Shanghai, China II

On Sunday, the next day of arrival in Shanghai, I joined a day tour. I did not research on Shanghai beforehand, so I was not sure what would be the best places to visit. Because this was my first visit in Shanghai, I decided to join the most basic one, the city tour.

The first place was here; not the entire city looks like this but only here. I have a great interest in architecture, so I was pretty impressed by these buildings. In my head, I was comparing with my image of “China” to what was in front of me. I think the real China was more colorful than what I thought.

	It seems this is a famous tea house.
	The famous Shanghai food, Xiaolongbao. The cooks were standing next to each other and making these small Xiaolongbao like a most efficient machine. There were the cook who makes the skin and another that wraps meat in it.

It was pretty impressive to see this many bamboo baskets standing. This restaurant seems to be a great Xiaolongbao restaurant where people wait for a few hours to get in. Unfortunately, I did not get to have any of Xiaolongbao on this trip.

Yuyuan Garden was the nxt stop. There are many beautiful buildings and unique architecture gardens or ponds throughout the garden.
In the garden, there was this wall with a dragon on top of it. The tail of the dragon continues to all the way in the back.

	This whole on the wall is one of the Chinese garden’s techniques that you can enjoy the view through this interesting shape whole. This shape has a role of being the frame of the view itself.
	Chinese buildings have very beautiful and detailed art work.
	This buildings seems to be very famous that if you didn’t see it, then you cannot say you came to Shanghai.
	I enjoy these seems-to-be the “normal” views more. It is just a small garden that has bamboos, but this is very relaxing to me and reminds me of Japan.

Once you step out of the garden, it is a residential area. Chinese New Year is coming soon; mid February. There were so many red items in stores. This one had many bakuchiku and lamptons hanged in the front. Everyone was very looking forward to the New Year's. They will have nine-day holiday.

We were brought to this silk museum.

There were ladies untying the silk threads from cocoons. According to the guide, there were different kinds of cocoons; one with one warm inside or two ore more. If there is only one, then the silk around the cocoon is made out of one silk thread. But if there are two worms inside, then there are two silk threads coming from the opposite sides.

With this machine, they take only the ones that have one warm inside. It is really one strong continuous silk thread. It is amazing. I think the guide said that the thread is about 2000km long. The cocoons in the blue basket in front of the lady are the completed ones; no thread but only the shell. Inside, I could see the worms through the shell. The guide said Chinese don’t waste anything, so they cook them and eat them. She said it tastes like crabs. (She also said that in China, they don’t say everything tastes like chicken but crabs.) The cocoons in the water are the ones in the middle of untying process. I got to touch a string of silk thread. It was surprisingly strong. In this untying process, even though one thread is strong, they combine some cocoons together make stronger silk threads.

At this moment, I didn’t realize, but when we moved to the next room, somehow somewhere, this guide started sales pitch for silk blankets. It was well done. After you see the whole process of making silk threads or blankets, you are really interested in the blankets and most likely would like to experience this “cool in summer, warm in winter” blanket. Most of the tourists were purchasing the blankets. It was amazing to see that. I thought I joined a city tour, but it turned out to be locked-in sales show. I guess it is a part of Chinese cultures.
Anyhow, I was not interested in those blankets, so while I was waiting for others to make the purchase, I was looking back to where I came from. Then I realized that those hard working ladies were just standing there! Believe or not those looks-like innocent ladies were a part of sales process! They were just demonstrating! I felt like I was cheated, but then I realized that there shouldn’t have been a silk thread factory in the middle of Shanghai…