Third Day

we went to the Suzhou Silk Factory. gahhh -_-" not that i dont wish to buy, but it's freaking expensive. and wasted alot of time there. why!! all these time would be better spent shopping. btw, there's only few shopping pictures coz my time is spent running from shop to shop haha.

Suzhou consists of first, the silk industry, second, tourism while third is the electronics.

this suzhou silk is really the best. instead of just showing us the factory interior and how the silk is extracted from the cocoons, they prepared for us a rather impressivly-scaled FASHION SHOW

with tall and slim models, albeit with lousy makeup and visible "transparent" bra straps..



felt like i am in project runway!!! -SQUEALS- too bad nobody wanted to photograph me walking down the stage after the show. hahaha!

the dresses looks better on the girls than on display indeed! some of the qipao were modernised to look really chic and much of my taste but sadly i couldnt capture them in time!


then we were taken to a boat, somewhat sampan with people standing and rowing it, much like venice. the town was also called "china's venice" where the people travel from one place to another by boats.

on the boat:


the lady rower in the background while foreground is my mum looking pretty haha!

scenery:

zoom into their houses' front porch


we even red bras being hung out to sun but mum stopped us from photographing them:

then there was this person demostrating against something on the roof precariously! guess he/ she wanted to kick someone out!


we got off the boats to explore along the houses where there are residential houses and some others used for tourist viewing purposes.

dad, mum, sis

outside a house

along an alley where i tried to do martial arts + special effects

chinese style graffiti
very crude but hilarious

in the earlier part of the day we saw the silk factory, then we saw the cotton making

products of the process- pretty patterned yards and yards of cloth hung on 10m tall wooden poles!

next one of the houses housed woodcarving works rescued from being destroyed during the Cultural Revolution.

quite intricate right! here it is of some family whose name i cant remember. all the sons attained high official purposes came back for a reunion. it is a scene of what most families would wish for their household.

so we reached the end where there was this tall pole that was used for performances. usually an acrobat would scale it like a caterpillar and to build something at its tip to resemble the silkworm growth process.

family!

then the bus brought us to West Lake, Xihu.
which is a HUUUUUUUUUUge lake. you would have thought it is the sea!

military boys training heehee



daddy and mummy in the boat/ ship

cam-whoring along the narrow walkway outside

夕阳无限好，只是近黄昏

went to see their museum to increase my knowledge of Xihu so there's live specimens of the animals found in that area (nothing interesting though) haha. got boar.

watched a musical....!!! FANTASTIC. ok acrobatic show would be accurate. hmm! anyway, it's all good and i couldnt bear to leave my seat for many moments.

starting act was this 白蛇传, Legend of the White Snake.
following was some acrobatic acts of some chinese war and general. there were some chinese kinda break-dancing acrobatics, was very hilarious!

this is the best amongst them all!
i call it the many-hands act!

i remember standing outside this book store in bras basah complex for some time watching this scene played out so many times, but never in my lifetime thought i would finally watch it right before my own eyes!

it's not so difficult for one person to do it but collectively it is really wondrous to look at.

then was the Liang Shan Bo and Zhu Ying Tai singing this chinese song, which at first was incredibly jarring to my ears (argh those nascal high-pitched song) but it soon grew on me. then they transformed into butterflies, which was acted out by another 2 young acrobats who performed a flying stunt in the air above the stage.

i really love that tale now. quite magical! the song Butterfly Lovers is quite nice actually.