First Full Day!

This morning after the housekeeping incident, I couldn't go back to sleep so I hopped in the shower, desperately trying not to get water everywhere while still maintaining water pressure. Dressed, journaled. We went downstairs at 11:50 for lunch, which was in another hotel.

They totally serve meals on lazy susans.

Gigantic ones! At least that's the way it's been at the 2 restaurants we've been to so far. It's family style - our dishes included fried mystery meat that tasted like chicken, tofu, more mystery meat that was really good, delicious fish (however, they like to leave the bones in the meat, so we had to constantly check for those), potatoes, soup, rice and something else. One drink is included with every meal, but that drink is an 8 oz glass with no free refills. The plates are the size of soucers, and you get one or two little bowls for soup and rice, one with a spoon. To drink we could usually choose from water, tea, Coke or beer. I think several people would have gotten beer if we didn't have rehearsal right afterwards. Sluggish musicians aren't good! A little ways into lunch, people went to the bar and got some water for 10 yuan - I keep wanting to say yen - which is about a buck and a half. One guys almost got beer because apparently the bottles are rather large. I don't know much about beer, but their bottles looked about 2X the size of ours.

It's interesting how full I felt afterwards. It's really hard to gauge how much you eat off that tiny plate when you keep refilling it, plus you have to account for what you lose off of the chopsticks. Ha. Oh, and we've told to try KFC, it's supposed to be good.

After lunch we went back to the hotel to get instruments. Jenna and I made a stop next door at the Construction Bank of China, or China Constructions Bank or something like that, since I can use that one without any fees. At 2 pm, we all left to drive to Fudan University.

Fudan University apparently has about 50,000 students. The campus is incredibly large, and has high schools (at least one) there too. From where we rehearsed, the campus extended at least another 2-3 kilometers, Alex said. We rehearsed in a classroom-turned-orchestra room, which was very cramped. They're used to getting closer to each other than we are. Most all of the kids speak English, so that's a relief!

Rehearsal went pretty well - Mr. Li basically did the first half. He doesn't speak much English at all, so he would sing the wrong way of doing something, the sing the right way/how he wanted it, we would play it, and that was that. We went to dinner (not sure when - I sort of lost track of the time) with the students, some who rode on the bus with us. There I met Hower and Violet, both violinists. At dinner, me, Jenna (both violinists) and Hannah and Nick (cellists) sat with Maggie, Tiffany, Eysen, Adolf, Hower and Violet, all violinists. It was fun - we compared differences between countries and asked various questions. Also, they showed us the correct way to eat the food (bowl vs. plate). I didn't feel so bad the rest of the trip when I dropped food with my chopsticks because they did it too! They also put what they don't want on the tablecloth, while we just tried to keep it to one side of the tiny plate.

Back to rehearsal. Anderson did most of this one. He figured out most of them spoke English, so he talked a lot more than Conductor Li. I keep wondering how much of him they actually understood. I don't know, but we all came in at the right places. Li did the end, then we headed back to the hotel.

I often crave sweet foods at night (ok...well all the time) but I was in the mood for ice cream. A few of us went down the street to a 24-hr C-store to get snack food. Now, Alex had cautioned all of us to cross only with the locals and/or only with the green lights. Well, we did the first leg, with the green because there weren't any locals, to the middle of the road under a bridge. The other side was red, so we waited...and waited...and waited...it definitely never turned green, so we just went. Got a bunch of food for 18.80 yuan, which is less than 3 dollars. woot!

Came back, slept, day over.

Getting There

Alright! Back in the States and blog working, so here we go!

I woke up this morning in CHINA. How often can one say that?! I awoke to our doorbell ringing (yes, our hotel room has a doorbell) and the oh-so-familiar, "Housekeeping! Housekeeping!" I was only halfway across the room when she came in (she had been knocking/ringing/yelling for awhile, I think). She realized we weren't quite ready ready to have our room cleaned - Jenna was still conked out in bed - and switched to, "Laundry? Laundry?" while tugging at her shirt. No thanks, was my response, but I'm still wondering if the laundry service is free here? Before I get ahead of myself, I have to tell about our fabulous 24 hour+ adventure that got us to this cute Chinese housekeeper lady.

Mom and I left the house at 6:47 am, grabbed some coffee and headed to the airport to meet the rest of the orchestra at 7:30; they were coming from Boone, meaning they left at 5:30. Eww. But hey, they were right on time! So far, so good. We went to check in, all was going smoothly (we didn't even have to pay the $15 bag fee!) but then something happened with Keagan and Kimberly's tickets. Not quite sure what it was - we heard their tickets weren't grouped with our and they had to go on another flight (?!) but that got fixed and they came with us.

