Oops – when I was writing my post for Saturday, I asked my mom what else we did that day (I wrote it on Sunday). Neither of us could remember at the time – you know how that goes. But, I now remember that I forgot three very important things that we did – it is funny how as soon as you stop trying to remember, it all comes back to you.
Before we went to lunch, and after the museum, we went to a silk rug making store. They have women working on different rugs in the store we went to, but generally the rugs are made by women out in the country. There are three different grades of rugs – silk and cotton (light traffic), silk on silk (heavy traffic) and another silk on silk that is for wall hangings. The difference between the three types is that the silk on cotton rugs only have 300 knots per square foot, while the silk on silk rugs have 625 knots per square foot, and the wall hangings have 1700 knots per square foot. It was pretty amazing to compare the work that these ladies were doing to the needlework that Mom does – I know how long some of her projects take and these rugs were far harder work. I forget the exact figures, but I know that some of the rug projects (e.g., the larger wall hangings) could take one person a couple of years to complete. That is working 4 – 5 hours a day for two years. I don’t know how a person keeps motivated, or how they read the patterns.
And after we went to the Yuyuan Garden, we went to a market to do some shopping – what an adventure that was. There were people everywhere – we followed Jay and Steven through the market to a silk shop – where they grew the silk worms, harvested their cocoons, and then used the silk for making cloth or comforters. \
I guess that silk worms sometimes cocoon together (coziness factor I guess) – and those cocoons are not good for making silk thread, because the strands are all tangled up. So single cocoons are used for making silk thread (it takes 8 cocoons to make one strand of thread), and double cocoons are stretched out to make duvets (it is quite a process to stretch them out). Lots of people bought the duvets to bring home – I will be curious to know how they compare to down duvets!
After the silk shop, we had free time to shop in the bazaar. It is an experience that is hard to describe. I did some serious shopping – buying a beautiful tea set that I really didn’t need, a purse that I really did need, and a few other things that were complete impulse buys. I got many comments on the new purse – which was kind of nice. We were given two hours to shop – and honestly, after an hour I was done. I got a coffee at Starbucks (31 Yuan or $ 6.20 Canadian) and bought a shirt for my barista at Starbucks at home. She will love it.
So, those are the things that I forgot on the November 1st day – sorry for all the confusion!
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