It seems I was your close neighbour for the past year.I live on the GZ DG border. I cant answer your question, but I will answer so it goes to the main board.

Paging icniff

Suzhou is a lovely city to live in with it's good mixture of old and new.

It might depend on where in Suzhou you'll be - the old(er) city, or the new city... and there's the SIP where the universities are located around a park.

There is a regular poster on here who lives/d there, but I haven't seen him post in a while. Do a search for Suzhou, and I'm sure you'll find a few posts.

Personally, on the couple of times I've visited there, I've liked it.

If expensive and loads of foreigners are the main cons for you, then Suzhou won't be that great, and definitely not Shanghai.  I noticed that a few of the normal things in SZ like cookies, or things like fried rice tend to have a minimum of an extra 2 RMB added on. Cab fares tick up rather quickly. A bit hard to find a 20 RMB Korean bibimap (石锅拌饭） that you'd be able to find in other places. Of course expensive is a relative concept, if you are looking for quality meat and dairy products then pretty much all of China is expensive. 

And if you are actually looking to learn about the "real" China then Suzhou wouldn't be a good choice since its a very large exception compared to the rest of China. Economically healthy, very developed, very clean, English is spoken a lot more commonly but with the typical Chinese twangs (this is not a perk in my opinion, so I don't particularly prefer SZ) a lot of sights that you could easily dig up on the net.