I just went ahead and decided that this would be my least favorite garden. That sounds more fitting now that I think about it. Another tidbit that hastenened the garden's demise in my good memory bank was the fact that the Chinese character 拙 (zhuo1), which was for some reason translated to mean "humble" by whoever named the garden, literally translates to mean "clumsy". In other words, whoever doesn't know the literal meaning of 拙 before venturing to this garden has been duped by it's false air. Not to make it seem like a complete waste of time, Liu Laoshi gave a good lecture on the origin stories of China, we found a fantastic tea shop (where: ShengFa's Famous Tea; Shengfa Mingcha/盛發名茶; No. 168A-6, Dongbei Jie, Suzhou, China) and had our first good meal in China (not at the tea shop, though).
No comments:
Post a Comment