Tong Li Introduction (Part I)

There's a lot to show and tell about our visit to Tong Li, a small watertown near Shuzhou, and this is already a busy week for me (and its only Sunday night). So I'm going to blog about Tong Li in smaller bits - 'bite sized pieces', if you will.

On Saturday morning, we arrived in the second place near Shanghai that claims the name "The Venice of the East", and this did hit a little closer to the mark. Tiny roads run along the banks of small canals which are criss-crossed by stone bridges. The town has three main bridges (or only three bridges?) which are supposed to bring luck to whoever crosses all three. It seems that there's a lot of things that we found you can do here to bring luck; so if you didn't get a chance to hit every bridge, there is surely a rock nearby that you can rub for an equal amount of good karma.

Tong Li is the second town that Kim and I have been to (the first being Clovelly in England) that has an entry fee to the town for tourists. That struck me (both times) as a bit silly, especially when the tourists usually bring in a lot of money in other ways anyway. However, it was well worth the price of admission, but we'll find out why in part II...