Trip of a Lifetime - Day 17

If I thought that yesterday was a long day I was sadly mistaken! Today was even longer, more stressful, MORE STEPS TAKEN, and very glorious the more I think about it.

I told you that my entry would be very long today, so buckle your seat belt and be sure to check out the acrobatic show that follows this entry to see the whole day. Here we go!

After breakfast we boarded the bus (again) and went to the Bund. The word "Bund" means an embankment or an embanked quay, and comes from the Urdu word band, meaning an embankment, levee or dam. The Shanghai Bund has dozens of historical buildings, lining the Huangpu River, that once housed numerous banks and trading houses from Britain, France, the U.S., Russia, Germany, Japan, The Netherlands and Belgium, as well as the consulates of Russia and Britain, a newspaper, the Shanghai Club and the Masonic Club. The Bund lies north of the old, walled city of Shanghai. This was initially a British settlement; later the British and American settlements were combined in the International Settlement. A building boom at the end of 19th century and beginning of 20th century led to the Bund becoming a major financial hub of East Asia. The former French Bund, east of the walled city was formerly more a working harbourside. We walked along this important area and I was part of the crowd. I got some good shots of the local people and sights. I even got a shot of what I consider to be a typical tourist taking shots. Hope I don't look like this to them! It was another overcast day, but that kept the temperature cooler so walking was very pleasant. The architecture in this part of town is fascinating.

They are all very different from the buildings we see at home. From there we went to the Shanghai Museum of Art. It was a very modern building and was very well planned. There was a Goya exhibition there which we enjoyed but there was no photography allowed in this part if the museum. However, we could take photos everywhere else in the museum so I got some really good shots. Frank wanted to be one of three Buddhas, but I decided that they look more like the Three Stooges. The exhibits were really wonderful and I can only show you a few since there were so many. Lots of ancient artifacts that had been very well preserved. Since I used to be a hat person, I'm always fascinated with hats.We also thought that this little dog looked just like Franklin and Beth's dog, Harry. I had no idea we'd find him in a museum!

We then had a Dim-Sum lunch at the embroidery gallery and looked at all the beautiful work that I put in my slide show. Our place mats had the history of the Embroidery Gallery on them.You can see how large some of the silk paintings were. The girls that did the stitching were wonderful artisans. The silk thread was no bigger than a hair in circumference and some of the pieces took over a year to complete. As a stitcher myself, I couldn't believe the complexity of their work. This was a really nice place, the food was excellent and we got to see the chef at the front desk on our way out.

From there we started on the Bataan Death March. We went through a market place where there was a huge crowd and then on to the Yuyan Garden. Here this man is making cotton candy on the back of his bicycle and when I came upon this old man, I thought he was dead! As it turned out he was only napping since he was probably tired from trying to sell his wares. There were people visiting and also playing cards everywhere. We had to wind our way through the crowds to get to the garden.

The garden was reportedly first established in 1559 as a private garden created by Pan Yunduan, who spent almost 20 years building a garden to please his father Pan En, a high-ranking official in the Ming Dynasty, during his father's old age. Today Yuyuan occupies an area of 5 acres, and is divided into six general areas laid out in the Suzhou style.

The walkways here are elaborate as well, being laid out in mosaic style patterns like the ones in the other garden we visitedand the doorways are never just rectangles like most of ours are. They have a beautiful design and an aesthetic beauty to them.

Once again I will call attention to the details of the architecture. The craftsmanship is exquisite and so detailed.

The locals visit this place all the time and always take a photograph as a remembrance of this lovely place. This cute little fellow was fascinated with the Foo Dog statue and I couldn't resisting taking his picture.I wish we had been able to have more time in the market place. This teapot was actually pouring real tea into a circulating fountain and this wonderful candy dragon was made from spun sugar. You could request the shape you wanted and they would make it as you watched.We did buy an extra suitcase to get our goodies home in. My feet were so tired and our day wasn't over yet. We had already walked nearly 9 miles. Frank wanted to buy one of these to scoot around town on ,and I thought I'd personally be better off with this!

Tonight we have the acrobatic show and our farewell dinner. We will be leaving a lot of the Viking group and we will continue on to Guilin and Hong Kong. After dinner we went to the Acrobatic show. Be sure and look at the slide show that follows.

