Had a trip to Suzhou to meet my friend’s family, and fell in love with a building. Also keeping up the chess grind.

Suzhou

Got back from Suzhou! I spent some time with my friend’s parents who treated me to a delicious homecooked meal. The dad decided to serve me a big glass of 56% ABV baijiu with the food so my friend and I were tipsy all day. They showed off one of their 4 rental properties in a residential district, which is a big lot of land with 6-8 tall apartment buildings.

After all this we went to 同里, a touristy water town. The parents needed to drop off some cooking oil and food to their grandpa’s brother who worked at a shop there. There was a cat cafe we spent some time at, and we went off to a buffet afterwards.

I took the subway to a hostel in the tourist center street to spend the night. This hostel was the worst experience I’ve had so far – Water was covering the floor of the bathroom and bedroom area, all 7 Chinese dudes I shared the room with were nice but smelled terrible. At 1am they were still using douyin on their phones and one was talking to his girlfriend for an hour while I tried to sleep. And sure enough, at 8am, earth-shaking construction started adjacent to the room. On the bright side I got up early for once!

This morning was a trip to the Suzhou Museum and then the train home immediately afterward. The Museum was breathtaking! In my life, I’ve never seen a more tasteful and beautiful complex. It fit the typical Suzhou color palette and blended in well with the rest of the buildings on the street, but the glass sections made it tastefully modern. Turns out the architect was the same that designed the iconic Louve Pyramid, Ieoh Ming Pei. Pictures won’t do it justice, but look at them anyways. If you’re interested in academic writing and a narrative analysis of the museum, check this paper out.

As for their collection, there were pieces that spanned from Neolithic to contemporary. My favorite parts were the Ming scholar’s study which showed a tastefully decorated room of what would have been a very tidy Ming dynasty scholar’s workroom. There was also some contemporary art on the east side of the museum including some paintings and sculptures by Shao Fan (邵帆).

What confused me was the “Olive green lotus-shaped bowl.” This is, according to the museum, their best and most famous artifact.

After all this I walked to the train station and took a fast train back home.

Impressions of Suzhou

Suzhou is to me a more beautiful city than Hangzhou. Even in the outer areas, there’s a consistent aesthetic to the buildings in color and architecture.

When visiting the rental property of my friend’s parents, the Chinese housing investment bubble boom really hit home. On the outskirts of the suburbs of this city, there were 8 buildings (and more being constructed) filled with empty concrete rooms for potential referbishment and tennants. But the building we went into was dusty, obviously uninhabited, and kind of far away from things like grocery stores or entertainment. It’s definately not a bad place to live, but I’m not convinced it’s a worthwhile investment, and people that buy them may need to call in favors from relatives to buy the place or rent it at low margins. Only time will tell!

Chess

Terrible. My 10+0 rating is slipping below 1000 and I’m losing worse than I did two weeks ago. I feel a lot of this is due to lack of awareness or concentration which leads to blunders more than tactical mistakes. This could be since I’m usually playing at nighttime and tired. The grind continues anyways, any my new routine is going to try playing 10+0s every day or so and try to win at least once. I’ll also look into some openings so I have a better plan 4 moves in.

I also logged into my 6 year old chess.com account and am going to try that site out too. It looks like the emacs of chess, while lichess is vim. I’ve always been a vim guy myself but maybe chess.com will fit me better.

What I’ve Been Liking

• Dwarf Fortress: I played this since I was a kid and try to come back to it occasionally. The inspiration for this time around was all the ancient crafts in the Suzhou Museum, so I’m going to make a fortress that’s entire economy is based around maximizing the amounts of craft exports.