At last! The chance to sleep in – even if it is just ’til 7 a.m. Not as heavy a schedule today for one thing and for another, we’ll be here tonight, so no need to add miles traveling to the next town. But, we awoke to a dense fog – so heavy we couldn’t see anything out our hotel room window. I even climbed up on the ledge to look down – nothing. Eerie. But by the time we descended to the 26th floor for breakfast, it was clearing a little – mostly because it had started raining. Not unusual in Shanghai, we hear. Glad we brought our umbrellas.
First up, the silk rug factory tour. The main factory has actually moved out of Shanghai, but they maintain a demo set-up and sales office there. Once again, incredible craftsmanship, and all by hand.
The key to quality is the number of knots per square inch, by which the silk is tied to the rug. The best of these have 6,000! That gives them greater detail and also takes much longer. So they can command in the thousands of dollars. Due to the quality of silk, rotating the rug changes the hues. Gotta see it to believe it.
Lunch was an ordeal. Not the quality of the food (Mongolian barbecue – yum!) but getting to it. The ordeal was trying to stay on your feet in the rainy mess. For a city that gets a lot of rain, they don’t have non-slip floors. In fact, in one place, they were actually using a squeegee to mop up. They often just throw cardboard down on the floor instead of carpets. Highlight of the meal was celebrating the birthday of one of our group. The tour guides made a very special presentation.
After lunch, a group of us took a ride on the wild side – the maglev train, that is. I mentioned construction on the Shanghai/Hangzhou line to be completed in three years. The line to Pudong Int’l Airport is done now. Roundtrip fare is $25 and I’ll bet they’re making more off tourists than they are airport passengers. They have to pay for it somehow. I won’t attempt to explain magnetic levitation; suffice to say, it enables incredible speed. During the short 7 1/2-minute ride each way, we easily hit tip speed of 431 Kilometers per hour (240 mph)! It really didn’t seem to be going that fast, ’til we passed the other train going the same speed the other way. Let’s just say several people shrieked at the sudden flash right outside their window. If you look over Kathy’s head, you can see the readout of 430 km/h.
To calm our nerves, our tour guides took us shopping! This was around the Yu Graden, at a place they call, of all things, “Chinatown”. That’s in part because it’s been built to resemble other Chinatown tourist traps. And this had it all – vendors on the street and in little shops. They were peddling everything. I gotta hand it to them; they’re persistent. They love to bargain. Although a bit annoying when we first got here, it’s a change from having to chase down a salesperson for help in some stores in America.
We made it an early dinner that night, so we could attend the ERA Show. The best way to describe it is a Chinese “Cirque de Soleil”. Acrobatics, theatrics, music, acting, motorcycle “cage of death” – absolutely amazing, to quote a friend. And what a way to end the trip. With an early rise in the morning, we called it quits.
April 1, 2010 at 8:49 pm |
I did a little bargaining in the night markets in Thailand, but I wasn’t very good at it. I did listen in to some who were good, both sides were enjoying the sport of it.