I do want to mention the buildings here in Shanghai. There are so many high rises that you couldn't believe it unless you saw it. It makes NYC look like a drop in the bucket. Shanghai is one of the world's busiest ports. In 2005, Shanghai ranked first of the world's busiest ports in terms of cargo throughout, handling a total of 443 million tons of cargo. In terms of container traffic, it is the third busiest port in the world, following Singapore and Hong Kong. The 2000 census put the population of Shanghai Municipality to 16.738 million, including the floating population, which made up 3.871 million.

As we drove around this enormous city we could not help but notice all the air conditioning units in the windows. Our guide told us that the newer buildings had central air. And talk about a bunch of power lines! You have to feed those window units and washing machines :-)

We're really tired as it has been an extremely full and busy day so we fell into bed after the acrobatic show which ended at 9:45.

We fly to Guilin tomorrow but have the morning free to re-pack. There's a strict limit on luggage weight for this flight which makes no sense at all. Your checked luggage cannot weigh over 44 pounds, but you can carry on as many bags as you can hold and there is no weight restriction. Go Figure!!! We will look like the coolies did when we boarded the boat with all of our heavy carry ons, but we're going to make it. Frank does something tomorrow morning that very few people from this country have done, so be sure and check back. It's exciting and I promise that tomorrow's will be short!!!

Pcasso

Shanghai Acrobatic Show

I've put this Acrobatic performance in the form of a slide show since there are so many photographs and I'm sure you're getting tired by now. I'll repeat, if you click on "View All Images" you'll see the captions that go along with the photos. This performance was close enough to our hotel that we could walk there and that was a welcomed relief from climbing on another bus. We were sitting about 20 rows back and I couldn't use a flash, not to overlook the fact that some of these guys were moving SOOO fast, that some of the images aren't quite as clear as I would have preferred, but you'll get the general feel for what we saw. Enjoy!

Check out my Slide Show!

Day of Rest

Sunday is a day of rest, so I'm going to give you a break and I'm going to take a break as well. There will be a long blog about our first full day in Shanghai tomorrow, but I thought I'd give you a sneak preview of some of the wonderful handwork that we saw in a Silk Gallery in Shanghai. If you look at the entry below this one you will see a slide show of some of the wonderful pieces of art that were there. It's hard to believe that these weren't either paintings or photographs. They were difficult to photograph through glass, but I did the best that I could. Enjoy your day of rest and tune in tomorrow. Hope you had a great weekend.
Pcasso

Check out my Slide Show!

Trip of a Lifetime - Day 16

Today's entry will be short and sweet, but I'll have quite a few photographs for you. We left the boat for the last time at 7:45 a.m., said farewell to the Viking Century Sun and it's staff, and boarded the bus for our final destination today ... Shanghai.

Our first stop was in Nanjing where we visited a 14th century City Wall. It was one of the biggest city gates in the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). The wall was built from 1366 to 1386 and was made from huge rocks and was held together with a special "environmental" cement made from lime, tung oil and sticky rice juice. It's still the world's longest capital city wall with a length of 21.35 km ( it was originally 33.686 km)

The delicately designed gate has two archways that are wide enough for 15 people to walk abreast. When you are on the top of the wall, you can have a towering view over Xuan Wu Lake
When we left this intriguing place we went to Suzhou which is called the Venice of the East because of it's canals and water system. We toured a private garden, the Garden of the Master Nets, which was one of the most exquisite and smallest of Suzhou's residential gardens. It was designed during the Song Dynasty as a gift from an Emperor to his mistress. It later became the residence of a government official after whom the garden was named. It was perfectly beautiful and so serene. There were Koi in all the ponds and small waterfalls. I even had the good fortune to spot a herd of turtles playing with the Koi! It was a perfect place to spend some quality quiet time just sitting and thinking

or resting by the stream and reading a good book.Frank decided to be the official sentinel of the garden, so we were all supposed to salute him before we went inside to look at some of the living quarters that had been preserved and kept as they were when the government official lived there. There were hidden corridors and treasures around every corner and even beautiful little secret gardens to explore. The sidewalks all had designs in them that had been made from rocks and pebbles centuries ago. There was natural art everywhere. It was lovely and has been so well kept over time.

