Well we did go to the Wall today but a couple of other things first. Will put the Wall in the next installation.
As usual you can enlarge the pictures by left clicking on them.
Below is a picture inside the Ming Tomb area and inside the Zhu memorial that had the statue of the Emperor on the previous issue. The structure of the building is the interesting thing here. Notice the high decoratively painted ceilings supported by the large wood poles. The poles were the trunks from camphor trees (I think this is right - should carry a recorder or take better notes). It's a large building and of all wood construction.
Below is a typical lunch and evening dinner, Chinese of course. The restaurants we went to all had a good system for serving busloads of tourists very quickly. All had round tables with a lazy susan in the center where the dishes of food were placed. The system was simple, just spin the lazy susan to take what you want. There was always a variety of selections and for drinks hot tea, water, Coke, Sprite, and a Chinese beer. We never went away hungry.
Who would have guessed - Italian Gelato in China!
One of the handicrafts that was demonstrated to us was Cloisenart. This was tedious as were most of the handicrafts that the Chinese do. In the picture below the girl is using pliers to bend pieces of copper about 3/16 inch wide to follow an intricate pattern on the paper. The pieces are then appied to a copper vase or bowl using a slip or liquid ceramic solution.
After the patterns are attached then they us an eyedropper to fill in the spaces with ceramic solutions of different colors to match the desired pattern after which the piece is fired in a kiln.
Since the spaces cannot be completely filled with solution in one step this is done and fired up to 5 or 6 times. The result is a beautiful and colorful vase as evidenced by the couple small pieces in the photo below.
Below is another interesting handicraft that involves painting the inside of hollow glass items with various scenes. This must take a lot of practice and nerves of steel as the paintings are basically done backwards also.
Next - The Great Wall
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