Jessica sells us silk!

Day 4   Friday, November 15, 2019   Suzhou and Wuxi

Oh Jessica Jessica. How doth thee sell so well? Her smile belies a cunning salesperson, who cracked us up and made sure we knew that if we just ordered today, she'd throw in the kitchen sink! She could have sold frozen foods to the Eskimos.

Our day began, of course, with breakfast, and that meant our first experience with "exotic" Chinese culinary treats. The elaborate buffet was fun to explore to see what all they offered, and some of them were quite noteworthy. I wrote down several items a few days later in Shanghai, but I will note them here because it illustrates what we saw each morning: salted fish skins, cold black fungus, delicious seaweed, five fragrant mustard, fried west blue flowers, dried scented radish, Xiangxi cloud silk, red sugar hair cake, sour and spicy lotus root belt. Wow. Janet and I did try several exotic items over our days in both China and Japan, and sometimes we were okay with them, other times not!

Our first morning stop was the silk factory. Who knew we wouldn't get out of there before shelling out U.S. $540? But that was before we embraced Jessica!

In the photo above, she is explaining the benefits of "dupion" silk, which she made us believe was so much better than normal silk, and how they specialize in it and therefore we should definitely buy from THEM. Dupion silk is reeled from two or more entangled cocoons, creating tightly woven yardage with a stronger and highly lustrous surface. She pulled on it, breathed through it, let us try to push through it, let us breathe through it. By golly, we'd better not miss this opportunity to BUY it!

Their display shows single cocoons in the three jars on the left, double cocoons in the two jars on the right. The captions above say how double cocoons happen when two or even three worms, for want of space, spin the silk together. It states: "Silk threads reeled from a double cocoon are uneven, thicker, and harder than normal silks." Jessica milked this idea for all it was worth...literally!

She first gave us explanations for how silk comes to be, and some of its history. Silk embroideries were the imperial dynasties' #1 export for many centuries. It is shiny, lustrous, soft yet strong, and can be brilliantly dyed. The history of Chinese silk stretches back more than 2,000 years. China produces about 150,000 metric tons annually, far more than the rest of the world combined (78% of the world's silk). Silk garments were worn by emperors and royalty, and it was a status symbol. Common people were prohibited from wearing it.

Silk moths lay around 500 eggs during their lifespan of four to six days. After the eggs hatch, the caterpillars are fed a diet of mulberry leaves in a controlled environment. They weave a cocoon, whose filaments might be 600 to 900 meters long! Several filaments are twisted together to make a thread. The silk threads are then woven into cloth or used for fine embroidery.

 Jessica never stopped with the pitch. I wonder what Jack and Rob were thinking when I snapped this photo!

She made sure we all could feel how soft it was. Silk comforters are warm in winter and cool in summer, so it's obviously the best bedding there ever was. And on she went, full of humor and we laughed and laughed. "And today, our sales price is not just half the list price, NO! It's a full 70% off, and today only, we'll throw in a 2nd comforter for FREE! And if you buy the entire package, the price is NOT xyz, No, it's ONLY this tiny amount!!! You cannot pass up this opportunity, and you'll always thank me for the rest of your lives!"

Then the sales ladies swooped in to get our orders handled before we might change our minds. And all this was only for the bedding. We then went upstairs for garments and swaths of silk for making your own clothes. In all, our group bought quite a bit of stuff. I even bought 100% silk underwear, because Jessica explained how (besides being warm in winter and cool in summer) you could wash it in the sink (with shampoo) and it would dry in just 20 minutes! Sure enough, I wore them most of the remaining days of our tour, returning home with about 8 or 9 unused cotton undies.

Our next stop was the Grand Canal boat ride. The Grand Canal is an ancient grandeur project linking Beijing and Hangzhou, the town we visited in two more days. It is the earliest and longest man-made watercourse in the world, with an overall length of 1794 km (1112 miles). Its first portion was completed in 486 B.C. and open to navigation through the entire length in 1293.

 Here we are on the boat, ready to cruise. Not all of us chose this optional tour.

Steve mentioned that one of the emperors took the Grand Canal from Beijing to Wuxi, and it took 3 months. The canal was built, expanded, and maintained as a way to link the north and south, as well to link to the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers.

Other canal boats. With recorded labor of five million men and women, the first major section of the Grand Canal was completed in the year 605.

Different kinds of homes compared to all the high rises we saw from the freeways and the city outskirts. 

Laundry to dry, stretched from the home to the bridge.

One of the bridge tunnels had wall paintings, but my photos did not come out.

A different kind of canal boat.

It got pretty narrow in parts, but this was a feeder canal, not the main Grand Canal. 

Rounding a bend. By the year 735, it was recorded that about 165,000 tons of grain were shipped annually along the canal. In the southern portion where we were, the canal is still in heavy use to this day. 

We departed the boat onto this crowded shopping street, where Steve led us to his recommendation for where to eat lunch - a dumpling restaurant.

Being a crowded pedestrian shopping street does not stop scooters from speeding through beeping their horns. Here's a fairly older woman with her granddaughter(?) while a young family with two children in tow pass her going the other direction. 

Most of us from the boat did eat at the dumpling restaurant, and Steve helped us order. We had both pork and crab dumplings, plus a bowl of won ton soup and beers. We liked everything!

Right behind us there on the 2nd floor was this rice steamer, keeping us warm, and those bags of rice. 

The restaurant was right on the canal, and here's a view from our 2nd floor. 

Here's the view the other direction.

After eating, we still had some time before we regrouped, so Janet and I walked along the canal a bit. We reached a spot we had seen from the boat ride, with a wall full of white notes attached. We had asked Steve about them, and he said they were love notes. There was a nearby desk where you could purchase them.

