In September 2014 I moved to Jiangmen in the Guangdong province of China. I came here to study chinese and I got a job along the way teaching english at a school.

The chinese learning was going well in Wuyi University in Jiangmen, but life in this city was pretty boring and monotonous. For this and a few other reasons, we decided to move (I say we because my younger brother is on this adventure with me).

We chose Suzhou just because a family friend recommended this city, we hadn’t heard of it before nor had visited it, but I’m so glad we picked it. Last week we packed our things, emptied our Jiangmen apartment and hopped on a train to Suzhou. The fast train departed from Guangzhou to Shanghai, and from Shanghai it’s just a half an hour train ride to Suzhou.

Suzhou, in the Jiangsu Province, has a rich history of over 2500 years and is the capital of the Wu kingdom. It’s also called the “Oriental Venice” due to its canals and streams that cut across the city originating from the Yangtze river.

As I’m the early stages of settling in the city, I haven’t gone around much but I really like what I have seen. I have been to the more modern area called Suzhou Industrial Park or SIP where you can find tall buildings, wide streets and a very cosmopolitan way of life. And on the other hand I’ve also visited the more picturesque streets with old chinese style houses and crowded pedestrian streets.

I can’t wait to explore the tourists sights,there are plenty of gardens and pagodas to check out as well as museums and the ancient towns. And I’m so excited to start my chinese classes again, making friends, hopefully finding a job and starting this new chapter in my China adventure.

(All the pictures in this post I took with my phone, I haven’t taken my camera out to take better pictures just yet, but I will get to that soon enough 🙂 )