We then went to the Holiday Inn for lunch and it was not the best meal we have had on the whole trip. They even gave us forks! (I guess we looked like tourists )We had lots more things to do today, so we really didn't need to eat much anyway. I'd rather be looking, photographing and learning than eating. You can eat anytime when you're home!

From there we left for our next stop of the day and I saw two things that you don't see in the states. Their touring buses have beds in them so the passengers can rest if they need to (they don't look too comfortable) and then we saw a truck with some hogs in it and we all started saying, "This Little Piggie Went to Market". Poor things. They were having a nap as well but I'm sure they didn't know what their last stop would be :-( After lunch we toured a silk factory and I bought several things there including 2 silk quilts. They ship them in a vacuum type packaging so they are easier to get home that way. We had ours shipped since we would have too much luggage on the return trip to carry them. We won't be limited with luggage weight on the final flight, thank goodness!!! They had an area there that was as large as a department store with beautiful silk items. We first took a tour of the factory before we went into the shopping area. It was fascinating learning about the silk worms and watching the workers take a tiny silk cocoon and turn it into something larger than a shower cap.
The silkworm is the larva of Bombyx mori i.e., the "silkworm of the mulberry tree"), the domesticated silk moth. A moth in the family Bombycidae, it is very important economically as the producer of silk. It is entirely dependent on humans for its reproduction and no longer occurs naturally in the wild. Silk culture has been practised for at least 5,000 years in China. A silkworm's preferred food is White Mulberry leaves.Eggs take about ten days to hatch. Silkworms have a strong appetite, as do all lepidopteran larvae. They eat day and night, preferring White Mulberry. When the color of their heads turns darker, it means that it is time for them to molt. After they have moulted four times their bodies turn slightly yellow and their skin becomes tighter. The larvae enclose themselves in a cocoon of raw silk produced in the salivary glands that provides protection during the vulnerable, almost motionless pupal state.

In China, there is a legend that the discovery of the silkworm's silk was by an ancient empress called Xi Ling-Shi. She was drinking tea under a tree when a cocoon fell into her tea. She picked it out and as it started to wrap around her finger, she slowly felt a warm sensation. When the silk ran out, she saw a small cocoon. In an instant, she realized that this cocoon was the source of the silk. She taught this to the people and it became widespread. There are many more legends about the silkworm.

The cocoon is made of a single continuous thread of raw silk from 1000 to 3000 feet long. The fibers are very fine and lustrous, about 1/2500th of an inch in diameter. About 2,000 to 3,000 cocoons are required to make a pound of silk. Based on about 1100 yards per cocoon, ten unravelled cocoons could theoretically extend vertically to the height of Mt Everest. At least 70 million pounds of raw silk are produced each year, requiring nearly 10 billion pounds of mulberry leaves. One pound of silk represents about 1,000 miles of filament. The annual world production represents 70 billion miles of silk filament, a distance well over 300 round trips to the sun
The Chinese guarded their knowledge of silk. It is said that a Chinese woman smuggled eggs to Japan, hidden in her hair. The Japanese thus began their love affair with silk. A single kimono requires the silk from 2100 silkworm moths to produce and Lucky me .... Frank bought me one! Hopefully these photographs will give you a better visual explanation than I have done verbally. It's a complicated process.

When we left there we continued on to Shanghai. We arrived around 6:00 p.m. and had an early dinner in our room, unpacked and went to bed. It's been a very long and full day. We're staying at the Portman Ritz Carlton which is a lovely hotel. Viking takes really good care of you. Our room is on the 39th floor and we have a great view of the city.

The public rooms are all very nice as well. I especially like the large piece of jade in the bar area. It's very impressive,and the library is very quite and comfortable if you want to get away from it all.

I forgot to mention that our guide told us that all the laundry you see hanging out of windows and on clothes lines in front of the houses everywhere is due to the fact that most people have washers but they don't have dryers. In fact, she said that the laundry flapping in the breeze has become the National Flag of China :-) Well, once again I've made a liar out of myself. When I start talking about our travels I never know when to stop. You're probably ready to sweep me under the carpet by now, but I've been having such a great time re-living our adventures through this virtual journal that I don't want to stop. I only hope that you want to stay with me for a few more days. It's late and I'm ready for bed. Happy travel dreams!

Pcasso