Hello from SuZhou!!
Today, we made our way to Su Zhou from Shanghai. The journey was 2.5hours long! The life in Su Zhou is much slower compared to Shanghai. The people here are poorer and they have a lower standard of living. It is quite different from the city life in Shanghai which we experienced for the past few days. The tour guide told us about the difference between Shanghai and SuZhou. For example, the average life span of a person living in Shanghai is 72 years old while those in SuZhou is 79 due to the hectic lifestyle.
One of the main thing about SuZhou would be the pretty girls and silk! Silk contains collagen which is good for the skin thus girls in SuZhou have good skin and they are deemed as pretty! We’ll be visiting a silk factory tomorrow so look out for more!
Before heading to Shanghai, we visited:
Shanghai Bus International Travel Service
The Shanghai Bus International Travel Service is a travel agency in Shanghai and today we were given the opportunity for a site inspection at this local tour operation office.
The Shanghai Bus International Travel Service is a travel agency in Shanghai and today we were given the opportunity for a site inspection at this local tour operation office.
The Shanghai Bus International Travel Service was stared at about 2004. It has been six years then and they have made many developments to their company. They provide travel services that inbound, outbound and domestic (within China, amongst cities). Travel agencies commonly provide such services. However in Singapore, there is no need for domestic travelling, considering the size of it. Hence, making it easy for locals to travel around. I believe this has its advantages and disadvantages. The advantage of this is that it proves that there is hardly a place in Singapore that is not accessible. Even when tourists travel around Singapore, it will not take them long. However, the downside to this is that tourist can get bored easily. Tourists may spend one week in Shanghai and still feel its not enough but it is more than sufficient for them in Singapore. This would also mean that tourists spend less time and money in Singapore. Singapore has to constantly create opportunities for revenue or something that allow tourists to feel that it is worth coming back for.
Moving on, some of the unique selling points of the Shanghai Bus International Travel Service is that it provides online registration. This online registration is in trend and is slowly gaining popularity now that people are more tech-savvy. It provides customers with convenience and saves a lot of time (travelling, queuing etc) for them.
Thinking about it, it will still be best if they have both the old and new. Not just to travel agencies but to most services, it is best to still preserve the traditional method and make use of the new one. Both has its pros and cons and should help complement each other. For example, if the queue is long, use the online registration. At the same time, if the online registration has an error than we can use the old manual way. In this way, we can help achieve the best of both worlds. Both can help serve as a backup plan for each other.
We had shopping and lunch time back in Chenghuangmiao! Most of us spent all our time shopping thus we had no time to eat our lunch and we had to packed food to eat on the bus!
We made our way to:
Shanghai International Convention Center
There is an upcoming event called Marine Port China 2010. It is the 12th International Exhibition On Ports, Shipping and Logistics. Mr Wilson who is in charge of organizing the whole event brought us on site and explained the registration process to us. He mentioned that each of the delegate will received a personalized barcode and it will provide their information when they visit the site. There were also some plans made to ease the whole movement of registration for example, there were six counters which is able to cater to 6000 delegates but there is also 3000 delegates attending. This is part of their plan to speed up the process and this is part of their contingency plan for overcrowding. They were renovating the site thus we were not able to walk around.
There is an upcoming event called Marine Port China 2010. It is the 12th International Exhibition On Ports, Shipping and Logistics. Mr Wilson who is in charge of organizing the whole event brought us on site and explained the registration process to us. He mentioned that each of the delegate will received a personalized barcode and it will provide their information when they visit the site. There were also some plans made to ease the whole movement of registration for example, there were six counters which is able to cater to 6000 delegates but there is also 3000 delegates attending. This is part of their plan to speed up the process and this is part of their contingency plan for overcrowding. They were renovating the site thus we were not able to walk around.
After this, we embarked on a 2.5hours journey to SuZhou where we were greeted with a sumptuous dinner of the delicacies! Dinner was really a spread and the food is really different!
After dinner, we had some free time to walk around:
Guan Quan street.
This street is a mixture of both modern and old. There are back alleys where it is really old school, however the shops there were quite modern. There are a lot of different brands there. We also saw a lot of beggars around begging for money on the street and we didn’t see that happening in Shanghai!
This street is a mixture of both modern and old. There are back alleys where it is really old school, however the shops there were quite modern. There are a lot of different brands there. We also saw a lot of beggars around begging for money on the street and we didn’t see that happening in Shanghai!
We are spending our night in SuZhou today in a Oriental Hotel. All the furniture is wooden and Chinese. There are also Chinese characters on the walls. The beds are also hard as Chinese likes to sleep on hard beds because it is good for their backbone but we are definitely not used to it!
Goodnight! We’ll be heading back to Shanghai tomorrow night and we can’t wait to be in the super luxurious hotel!
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