Chronicles of E²: Another day, another town

We've been going from one town to another everyday. The days are getting blurred and mixed up in my head. In Nanjing, we went to see the Nanjing Bridge over Yang Tze River. This is the longest river in China. A lot of literature had written about this river. And growing up in Taiwan, it had almost a mystical quality in our minds and we had never thought we would ever get to see it. Twenty years ago when I came to China, I got to see the upper part of the Yang Tze (three gorges) before they decided to build the ginormous dam and relocate thousands of people so they could flood the area. Such a pity. Nanjing is in the lower part of the river. The bridge is pretty impressive. Our local guide made a big deal out of it.

We then were taken directly to a specialty shop where they sold snuff bottles that had been painted from the inside. The masters' work was truly impressive, but these were pieces of art and had price tags that were above my humble reach, so I just admired their work. The shop was FULL of young sales girls (apparently art students) that follow your every move and jump to explain things to you if you even showed any interest. It felt a bit like high pressure sales. Good thing I've had good training from going to timeshare sales, but it still wasn't very comfortable. Then just when we thought we were done with high pressure sales, they took us to a jade specialty shop. These shops, I believe, are all owned by the government. Our trip is partially subsidized by these shops, so I guess we can't complain that they wanted to sell us stuff. They sat us down for a little demonstration/informational session. At the end of it, Mrs. Angry Bird stood up and said "I'm not interested in these small things. I want to see big stuff!" sending all the salesgirls immediately into a frenzy. Hilarious! I'm not much of a jewelry person. I can't tell good jade from bad, so we huddled in the fringes trying to avoid the sales girls. Mrs. Angry Bird ended up buying some sort of jade statue to put in their big house in Shanghai.

That afternoon, we left Nanjing to go to Wuxi. We toured a beautiful park with traditional buildings and gardens. Unfortunately, it was late and got too dark. We were bummed that we didn't get to spend as much time there since we were stuck at the jade place for so long.

That next morning, we got to see Tai Hu, the third largest lake in China. They grow fresh water pearls here, so guess what? Next stop, pearl shop! These are not like salt water pearls where only one pearl grows in the clam. These clams can have 10-50 pearls each! Of course, not every pearl is perfect and good enough to be made into jewelry. They grind the imperfect ones into powder and make cosmetic products out of them. Once again, a group of salesgirls were there to sell sell sell. We retreated as soon as we could.

Then, I guess we weren't done with the sales pet of the tour. They took us to a "museum" of traditional tea pots made of this particular rock which was only available in Wuxi. This was actually pretty interesting to me. We got to see a master at work. A couple of people in our group picked up big ticket items.

In Nanjing

Fancy looking fish. Tasted a bit salty though.

We took these choo choo train looking shuttles from the parking lot to Zhongshan Ling (where Sun Yat Sen was buried).

Stairs!!!

Made it to the top!!

Stone lions come in pairs, female and male. The female gets a lion cub while the male gets a ball to play with (doesn't sound fair). This mom has her cub under her paw... as it should be! ;o)

Bridge over Yang Tze River, constructed by Chinese people back in Mao's era (I think). They had tried to hired people from other countries but didn't work out.

The local guide (the guy standing) was articulate, just a bit slick but funny as hell. Here he's priming us for our next "shopping" stop, snuff bottles (and other stuff) painted from inside. Great works of art. But we were not allowed to take pictures in there. They're afraid other countries will steal the craft.

In Wuxi

This was a beautiful park. Too bad we got here too late because of previous shopping stop. It quickly got too dark to take pictures. Hopefully, dad has better photos than I do.