Contrasts

China is such a place of dichotomies.
We went into the old part of the city intending on going to museums. There is a website that lists all of Beijing's museums and because there are so many and not adequate information on the one page websites, we had to guess which we would be most interested in seeing.

We chose two that were sort of close to each other.
The first was "Museum of 100 crafts" Sounded good. But what it was was a mall in an old building with quite a few shops (not 100 though) of crafts. These were oriented to the Tourist and quite high-priced. That being said, we went into a ceramics shop with some of the most beautiful traditional Chinese glazes that I have ever seen, including in museums. Reduction reds, purples, several different celadons, oil spots, hairs fur. They were all exquisite, but pricey. I came very close to buying an oil spot tea bowl out of my budget and I still kind of wish I had bought it. But settled on a smaller sang de bouf tea bowl.

The second museum was such an opposite. A dusty private collection of mostly ancient pots. I took a zillion pictures. This museum sent a guide along and another museum goer offered to translate for us. They were so very gracious and friendly. After our tour of the small, dusty exhibit, they served us green tea and were very hospitable.

Then for the third contrasting experience was a Beijing rush hour traffic jam, which I will write about later.

From the T'ang era:



Another camel shot. I took this from atop my camel in the Gobi. I just liked the photo