Travelling to Suzhou on national day

1st October (29 days till my birthday)
This morning I got up really early because we were getting the train to suzhou at 10.30 and it was going to be really busy travelling to the train station because its national day, and one of the busiest times for travelling in china. But we managed to get to the train station ok and we had a bit of a wait, but id taken some work to do. I was just trying to translate the reading passage and the girl sat opposite me said she was studying english and that she would like to help me,so she basically did all my work for me. She was really nice,she was called stephanie and she had been learnng english for 7 years and she gave me some tips for learning chinese.
The train was so exciting. It was really comfy and spacious, and it only took half an hour to get to suzhou. But when we got there it was mad, litterally hundreds and hundreds of poeple everywhere. I had expected it to be bad because of national day, but i never thought it would be this bad, and then none of the taxi drivers would take us to the hostel because aparantly they'd never heard of it, but one guy offered to drive us, and completely ripped us off. He dropped us off at the end of the road because it was a really narrow old street running down the side of the cannal and i thought that it couldnt be right, but i found a signpost and it was the right place so we set off down there, and then we had to turn down an even smaller narrower lane. It was really interesting walking down there, we could see inside some of the houses and poeples homes were just one little room, id never seen anything like it. Part way down this little street we found the hostel which was amazing. From the outside all you can see is a white wall, but when you go in there is a big courtyard with all the rooms surrounding the courtyard. It was the most amazing place that i've ever stayed, it was so pretty and the history of the building was so interesting (but quite long so i cant be bothered to write about it). We left our bags and went exploring the old part of suzhou around all the canals and we arrived at the east gardens which were really pretty and they had a little zoo. (Suzhou is famous for its gardens). In the east gardens there were lots of streams and people were fishing in them for goldfish and crabs to take home. After we left ths garden we went to get some lunch and then carried on walking around suzhou until we found the Lion Forrest Garden which is the only surviving garden from the ming dynasty. It was really pretty, altho i little bit too busy. We were walking back on one of the main roads back to the hostel and all along the street they had loads of pet shops and dog hairdressers, and i saw a little white dogs with pink ears and a pink tail, i want one!