China - part 3 - The Jade Store

Greetings and salutations!

This post features one of my 'not favorite' things we did on our trip; shopping... again.

After we left the Great Wall, we drove to this place which I cannot recall it's name.  It was a rather large building with a jade store on the ground level and a restaurant on the second level. As you can tell from the upcoming photos, the place was really big and again, the photos don't do it's size justice.  The restaurant was the same size as the store, utilizing all of the second story.  About 1/3 of the second floor was being used for a wedding reception while we were there and we ate in the other area.  The singing from the wedding reception is something that I would like to forget, but through all of my efforts so far, have been unable too.

Onto the photos...

This ship carved out of a rather large hunk of jade took some crazy person(s) over 5 years to finish.  The chain links are all separate and move just like a metal chain.  There was no way to take a photo that would clearly show all of the detail on this thing.

Here is one of the workers carving what is called a Family Ball.  It's a ball, inside of a ball, inside of ba...  you get the idea. Somehow, they've mastered carving these things out of single chunk of jade. We bought one about the size of what she is carving plus two smaller ones.  I've spent a great deal of time that I'll never get back trying to figure out how they would do such a deed.

This is just a shot where I was trying to show the great expanse that this store covers.

We were shopping for probably close to 1/2 hour by the time Robby and I started to grow weary of it.  Yes, it's impressive to look at, but unless you purchase an over-priced item that is quite small, you're going to pay dearly trying to get some of these bigger items home.  That eagle that Robby is standing by was $1600.00, the items in front of him were around a grand each.  I'm not sure who is buying these things, perhaps hotels and businesses for their lobbies, but I can't imagine the average Chinese family living on $3000.00/year buying this stuff.

We find ways to entertain ourselves.

Again...

Yet again...  the locals were not amused, but my argument was that they shouldn't have such a big store if they want men to be in there.

And one more of us trying to find a cure for common boredom.

Ahhhhhh...  finally, back on the bus.   I took this shot in an effort to show traffic.  It didn't turn out very good but if you can see out the windshield of the bus, it's 4 lanes of bumper to bumper traffic and they are not in any particular lane.  Also note that out of the side windows there are fences to divide the major highway that we're on with more local traffic going both directions on the sides of the highway.  This is somewhat common in Beijing.

Once we were on the bus, we were headed to the Hutongs with a brief tour to drive through Olympic City. And that will be the subject of the next post.