With Christmas and New Year's Day falling on Tuesday, we received two long weekends. Unfortunately, the school that my wife works for gave her Christmas Eve and day off, but made her make part of it up on the Saturday before New Year's, making it only a three day weekend. Yes Virginia, you can celebrate Christmas in China, but you have to make it up.

Originally we had planned to make big trips over both weekends, but as with so many things in Shanghai, those plans didn’t work out. Initially we planned to spend Christmas in Hong Kong. Planning big trips in China is a bit more difficult than planning them in the States. Where in the States we’d simply hit Travelquest for the quickest roadways and then get in our car, in China there is a lot more planning involved.

After spending several days trying to figure out just how to get to Hong Kong, where to stay, and what to do we consulted my sister for advice. After much more discussion we hit upon a separate plan. We get three weeks off in February for Chinese New Year and we were all planning to go to Thailand. To get to Thailand you have to make a layover in Hong Kong and we decided we’d just make a couple of days of it.

At this point Christmas was getting very near and we were tired of the laborious planning involved in travel, so we decided to just hang around the city. Some friends were doing the same and we made plans to do some indoor skiing, some ice skating, and some miscellaneous adventuring.

Remember when I said nothing was easy in China? Well, as it turned out, my wife got a bit sick over the long weekend and we wound up staying home for pretty much all of it. For Christmas day proper she felt well enough to head over to our pseudo-family’s home and we had a very nice meal with friends and family. Then we went to another friend’s house for games and fun.

It wasn’t the extravagant trip I had hoped for, but it was pretty good anyway.

Even so, I wasn’t going to do the same for New Year's. In our nearly five months here we have often heard the name Suzhou. Universally people praise this city and after looking at pictures online we decided to make a go of it. It helped matters a great deal that it is only about 45 minutes by train.

We left bright and early Sunday morning. Along for the ride was my wife, my sister, her husband, and our friend Dan. The train ride down was lovely. The seats were comfortable, there was lots of leg room and the train was sleek and clean. It was also fast. So fast, in fact, that it took us less time to train from Shanghai to Suzhou than it did to taxi/subway from our apartment to the Shanghai rail station.