My China Adventure: Zai jian, China - Goodbye, China

As we traveled through the streets of Shanghai (and in Beijing and Xian) there was traffic whizzing all around us; bikes, motorbikes, motorcycles, people, other buses… So I took this video to show what it was like, and right at the end someone on a motorbike cut us off and the bus driver slammed on the brakes, throwing us all forward, causing me to spontaneously stop the recording. Too bad. If I’d left it going you would have heard our guide get on the microphone and say, “So sorry…there’s a meshugana in front of us.”
He’s such a funny guy; so clever and charming and smart, with a great grasp of American (and Jewish, as it turned out) slang. One day he was telling us some fact about something (he told us lots of facts about lots of somethings) and he misspoke so he said, “I didn’t mean to say that. So sorry. Senior moment.” He’s 12. Okay, maybe 30.
Whatever, he’s delightful.

Today we visited Suzhou, an ancient city on the Yangtze River where we took a cruise on the Grand Canal and walked through the market.
Then we had lunch and visited a silk workshop where we saw how they extract the silk and then make it into comforters and scarves and sweaters which, of course, we had the opportunity to buy. Once again I resisted but now I’m sort of sorry I didn’t buy a silk comforter.
On to our farewell dinner - a lazy susan affair with no liquor.
 

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The next day was Tomb Sweeping Day – kind of like our Memorial Day where people visit the graves of their ancestors. We left early for the airport but who knew we’d get into a massive traffic jam – all those people heading to the tombs, I guess – and make our flight with only minutes to spare. From Shanghai we flew to Beijing, then on to San Francisco, then on the Chicago. Whew…long travel day. But all in all it went very well.

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The unnamed bank robber…uh, person...in this photo (left) is going to kill me. Unfortunately her precautions didn’t prevent her from getting the Chinese cold that we were all passing around. That was her least favorite souvenir when she got home.
I wish I had taken a photo of the flight attendants on that flight from Beijing – they were stunningly beautiful. Luther, an 80something man in our tour group said to me: “This waitress here (pointing at a flight attendant), she would be the perfect model for a Chinese doll.”


That’s the end of my Chinese adventure.


See the rest of the story here:
Part 1 
Part 2 

Part 3 

Part 4 

Part 5 

Part 6 

Part 7