October 15, 2005

October 15, 2005

In the morning Aimee and I get up early and walk to a small local park a few blocks down the street. It is packed with elderly Chinese doing their morning Tai Chi exercise. Afterwards we join our group for a city tour. We start at People’s Square in the center of the city. This park is surrounded by lots of tall futuristic skyscrapers. It looks to me like they had an architecture contest and instead of choosing one winner, they decided to build every entry. There we also tour the Shanghai Museum. This museum contains a very interesting collection of Chinese cultural artifacts.

From here we go to our requisite factory tour. This time it is silk and really cool. Silk comes from the cocoon of the silk worm. Silk worms only feed on mulberry leaves. They build their cocoon from a single strand of silk. This factory has a sweatshop of women slowly unraveling buckets of cocoons. To do this, the women soften each cocoon in hot water, pick at it to find the loose end and then tie it on the end of the previous unwound cocoon. Nine strands are twisted together to form a thread. The women work with a machine that slowly rolls up the thread for them. Their job is to keep tying on new cocoon strands to a whole line of threads. The associated store has some beautiful silk garments for sale. 

After lunch we continue our city tour and head to the Bund. The Bund is the historical area where western colonial nations had their commercial operations. The area still looks like it did 100 years ago, though it sits in sharp contrast to the ultra-modern Pudong across the river.

From there we drive to the nearby Yuyuan Garden. It is a beautiful refurbished area with traditional Chinese architecture. Next door is a tourist mart where we do some shopping. The big items for sale are knockoff Louis Vuitton Purses. The youngsters on our tour buy several.

This evening we watch an amazing acrobat show. They do an outstanding performance. Aimee is really scared for this guy sitting on top of a very tall stack of chairs. The finale is six death-defying motorcycles racing around the inside of a not-big-enough metal globe.

Since tonight is Aimee’s birthday in China, we have a surprise cake for her in the lobby of our hotel.