We arrived safely and found a cab to take us to our hotel. With traffic that trip was nearly as long as the train. The hotel was grand and beautiful. One of the nice things about travel in China is that even the nice hotels are cheap by US standards. As we unloaded we realized we had forgotten to buy our train tickets back.

For reasons I will never quite understand you cannot buy round trip train tickets in China. In Shanghai you can buy tickets to just about anywhere, but you cannot buy tickets to return to the city. They also do not have any sort of Internet purchasing function, or at least none that I can understand.

Luckily, the hotel had a service that would buy tickets for us. Trains leave Suzhou heading for Shanghai about every 45 minutes all day long. We debated on when to return on settled on early afternoon on Monday.

There were no tickets available. Then we asked for an earlier ticket. There were none available. Then we asked for any tickets at all. There were none available. There were more than a dozen trains headed to Shanghai that Monday and every single ticket had already been purchased.

Even though December 31 is not the official Chinese New Year, this is one circumstance where the culture has gotten with the Western nations and decided to celebrate with days off.

A few hundred million people on vacation at one time means no trains for me.

We then considered hiring a private van service. These are non-official taxi services that will take you to and fro for a bargained upon price. There was then a long debate between ourselves and the hotel staff as to where the taxi might take us in Shanghai. Our Chinese was about as good as the staff’s Shanghai geography, which is to say terrible. We wasted a good hour on that before we made the call to the taxi service only to find out that they wanted way too much money for the trip.

Frustrated and tired we took a taxi to the bus station and got bus tickets for the following afternoon. We had now been in Suzhou for about three hours and had only managed to see the inside of our hotel and a bus station. But it wasn’t the sights that were on our mind now, it was food.

We directed ourselves to a Mexican place we had seen advertised. Good Mexican food is a beautiful, rare thing in China and this place was a fine jewel. I had what I must say were the best tacos I have ever eaten. They were set up more like fajitas than tacos and were simply fabulous.