Shuishang Park

Shuishang Park is the main city park located in the heart of Tianjin city a little bit west of the huge tower where on our last visit we replaced the phrase "revolving restaurant" with "revolting restaurant". Eat the food up there at your own peril!

Tower aside (we certainly won't going to visit it today) the park is nicely themed, and the park has a decent selection of rides. Being in the heart of the city the park was reasonably busy too.

I rode the wheel last time and remembering it being a bit of a sweat box, and a queue today meant I wasn't going to be riding this again.

This is probably one of the biggest city parks that we visited on the trip.

The water splash was easily the biggest draw today with a huge crowd cheering every splash down and some more foolish souls standing in the splash zone in an attempt to cool down. The water didn't look particularly clean though.

Anyway, onto the coasters. I knew that this park had two rollercoasters for us to ride and as they were both down on our last visit we had 2 potential hits. In fact doing some digging there must be some major downtime on these rides as a few clubs have been to China and these should be easy hits but no-one has ridden them yet...until now. The spinning mouse that was roped off last time was open. Cool!

As was the big SLC, which had only just completed construction in 2010. This one seemed to open just as we got to it, a sizeable crowd of locals and exchange students had gathered to ridden it and the family that run the ride showed up to let us on.

Look at the additional padding on the seat. All this does is serve to push you deeper into the restraints giving you no opportunity to lean back.

and as you go through the loop the forces and seat combine into a sensation that can only be described as a punch to the sternum. It was a very strange feeling. Like fighting a boxer who only throws head punches to have an SLC that throws in a shot to the body is something that I just wasn't prepared for. At least now I have a story should someone say SLCs just smack your head.

An improvised ring toss game.

So, with the final park of the day we did get our credits. They were only a cookie-cut mouse and a rough SLC but given our day they tasted sweet!

Now as mentioned earlier today was supposed to be about visiting Happy Valley, which wasn't ready for us. So imagine the irony in us getting back to our hotel to a message that the ride builders had organised something for us at the park and wanting to know when we'd be there. This meant that tomorrow's plans would have to be reworked and we'd head over to the park in the afternoon. Our bad day had just gotten a finished on a high...we were going to Happy Valley.

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