Recently I took a day trip with a friend to a nearby city, Wuxi, Jiangsu Province which was about 45 minutes drive from our town. In the middle of this city is a small area of old buildings, some of which have been renovated, others are still old and deteriorating but hold a lot of history! This is referred to as a water town in China. A small town near the rive and with many bridges to cross over. Each bridge was unique in the shape, but all along the same walking path for us. In this area there are coffee houses, small souvenir shops, restaurants and of course tea houses. There is a lot of the red pottery tea pots in this area to buy and we even came across a purple tea set!
On the older side of the water town area was more of the buildings that still have people living in them, and among those buildings was the original fire brigade. The symbol is still at the top of the building which is now a bookstore, and there was a plaque explaining a little but of the history. In another building was pottery making of these characters you can see we posed with below. They wouldn't allow me to take photos inside but they were hand painting each and everyone. Most were much smaller than this statue out front, about 6-10 inches most of them but very nicely painted.
As we walked among the stores, there were many with custom dress making of traditional dresses. These are just a few we saw in the window. Another photo below is a statue of a family outside a shop. The others are some things we saw along out way!
At Metro you can tell that Dragon Boat Festival is coming this month as they now have rows and rows of red dumpling boxes! You can see below some of the varieties. The next was an outdoor shoe store we passed by this weekend in Shanghai that I found interesting....can you find a match? The balloon man on his scooter going down the main street and hanging on to all those balloons! While in Shanghai we saw a number of photo instructions of how to use the toilet, this is one specifically asking you not to use it upside down.
I finally made it to the fake marketing in Shanghai! I had been to the smaller one which closed down last year but this is a huge market with everything from purses, to shoes, speakers, jewelry and souvenirs. It was a fun experience and we didn't nearly get through it but found some good deals with help from our friend Tina aka "the purse lady."
On Friday the kids had sports day at school. While Blake was totally into it and won two races in his class, Grace was not thrilled to be participating and had to be carried across the finish line for the final event. I think she is more of a shopping girl than an athletic one :) Blake was so excited, on the way home that day he asked if when we go to America he can play soccer, football, baseball and basketball! I think we have daddy's sports lover in him! Grace is slowly learning to ride a bike, she prefers to pedal backwards so she is getting no where fast but we will keep working on it! The weather was nice over the weekend so some time outside was mandatory, they got to play with the soccer ball and blow bubbles in our friend's backyard while we all enjoyed a BBQ.
Summer is just around the corner.....(but winter is coming too). Until next time!
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