China Day 12, Bicycling West Lake

Friday July 8^th

We met up this morning after the rare included breakfast, and caught a local bus to West Lake. This was a great way to get up close and personal with the locals as it was very crowded. At the lake we rented one speed bicycles and rode around the lake. The whole trip took about four hours and included a few stops for photos and a visit to a museum. It felt good to be on a bike again, but I had to go slow as there was a lot of city traffic we had to mingle with and on the bicycle paths there were lots of other bikes and electric scooters and on the foot path around the lake there were lots of pedestrians (gas powered scooters are not allowed here, only electric ones, effort to be green, but the electricity comes from coal plants).

We stopped at the Chinese National Silk Museum and learned about the how silk is made and the role it played in China's development. The silk worm feeds on the mulberry leaves and spins cocoons to pupate. The Chinese learned to farm them. It is the longest thread of any fibre that man uses. A single thread can be four to eight metres long. This leads to its strength and durability. Marco Polo and later the Europeans who came here returned with silk and tea and the routes were called the Silk Route and the Marine Silk Route. There was a store in the museum, run by the government, that sells clothes and bedding at better rates that the local shops. Plus, they taught us how to identify real silk material and spot the fakes. They guarantee all theirs is real. Several people in our group bought bedding. One girl spent about a $1000 dollars on a comforter, a cover for it, pillow cases and sheets.

We rode to a Thai restaurant and had a really good lunch. Then we returned the bikes and walked back to the hotel by 3:00. I spent the rest of the afternoon talking to Paul who is under the weather today and napping.

Allen and I headed out for dinner at 7:30 to a nice Japanese restaurant in the hotel. We had a traditional Japanese meal with rice, veggies and beef mixed up and cooked and still cooking in a hot stone pot. We also had some sushi and a beer. After that we took a taxi to a bar area at the city soccer stadium, but couldn't find anything we liked so we took another taxi to a different area and found a bar where we sat and chatted with a few local girls, but they all want you to buy them drinks and that gets very expensive so we declined, had a couple of beers by ourselves and then headed back to the hotel for the night.