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This is the best restaurant in town.
For a few yuan, you can get broad noodles and flatbreads.
The broad noodles, served in soy sauce, are the prototype of fettuccine.
It's hard to accept the idea that the Chinese have invented everything,
including the fettuccine.
Suzhou is most famous for its parks.
The rich Mandarins and the court officials
built these gardens to spend here their years of retirement.
They are labyrinths of stones, streams, water lilies and small temples.
They continue to please the eyes of the generation that has separated from the aristocratic life,
the intellectual discourse, the nostalgic feelings for nature.
Every window, every rock has some significance.
And so does the name of the gardens:
the Gardens of Harmony, or the Gardens of the Humble Administrators.
It's not easy to enter a Buddhist temple in China.
They are closed or do not allow public admission,
and are not often desecrated and transformed into factories.
It's hard to believe that the religious sentiments have disappeared completely in a country
that has been dominated for hundreds of years
by the thoughts and ideas of Buddha and Confucius,
and where the Emperor was worshipped as a divine being.
Today, this West Garden Temple in Suzhou
is visited as a museum of the past preserved as a curiosity.
500 statues. All of them representing Buddha
in his various fantastic and symbolic incarnations.
The same deity depicted through the different stages of life.
An example of a personality cult from the former times.
Once, Nanjing was a corrupt capital
that hosted the glorious Ming Emperors.
Now it's an industrial and commercial center
that has played an important role in the Civil War and the Communist Revolution.
This district in the ancient center of Nanjing
used to be a lair of petty crimes and prostitution.
There is a medical center in the district, neat and efficient.
It has to rely, however, on herbal medicine and acupuncture,
which are the common resorts of the needy medicine.