Wednesday April 20th

This morning I managed a bowl of cereal with milk, but decided no more.  I felt so incredibly tired, I wasn’t sure I wanted to go out this morning, but when we looked at the map, none of the attractions were close enough to walk to and we didn’t fancy our chances with public transport!

We thought we would go look for “Chengdu Museum” but all we found was a Temple – no more English information then that, so we just turned around and went back to the hotel.  I couldn’t believe how tired I was, but when we got back to the room, I just went straight onto the bed and slept for 90 minutes.  Upon waking, I felt better, but still heavy limbed, so I decided to have a quick nibble and some electrolytes which seemed to pep me up a treat.

We went for lunch then on to a Shu Brocade and Embroidery Museum which was great although we couldn’t take any photos inside which was a bit of a shame.  Fortunately, there were a lot of leaflets which we picked up.  Shu Brocade is a silk weaving technique which has a long history throughout the Han, and Tang Dynasties and came back to life in the Qing Dynasty.  Many an Emperor’s clothes were made by Shu Brocade, and we walked through rooms with examples of how patterns and colour combinations have changed through time in China.  The loom being demonstrated here was pretty amazing – I believe it was called a Brocade Patterning Tower Loom we were looking at.  It has a straight frame with an upright platform for harnesses in the middle section, and is also known as a Harnessed Loom.  Two people use this loom – one sits at the top side to pull the drawstrings lifting specific warp threads to open a pattern shed while the second person does the weaving on the ground.

Shu Embroidery is traditional silk needlework resulting in very delicate pieces, some to use on everyday items, others to use as pieces of artwork in the home.  It is very delicate embroidery and every piece takes a very long time to complete as everything is done by hand.  We saw some pretty amazing stuff, including double-sided embroidery, a different picture on both sides which had been put into a double-sided frame.  How they do that, I have no idea!!  They must have so much patience as one of the assistants in the shop told me that a medium sized one took about 2 years to complete.  Wow.  And the prices of the items here were more expensive, what you would expect and be happy to pay for such workmanship.  I bought a decent sized and priced piece of embroidery which cost 320 Yuan, a square picture of a group of cranes.

Overnight train to Xi'an!

After the Brocade and Embroidery, we went to a shopping street (with the names ‘narrow street’ and ‘wide street’ but they were the same width!).  We were going to stay there for 3 hours until there was a change of plan to leave earlier to go to a park.  This wasn’t planned well though, as the change of plan was decided upon after we had all dispersed and resulted in half the group hunting down everyone else to let them know we were leaving earlier.  I only found out when Mathew and I decided to stop at Starbucks and saw some of the group in there who told us about it.  Oh yes, and as soon as we sat down, we were told to move along because those seats didn’t belong to Starbucks, even though there were no people needing seats at the time.  Well they shouldn’t put their seats right outside someone else’s coffee house, should they?

Anyway, the park afterwards was a little on the eclectic side of things, but it was just a time killer really.  I would rather have spent more time in the shopping streets people watching actually.  We had dinner, then we went to the train station where we went through the briefest security check EVER, before getting onto our train after a 30 minute wait.

We shared our compartment with Gary and Rhonda from Australia.  The girls had the lower bunks while the boys went up top.  It was cozy!  I was the only person in our compartment who changed into pyjamas!  Huh!  Anyway, we departed the station at 9:40pm after which I wrote my journal and we all went to sleep around 10:15pm for the majority of our 16 hour journey.  I was glad I had brought my ear plugs! *rattle rattle*