We went in a few shops and this product caught our eyes! Yum. Sort of like those "dried fish skins" we would see at breakfast in a couple more days.

Before getting back to the group, we used a public toilet. Luckily, I needed only to pee (they always had normal urinals for the "superior sex"), but I took this photo anyway to illustrate what Janet and the women faced regardless of #1 or #2. I must relate how Janet fretted for many weeks leading up to our trip after hearing horror stories about these public "squat holes". We always tried to have toilet paper with us since they had none, and Janet did her best to "hold it" if this was the only toilet available. The term "five star" came to be used if a restroom had normal toilets and didn't stink too much. 

Once we gathered again and walked to where our bus would pick us up, I got some photos of the scooters scooting by, because I had been surprised to see how 90+% of the riders used big front covers for their hands, arms, and bodies. They were like sleeping bags to fit over you, I presume to keep you warm and keep kicked-up debris from getting onto your clothes.

During our two-hour bus trip heading west to Wuxi ("woo-she"), Steve talked to us about lots of stuff. Here are some things I wrote down:  1) when a woman has a baby, she gets to "lie down" for 64 days, and they give her a different kind of soup every one of those days; 2) bird spittal. Worm fungus; 3) Steve began to learn English in school when he was 13 yrs old. Teachers don't really know how to teach it, so it's referred to as Chinglish; 4) an apt in Shanghai costs 10,000 yuan/month to rent, or 8 million yuan to purchase; 5) Wuxi means "no tin", which the emperor decided to name the city to try to avoid attackers who might want to steal their valuable tin, which this area had been famous for; 6) the area is known for its rice wine, raspberries, king-sized honey peaches (1 lb), and pearls and shrimp from the lake.

This is during our walk on Lake Taihu, once we arrived in Wuxi. The town is a prominent historical and cultural city and has been a thriving economic center since ancient times. They produce and export rice, silk and textiles. Population is about 3.5 million, and in the last few decades it has emerged as a major producer of electrical motors, software, solar technology and bicycle parts. There's a huge Apple factory here.

As soon as we arrived in town, a local guide named Vivian joined us. But instead of giving us any sort of tour, the first thing we did was to be let free for 45 minutes to wander around this Lihu Park on Lake Taihu. We guessed that some original plan had fallen through, and they needed to kill some time. Wuxi lies in the southern delta of the Yangtze River, and this lake is huge, the 3rd largest in China. It has 90 islands, and is part of the Grand Canal.  

 After we departed the lake, we went to this famous Nanchang Street tourist area. We were given 90 minutes on our own to see the sights. On the way, Vivian preached to us about health, nature, and the "good life" in Wuxi. She said it's more relaxed here, and husbands "do more".

At the start of the street was this sign, labeled "tourist trail - meter zero". Pretty funny. The 1.6-kilometer (one mile) Nanchang Street is on the south bank of the Grand Canal and has been made into an entertainment destination with restaurants, bars, cafes, snack stores and bookstores.

 This restaurant had a fire-breathing dragon at its entrance. 

There was a Nestlé ice cream shop on the other side of the Grand Canal (Nestlé owns Häagen Dazs). Just down this street, they were filming something, probably a movie, as we walked past from where our bus dropped us off. Later when we walked past here, they were on dinner break and there was food set out in abundance.

It was an attractive walk, but the public restroom received an F from Janet. She held off, and luckily found a higher-rated one later.

And there's the same Grand Canal that we cruised on back in Suzhou (Wuxi is to the northwest of Suzhou). 

We saw a few rickshaws in China, but a whole lot of them in Kyoto later. 

The canal was pretty at night! Loved the reflections. 

They had cruises on this section of the Grand Canal as well, and one could take it all the way to Suzhou where we were earlier in the day. 

Once back to the hotel, nine of us decided to walk a short ways for dinner to where there were several choices. Lucky for us, four or five of the nine could speak Chinese, so we figured that we could navigate the adventure with better odds than if we went alone.

Once we reached the street with all the restaurants, Audrey and Andrea went inside several to check them out for us. Finally at the one we ended up going on into, they brought out a menu and discussed it with a local. We all gathered to look and listen to the spoken Chinese!

We deemed this restaurant okay, so up the stairs we went to a room with four large round tables. Andrea has the menu at this moment, but we passed it around, looked at the photos, asked Audrey what the descriptions were, until we all could choose what we wanted. In the background was an all-men table who were REALLY loud.

 A selfie! Those men behind us were SO loud.

LOL, Audrey didn't want to leave any of the soup she ordered!

David had a nice conversation with this kid, one of three playing in the room while their parents were eating. As I recall, David asked him lots of questions about his life as a kid growing up here, and told him things about the USA.

The beer was plentiful and very light, so it helped wash down our spicy dinners. The total cost in U.S. dollars for our big dinner and beers was a mere $10.

After dinner, we split up and different couples went different ways to see more sights. Just a few doors down from the restaurant was a barber shop, and Audrey mentioned that she needed a haircut. I said that I did too, so she went in to discuss prices and their availability. $5 per haircut - "come on in."

The whole process was pretty funny, since we had to use Audrey to interpret what kind of haircut I wanted, etc. Janet had fun taking lots of photos.

This young man took such a long time to cut my hair, seemingly wanting to cut each strand of hair three times each. A mother of one of the barbers scooted home and brought back her kids to see us, because, according to what Audrey said, the kids had never seen Westerners before!

Is he finally finished? Janet got such a kick out of this cute, gay hair stylist.

Okay! Done! Everyone was happy. Audrey was happy with her haircut too. Such a fun event doing a local thing, not a touristy event! We then walked back to the hotel and hit the hay. What a day we had.