*Two side notes: There was just a massive amount of honking outside my window, i.e. it lasted about 20 seconds. I can also hear a violin playing scales and arpeggios. I don't think I'm going crazy- I'm hoping it's Kimberly or Vanessa warming up in the room beside us.*

Anyway, we all got through security, got to the gate, got food, came back. I managed to find an apple and an orange! So exciting. Plane ride was pretty uneventful. I sat next to Daniel, one of our tuba players. (Mr. Anderson likes to call him a trombone because of the part he plays. I don't know if Daniel appreciates that too much.) Daniel had never flown before or been out of the country, so that was fun. He helped me with my easy sudoku after I messed it up no less than 3 times. Oh, and our group was greeted over the speaker by the pilot with, of course, App-uh-lay-shun. Ha. Onto NY.

Got onto the "Airtrain" which people were very excited about, got to our terminal and to the place we thought we were supposed to check in. No one there, but Anderson said they didn't open until 4 hours before the flights, which would be 12:30. It was 11:50, so some went to get food, some, including me, just stayed there and played cards. At 12:30, sill with no worker in sight, we realized we were at the wrong check-in counter, but thankfully the correct terminal. We all checked in; Mr. (now Dr!) Anderson and some other that were at the front sat down to play cards while waiting for everyone; we finished and he told us to go through security...we left him on the floor playing cards. Ha.

About 7 of us went scavenging for food, only to find $9 sandwiches. I don't think so. I managed to find a $5 hot dog/drink combo. Woohoo. We boarded at 3:50 for our 13 hour flight to Beijing. Before that, we saw our plane out the window, and it was huge! Two stories! (The top was for first class, the lucky dogs.) All (or most) of us had aisle seats. Callie (harpist) and I were on the ends of the middle row of 4 seats. Miraculously, no one showed up to sit inbetween us! Oh so nice. We took off at 5:15, which is when I woke up since falling asleep at 4:30. All of our attendants were Asian and very pretty. Some of realized that sleep wasn't going to happen anytime soon, so we walked around a bit, stopping in front of the emergency exit and Dr. Anderson, who was completely conked out for almost the whole trip. Some 31-year old guy with an Air Force shirt came to talk to us; he's getting his MBA and doing a research project in China. Then he started talking about something that none of us quite followed, and only at the end did we realize he was talking about Google. Mainly because he asked us if we had friends at Google, then gave Vanessa his card and said to email his friend. Still not quite sure what went down.

I slept a little bit after that, maybe 2-3 hours. *At this point, I have a lot more written in my journal about the food, which isn't important, so I'm skipping it.* I don't think anything else exciting happened until the end of the flight. We stopped at the gate, everyone got up and got their stuff, then they made us sit back down. Two guys came around with stun-gun-looking things and pointed them at people's forehead's. It made a circle of light when they pulled the "trigger" along with a beeping sound. They were taking temperatures - and totally skipped over me. Not gonna lie, I felt a bit left out. :-(

Got off in Beijing! Turned in our health forms and promptly received a text message that read, "Welcome to China!" cool. Went through customs with no incident, except I had to give up my water again. Oh and Blake, Matt, and Dr. Semmes' luggage is still in New York. That stinks. We got to our gate 3 minutes before we were supposed to board (we still had a 2 hour flight to Shanghai), but had to wait for the rest of the group. I sat next to Elizabeth, and we both conked out almost immediately. Landed in Shanghai, met our tour guide (Alex Xue, he stayed with us the whole two weeks, and David) and headed to our hotel. There, we were greeted by two large posters of us and Dr. Anderson, advertising our tour. Pretty cool!

To get into our rooms, you wave the key in front of the door handle, like a FOB. The rooms also have a doorbell and you have to leave your key in a slot in order to have power. When you walk in, there's a sitting area/foyer type deal with a big armchair, a desk and chair, 2 closets, a mini-fridge and the bathroom to your left with a sliding door. You go down a short hallway (7-8 ft), one side of which is a ceiling-to-floor mirrored wall. You get to the "bedroom" with 2 just-slightly-larger-than twin beds, a TV and another chair. Plus the window, which looks out at another building in front, some really old houses (some might call them slums) on one side and new, tall skyscrapers on the other. The juxtaposition of the buildings here is quite interesting.

Jenna (another violinist) and I are rooming together. We settled in about 12:15 and decided to look for computers, which we heard would be available. They were, but not for free, so we went back up and went to sleep, which led us to the housekeeper previously mentioned.