The Silk Market

Today we went to the Silk Market. It is about a 30 minute walk from our hotel. We ended up walking back at about 12:30 p.m., and boy was it hot. I can just imagine what it's going to be like in Jiangxi.

I'd been warned that the vendors at the Silk Market are very aggressive, which is definitely the case. I think tonight I'll be dreaming about little Chinese women grabbing me and saying "hi lady" and trying to convince me to stop and check out their stuff. Anyhow, once we caught on to bartering it was actually kind of fun. DoT bought a shirt -- supposedly Polo, but who knows. And we bought two small, soft-sided suitcases which we may use to go to the province, since the weight restrictions within China for luggage are quite low. And our big suitcases are heavy empty. We also bought two hand-painted paintings -- literally hand painted. The guy doesn't use any brushes, but only various parts of his hand. They are very nice. Then right before we were going to leave we bought stamps for both DoT and I, and two for the two girls. They have our Chinese names on them, and came in a nice velvet box with a little red ink pad. Oh, and we also bought some tea. Hopefully it will be good. :-)

We'll do more shopping tomorrow, and hopefully the places we'll go will be a bit less aggressive. We'll see.

Later today, it's the acrobats.

Hopefully tonight we can manage to stay awake until at least 9 p.m. Last night we only lasted until 6 p.m. (6 a.m. Ontario time), and then of course woke up this morning at 4:00 a.m.

Here are a few pictures we took at our hotel...



This is a shot of our room. We've been in it all of 5 minutes at this point, and already it's a bit messy!










This is the view from our hotel room window.














And this is a shot of the entry way into the Japanese restaurant in our hotel. This is one of 4 restaurants at our hotel.