Day 5

Day 5, June 26

Well, we're off to Suzhou today. We got up at 6am and finished the last of packing before breakfast. We had a bit of a scary snafu at checkout when Nancee thought she had lost her passport. We opened all the bags in the lobby and searched through everything. Finally, she found it wedged in a book in her carry on bag. We went to breakfast and found out there will be 2 more kids in Wuhan-one 12 and one 17. Anyways, today we were scheduled to go on a tour of a silk factory and another garden. After the long bus ride there, we went to lunch in the factory and had an American-style buffet before our tour. The tour was amazing! We walked through the entire process of how they have the silk worms and feed them one huge leaf a day for 50 days before they go into their cocoon. The workers find the end of the silk string (it's extremely difficult) by soaking the unbroken cocoon in water, which makes it easier to find. After the tour, we went shopping in the everything-silk store. The prices were obviously government-fixed; one Cali king duvet cover was 2500, or about 400 USD! Grandmother bought a purse and a lipstick holder, they're both very cute! After, we went to our hotel, a Holiday Inn, and it is by far the best hotel we've been in so far. There's a couch, armchair, 2 beds, nightstand, desk area, free Wi-Fi and it's a corner room so we have 2 sets of windows to watch the rain and lightening through. We turned on the television to find out Farah Fawcett and Michael Jackson were dead, how depressing. RIP. Well, after that we went to dinner and realized we need to skip eating so much of this oily greasy food-it's good, but it's not good for us. We go back to Shanghai tomorrow!