Dongpo Park

This morning we hopped on the bus to downtown Changzhou to meet our friend Monica, a member of our Suzhou International Branch.  She is the coolest and cutest lady!  She is from Mexico, and has been here for the last 2 years.  She was just here to teach English, but met her husband, a Chinese National (who left the country to meet with the missionaries and get baptized!) and has been here ever since!

We started with a healthy meal of McDonald's.  I haven't grown weary enough of Chinese food to appreciate McDonald's yet, but I can say that they have some seriously delicious soft serve!  We then were off to Dongpo Park.  Monica was a great tour guide, we would definitely have gotten lost without her!

We hadn't even gone in the park when my breath was taken away by how beautiful the park was.  I love being by so many rivers and canals, they are so pretty!  And the pollution, on a good day, can pass as fog which is totally mystical.

We went in the park and it was so nice and quiet.  Monica said that Dongpo Park is her favorite because not many people go there, so it tends to be peaceful.

There were so many cool things to see that it was hard not to take lots of pictures!  I feel better knowing that the park is just in our city, so we can go back as many times as we'd like.

We did run into a few people, of course, like this guy who wanted a picture with Petro and Bailey.  In one of the pictures, Petro was doing a typical Hawaiian sign with his hand, which is actually the same sign the Chinese use for the number 6.  So the guy thought Petro was asking for 6 kuai, and he started pulling out his wallet to pay us!  Haha!  It took a while to explain that we don't want his money, and that the sign is just an American thing.

Shey and I decided that if people just want to get random pictures with us, then we could just get random pictures with them.  Like with this giggly group of girls!

The last part of Dongpo Park that we hit was this serene little courtyard attached to two temples, which of course you shouldn't take pictures in.  Though dark, they were very intricate and beautiful inside, with large statues looking straight into your soul.  Very intimidating.  Every time I visit places like that, I'm grateful for our temples which give such a different feeling.  But of course I love to visit these!

I'll for sure be going back to Dongpo Park before we leave in June.  We also hit another park today, but that calls for a whole other blog post!