Day 7 -- Suzhou, China

I woke up at 7:30am today. Today is Dad's first day off work since I have been here. He gets some 'on-call' time during the Spring Festival/ Chinese New Year holiday and is taking some vacation after that time, so essentially he is off until the 20th of Feb. Decided today would be another day of taking it easy as we will be up pretty late for the New Year's celebration. When we finally got up and moving around, we headed over to Bar Street again for lunch (it's not that they don't cook here, but we don't have a lot of meal food in the fridge since we will be out of town for a few weeks). The plan was to go to Jack's, but they were closed, so we meandered down the street until something else jumped out at us. We finally stopped at "Pizza - Tmt" (I think Tmt is for tomatoes...?). We ordered some personal pan pizzas that were excellent. Best pizza I've had in a long time (I haven't been to Juliano's Pizzeria for quite some time now--I'm not sure anything can beat that). On the way home we bought some sleeping pads (like Therm-o-rests that you use for camping) as the train beds (we leave for Beijing by overnight train on Tuesday) are pretty hard for sleeping on. Also bought some more DVDs (Narnia!) and then headed home to prepare for the Chinese New Year party this evening. Made a quick stop at the little food store here in the apartment complex and stocked up on soda and beer to take the party tonight. Mom spent a while preparing Banafi pie(probably butchered the spelling there); you boil canned milk for three hours in the can so it carmelizes, then pour it in a pie crust (in our case, one store bought graham cracker crust and one chocolate one we made of crushed oreos sans cream), put sliced bananas on top, then fill the rest of the way with whipped cream--very yummy! I managed to overheat our mixer while whipping the cream (oops!) and had to call some friends to go over and borrow theirs. We also put together a small production station and had Dad and Daniel make sandwiches, pass them to me, then I cut them in quarters and stacked them in a dish to go. We also took a jar of dill pickles and a brick of Tilllamook cheese to the party. Both of these went over very well as they are difficult to find here. Mom & Dad's friend Heidi (a German woman working for FedEx here) showed up around 7:30pm and we all headed over to Bruce and Sari's (from Wisconsin--also geocachers with more than 1100 under their belt) to celbrate the New Year. On the way there, you could hear and see fireworks all around. The streets were mostly empty (a rare sight to see). We stopped at the guard station on the way in to the apartments to check in and let them know where we were going. He said we could go ahead and also asked us if he could take a picture with us. This is a first for me, but apparently a common occurence here for Westerners. There were about 25 people at the party from various companies and various parts of the world. The apartment itself was pretty amazing. It is on the 26th floor of the Bai Ling apartments (great view for the fireworks), has 2 stories, 5 bedrooms, and was designed and furnished for the Mayor of Suzhou to live in during the SARS outbreak a few years back. We ate lots and did a white elephant gift exchange. Among the gifts, of course, were some good ones (including a jar of pickles, a bag of mini Reeses Peanut Butter Cups, and Pimsleur Mandarin CDs) and some bad ones (a 110v hairdryer, a 'Cup-o-Noodles', and some DVDs in French). Heidi had also picked up some fireworks, so several of us went down to the street to set them off. They weren't neccessarily spectatcular to see, but the booms were loud enough to rattle you and set off car alarms. I particularly liked the long strand of red fire works (much like the 'Black Cats' strands that we have at home) which would bang and flash bright lights. These ones, however, lasted for nearly 5 minutes after lighting the strand. Finally headed back up to the apartment and out onto the big balcony to wait for the real show to start.