Entrance to the Silk Factory
Our tour guide, Barbara, was our tour guide for the facility, too. So she took us into this back room and explained all the steps that the worms and workers go through to make silk. I mean, it's a fairly obvious process: you have an egg, it hatches, it grows, it turns into a cocoon, they take the cocoon, stew it, pull it apart to extract the silk, then use the larvae in hand cream and things like that. It sounds icky! I know! But it's actually really good hand cream (I bought some for my roommate's mom.) An interesting fact that stood out to me, though was that the Chinese really believe in coincidences....coincidences involving love and luck. One example of this is some silk worms mate and end up wrapping themselves up in the same cocoon. This thread is twice as strong--because there's twice as much of it, of course--and these silk worms are never separated in the extraction process. They were bound by love and should stay together for that reason. Kind of romantic, huh? All I'm thinking is there must not be a lot of room to move around in that bed....and what if it gets hot in there with two people? Either way, congrats to the silk worms that find their life-long partner!
Then I went shopping...and bought waaaaay too much stuff. It was super cheap, though, and good quality. If you have the chance to go to China and buy gifts for friends and family, I would highly suggest you give it a try. ;) Then you get to throw out the random China shout-out when people ask you where you got your gear. "Oh my! Where did you get that beautiful scarf??".... "Oh, you know, I went to China for a few weeks and thought I'd pick something up while I was out there... Super cheap. You should make a trip sometime...." :D Yep. That's what I'll be saying....
Old school silk making
Inside of the factory
Hard at work
Making a pillow toper for a mattress
Threading the silk out / separating it
This is separating the silk from the husk
So after we went to the Silk Factory and went to see the Master of Nets Garden, which was lovely. I bought a silk scroll for my grate grandma (told you I had been doing a lot of shopping...) :) Here it is:
View of the pond
Conrad getting stuck in a rock. Hahaha!
Watching everyone from a mirror
Then we had our two hour drive to Nanjing, which we slept most of the way through. We did get to stop at this nifty gas station....where I saw my first ever....pickled crabs!! Ew. Then we were greeted by our new tour guide when we got there...he wasn't nearly as exciting or bubbly as Barbara. His plain blue flag said it all...
We piled off the bus and headed straight to the Temple of Confucius, which isn't really for worshiping, but rather more to pay homage to Confucius for all of his accomplishments and his encouragement to his students as a teacher. I think George prefaced everything he said at the Temple with: Confucius always said... kind of like we do with trite sayings here. I would hate to think that Confucius turned into some kind of trite saying, but I guess when you say a lot of intelligent things in your life, people are going to quote you more than you ever expected them to.
River on the way to the city wall
Temple of Confucius
Temple of Confucius
Cards with the names of students and their wishes to do well on exams.
Then we went to the old city wall, which was beautiful even though quite a bit of it had been destroyed. We were able to see where the city wall stood in previous dynasties, before all the sieges and wars and then got to walk along a little ways. You could say we got a little practice in for the real thing...the big one...the GREAT WALL!! Yeah right....
Well, at least I got a great picture of Vendula while I was there:
Well! That's about it for today. Off to dinner! Gotta keep eating all this fabulous food! :)
-Signing out,
Whitney
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