Mar 29, 2009China blog3: the neighborhood market on the "Murmuring Stream."While we were in Suzhou, China, we were invited to take a boat down the “Great Canal” which leads to the “Murmuring Stream.” Suzhou is purportedly the Venice of the Orient. Not so much…I’ll give them this: it does smell better on the small waterways than in Venice! It has been a major waterway in Suzhou for 1300 years. We motor downstream, watching the houses and parks roll past. We have seen very few school age children on the trip so far, but here on the canal, the kids are just getting home from school, wearing their backbacks and waving at us. There is an appearance of crushing poverty here; the houses do not look habitable in many cases, and yet there is laundry hanging from windows, plants on the battered concrete steps which go down to the water. Are these the backs of the houses? Or is this the main entry? Few private boats are evident here. At a concrete pier we hop out of our little launch and wander through a ‘typical’ canal neighborhood, complete with market. What a visit this is! There are 6-foot wide streets filled with vendors, bikes, pedestrians, cats, motorcycles, news sellers, mopeds, tourists and carts, yet it is curiously quiet. The people smile, nod. We have been warned to keep our possessions close, though, and to step away from anyone who gets too close. Pickpockets and bag snatchers may be present. Backpacks and fanny packs are vulnerable, they tell us. Keep tabs on your stuff, they tell us. So we cluster like sheep at first, watching one another’s backs, but after a very few moments we are mesmerized and just break out of our tragic pack to go exploring. The food choices here in the open market are not to be believed: eels swirl in plastic dishpans; green turtles pile up in plastic dishpans; huge bug-eyed frogs scramble over one another in netted-top plastic dishpans; pointy, green, toothed, black-spotted fish (gar?) struggle in what? Plastic dishpans. There are tables of beautiful fresh fruits, nuts, grains, sprouts, tubers and vegetables we can identify; horrifying dried -somethings- we cannot. Bags and bales of them. There are live chickens and ducks, just waiting in wire cages for someone to choose them for dinner. I was apparently spared a chicken’s beheading, witnessed by some of our companions on a different alley. There are buckets of eggs of all sizes: chicken, quail or pigeon, duck, goose. There are brass sellers, silk sellers, coin sellers, post cards, feathered and bangled and jingling stuff everywhere, waiting for the tourist boat. A friend buys ‘ancient coins’ only to discover later that they are old pot-metal disks, maybe washers. Our guide warns us that the “silk” will disappear when washed, and the colors will run. Nevertheless, there are takers. A delicious aroma assails us: a pristine bakery is just around the corner, complete with gloves, hairnets, glass display cases and coffee or tea offerings. Chocolate seller. Beans. Rice. What iS THAT? Yikes. We move on. Further along, I buy some cunningly crafted life-sized insects: dragonfly, cricket, preying mantis, all made of woven grass and so convincing in their reality, they spook my budding-scientist granddaughter when I show them to her back at home.Time to get back on the boat, which will take us to a new parking spot, and our intrepid bus driver is always there waiting for us, handing us up and down as if we are gentry. At the bus parking there are horrifyingly mutilated beggars with holes cut in their clothing so you can see their stumps and damaged flesh. They call to us and flail their stumps. Our guide firmly leads us past, informing us that if they stayed in their own region, they would be taken care of by the government. Some of them have no hands & no feet; others are so crippled and deformed they are hard to acknowledge, so we don’t, and one wonders how they got here. Our guide tells us it is all a scam; that they have income, they are just wanting more. I wonder. Our guides, although wonderfully friendly to us and constantly filling our noggins with Chinese beauty, history, geography, philosophy, and language, are very scripted and do not always hear our questions. “Look over there!” They know the American ADD will kick in…Our guide, Li-li, is a native of Suzhou, and she expounds upon how lucky the residents here are to have such sweet air and plentiful water. The air is murky and polluted, but admittedly it is not full of coal smoke, as is Beijing. There have been many, many fields , gardens and newly-flooded rice paddies along our route today. Indeed, parts of Suzhou remind me of the canals and farmland surrounding Sacramento. It is still early spring here, and cold, just as it is back home, but there are camellias in bloom, and the magnolias and azaleas are in full bud, not far behind. I have to wonder, though, where the bounty of fresh produce at today’s market comes from. It cannot be local; it’s still too cold for the tomatoes, watermelons, tubers we’ve seen today…Has this “typical Chinese neighborhood market” been posed and scripted just for us as well? Many parts of our trip have been “demonstrations” rather than true factories, and we have commented on Disneyesque aspects of the propaganda we’ve been handed. Well, says I, as long as we understand it’s propaganda, right?Right?