Silk Silk SILK!

China Day 6, Thursday. Today we decided to hit the Silk shopping market in town. It had to be less expensive than the silk market at the lake for tourists! A bunch of us piled into cabs. First the driver took us to the wrong place, a silk department store that looked expensive. Mom pointed and talked at the taxi driver with the map and he got the clue that we were not amused. So he took us to the right place, and didn't charge us any more than it would have been.
And we walked into a market full of silk stores offering fabric, ties, clothes, scarves, and just about anything else you could think of to be made of silk. We roamed into a few stores, but the first stores we hit must have been wholesale. An Afghani guy in one of the stores offered to help me find the silk twill. But then he kept pressing me for my hotel room number, and I wasn't ok with that. I tried going back to that shop after the twill would have been in a few days later, but they had no idea what I was talking about. Not promising on the twill front, ladies.

But we went a few stores down and bought some ties for the guys, and bargained like mad women. The funniest tie was the one labeled Washington DC with the capital building on it. Nice. While mom was haggling over a pile of panda ties, I wandered next door to look at brocade. This shopkeeper actually seemed happy to see me and was nice enough to pull out the brocades I pointed at. The shop was about the size of a large closet, but she had some really gorgeous stuff crammed in there. I selected a black grounded with red chrysanthemums and red borders brocade, and got 10 meters for about $6 per yard. It was gloriously heavy and just delicious! She had other good stuff, but I wanted to shop around a bit.

We shopped a bit more and made a few shopkeepers cry with our bargaining over a pair of silk pants for mom and some scarves for me. We wandered through, but the stores started closing up about 5pm. We started looking for somewhere to eat, and passed on the Wei Wei Sheep place because there wasn't any pictures or English. So we went to a 2 storey restuarant next door. Again with a fabulous round booth surrounded on half of it with a koi pond stream thingy. Two little boys kept coming over and feeding the fish in the open part. They were giggly and delighted that the fish were enthusiastic to be fed. And they liked mugging for pictures for the American girls. Mom kept calling one the Chinese Harry Potter. Very amusing, and the food was great!