Silk Museum and more shopping

Countdown to the 2008 Olympics
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Well, today we visited the Silk Museum, and then headed to the Ya Show market for some more shopping. Again, we'll keep this to a fairly short entry, as we're starting to run out of money for blogging :)

The Silk Museum is one part museum/demonstration, and 3 parts humongous store. It was quite interesting and educational, though, to see how silk is made (Brian, you should skip reading this paragraph). Basically, the way to "detach" the silk from the worm is through boiling. They dump a whole bunch of cocoons (with live silkworms inside) into boiling water to loosen up the thread, and then find the end of the thread, and use machines to wind them up into thicker and straighter silk threads. Even though there are lots of machines involved, the whole process is still quite labor intensive. Once the whole cocoon is "un-threaded", the boiled worm is actually eaten - the place smelled like food :0

in fact they are washed with shampoo

The mascot from the XI Asian Games
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The silk threads are very similar to hair, and in fact they are washed with shampoo. They are used for various purposes, as was demonstrated in the gigantic "gift shop" (more like a shopping mall). There are beautiful silk bedding linens, clothes, knick-knacs, purses, underwear, ties etc. All in vibrant colours and designs, with lots of hand embroidery. As part of the tour, we also had the pleasure of seeing a fashion show of silk wares, which was pretty neat. Unfortunately we don't have any good pictures of that.

Boiling silk worms
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On our way back from the Silk Museum we stopped by the site of the 2008 Olympic games. Construction is in full swing, and the olympic village promises to be quite a sight when finished. Unfortunately none of the pictures we've taken from inside the bus came out well. You'll have to make do with a picture of the clock counting down the minutes to the games.

In the afternoon we went to another shopping market, called Ya Show. A little less aggressive than the Silk market, but still the same negotiation tactics required. We are still feeling ok about getting final prices in the 25% of the original quoted price, but who knows, we may still be getting fleeced :) We bought another memory card for the camera, but this time we decided to test it before buying it. Works fine!

Tomorrow will be our last full day in China. How fast time flies! The families with the new babies can't wait to get home to their own place, with their own beds and their own routines (living out of a suitcase with babies is certainly challenging), but we could stay here for another while. In fact, we've agreed that Beijing seems like a city one could feel at home in pretty easily. Tomorrow we're hoping to hit a few more recommended tourist spots, like the Lama Temple, and then it's time to pack and get ready for goodbyes.