Motorcycle Monk

Today we went to the most famous Buddhist temple called Jade Buddha Temple. It isn’t a very old temple, but it houses a national treasure, a gigantor jade carved Buddha. It was very busy in the temple because tomorrow is a festival to remember your ancestors so many people were in the temple praying and burning incense for them.

This group of monks were in the middle of a funeral ceremony, we only walked by, didn’t watch because it is “bad luck” and it was probably bad luck for me to take the photo too, but it was a risk I was willing to take.

Monks have to get around town too. Va-room!

Next we went to the Children’s Palace, a place for students to take creative classes, kind of like the JWR Center. There are 50 of these Children’s Palaces for children who can’t afford to have private lessons. The arts school is donation based and many of the teachers work as volunteers allowing it to cost very little (equivalent to $20-30 US).
The kids took classes like dance and art:

English:

Calligraphy (artistic form of writing Chinese characters):

Traditional Chinese musical instruments (also standard instruments like piano, drums, and violin):

Next we were off to the silk carpet company. They gave us a nice demonstration and told us about the varying qualities of carpet. Most women don’t weave the carpets in a factory, but in their own homes because then they can work anytime they want to and then get paid for their finished product; it is more cost effective this way instead of having a factory. I’m holding up a $4000 mini-rug, yeah, you read that right $4000 US. It is museum tapestry quality and it took five years to produce that small rug! That rug was definitely not “made for walkin’” (on). Ha ha.

We went to a silk factory too. It was cool; they showed us the process from cocoon to silk quilt.

Lots of cocoons

Pulling the silk threads (one cocoon unwinds into 100 meters of super fine silk thread which can be used in all kinds of very nice silk products.

Double cocoons can only be used for the filling in things like quilts and jackets, etc. They soak it, take out the pupa and stretch the cocoon several times as you can see the process below…they let us have a shot at stretching the silk to quilt size and we certainly weren’t naturals. FYI, that stuff is tough!

We finished our afternoon with a visit to the Shanghai Art Museum. It was pretty cool. Most exhibits didn’t allow photography, but furniture was fair game. I include these pieces because as we were walking through, my grandma said she had chairs like this one growing up in China and she had a bed like this one but “not that nice decoration.” All the brothers and sister shared a bed like that and there was no mattress, in the summertime they slept on straw and in the winter time they put down a little quilt for more warmth. My grandma has lived a very interesting life. I’ll have to share more at a later date.