Day 4 -- Our Jade Experience

This is a picture of a man carving jade. The men do the initial carving and then women take over for the detail work.

This morning was getting better time-wise. I woke up at 2:30 and then tried to get back to sleep until about about 6:30. We had the same breakfast choices as yesterday and Paul chose the American Breakfast again. I decided to try the Businessman's Breakfast. It started with beef porridge, which was very thin oatmeal in broth with ginger slivers and green onion slices. Delicious! Then came pork-fried noodles with a hard boiled egg and hot soy milk to drink along with tea. Definitely a winner for breakfast.

Since we were visiting so many sites, we were on the road a lot--which meant "happy room" stops. Let me explain that there are very few really "happy rooms" in China. There is a very different concept of sanitation and the facilities offer a wide variety of ways for women to squat. Occasionally there is toilet paper, but generally you are on your own. Most of Beijing was a definitely "high tech", however. They had automatic flushing "squatty potties". I have a picture, but think adding it here is definitely "TMI" (too much information).

We got on the road at 8AM today, heading out to climb the Great Wall. It was Monday morning and the traffic was very congested. The freeways are laid out in rings, and the traffic gets a little better farther out. Even on the 5th ring this morning it was still bad, but that was as far out as we could go to get where we needed to be. We saw a lot of interesting things along the road as we drove. My favorite was people doing Tai Chi in the grassy area between the trees in the freeway interchange--in business suits.

On the way out to the Great Wall, we stopped at the Jade Factory and got the "Jade Talk". Each tourist group (and there were many) was taken into a separate room and given the talk, then taken to a showroom with a line-up of salesgirls standing behind the counter -- one for each woman in the group. They each grabbed an arm and began fitting a jade bangle bracelet by covering our hand with a plastic bag. As they were rooting around for a bracelet of the correct size, each girl was explaining (in Chinglish) the classes of jade, how to fit the bracelet and how beautiful the color was on our skin. Supposedly, they had selected the best color for each of us. It felt like being attacked by a row of ducks, but was an interesting experience. BTW, a class A bracelet was about $500-$700. After we were released from our sales person, we roamed the
store and saw some beautiful carved jade statues. A number were cut to take advantage of unique coloration in the stone and were amazingly intricate. Again Paul tried to find the most expensive piece, which turned out to be one about 4 feet tall and 6 feet wide, for $110,000. The piece we liked best was $15,904.

After this "shopportunity" we continued on to the Great Wall.