We ladies (Mary, Faith, Jennifer and I) went on a pottery buying adventure to Jingdezhen – a city famous for is porcelain and pottery. Jingdezhen is about a one hour plane flight from Shanghai, but with China delays, you can never be sure.
Mary and I sent our drivers, Mr. Nie and Mr. Wu, down on Sunday. It is a nine-hour drive for them. The ladies took an 8am flight down the next day. I went last year with another group of ladies. Last time, we did not send our drivers and spent way too much money for shipping the pottery to Shanghai. Jennifer went last April and sent her driver down. Ok, what a brilliant idea as having our drivers there to help us and bring all of our purchases home was priceless. Nothing was broken and everything was gently cared for by our drivers. Mr. Nie and Mr. Wu helped us to negotiate the prices, carried all our goods to the car and guided our culinary adventure through the all Chinese menus.
It was a fun two days of shopping and laughing with the ladies. There is always toilet talk at the table as we always need a report on the “star quality” of the squatty potty. At one point, we all used the worst condition squatty potty I have used since traveling in China. Faith is new to China. She had comment that now she has experience that squatty potty, she is ready for any travel because nothing can compare!!
The hotel is a 3-star Chinese Hotel. It has the typical extremely hard Chinese beds. We were prepared with our supplies of wine, cracker and cheese to enjoy a night of girls night out in our quality hotel.
When we checked in, we all just grabbed a key lucky draw style. Mary and I picked the room with a view overlooking the street out front. The other rooms looks out at – a wall!. I think we would have preferred the wall, because at 5AM, all you heard was the beeping horns of morning traffic!
The airport at Jinddezhen is small. There is one flight in and one flight out each day to/from Shanghai. Our flight was over an hour late to depart. This is the board to post flight information. No one changed it for our delay.
Everyone came home with fun pottery to add to the decorations of our home. This is one of my favorite pottery piece. Mr. Nie had to negotiate hard to get the price to reasonable.
