Little victories and Panda silk

Our final hours in Chengdu represented a real victory for us. The schedule called for us to go to some kind of “Water Park.” No, this was not a place with water slides and wave pools, it was going to be a demonstration of Chinese engineering and how they purify water and the such. Ummm, yawn! No one wanted to go.

 

In the past when we have tried to get Xiao Fei to make changes to the schedule, he has been pretty resistant. We can tell he wants to please us and work with us, but he has masters elsewhere who pay his salary and he needs to keep them happy too. Plus, folks in these Communist countries are used to following orders, not improvising and making changes on the fly.

 

Anyway, we wanted to go to the Chengdu Brochade museum instead of the water park. Brochade is a very complicated form of silk weaving using these gigantic looms that must be operated by 2 or 3 people at one time. It is an ancient art in China and people who knew about it said it was really cool. I don’t know how we convinced him, but Xiao Fei agreed to abandon the water park and go to the Brochade museum instead. Here is a picture of a Brochade weave of some pandas.

 

 

The texture and tightness of the weave is what really impressed me.

 

The museum demonstration of the looms and the art of Brochade went fairly quickly and it was very cool… but then we hit the gift shop and almost everyone on the trip put their plastic to work! We bought wall-hangings, scarves, wallets/pocketbooks, and all kinds of other stuff. It was just too beautiful to pass up. So, instead of spending the afternoon being bored at the water park, we contributed thousands of dollars to the Chinese economy ;)

 

Here is a picture of Kathy and Ann Wichman looking at some panda hangings. They were magnificent and we got one even though they were kinda pricey.

 

 

My next reports will be on the fabulous Xi’an Wild Goose Pagoda and the Terra Cotta warriors, which we saw today. It may be a day until I get those up as the internet in Xi’an has been terrible and my pictures are taking forever to go through. You simply must see the pictures from these two stops!