Tourchestra 2012: Shanghai

Well, I now bring you to the last part of our journey, Shanghai. For those who are just joining us now, I'm blogging about the Westmont Orchestra's tour to China; the last two blog posts gave an overview of our time in the cities of Beijing and Suzhou, and I'll talk about our last and final stop here. You'll see that my pictures start in the daytime, although in reality we got into Shanghai in the evening. That night we had dinner (guys, I discovered why the pepper tastes like barnyard - it's white pepper) and then went to the coolest acrobatics show in the world. I didn't take pictures at either dinner or the show (they didn't allow photos, just so you would be even more tempted to go and see what the show is like!), hence the whole pictures starting the following day thing. Regarding the acrobatics show, I will say this: they had eight guys on motorcycles simultaneously riding on the inside of a giant metal sphere. No joke.



The next day we spent a bit of time cruising around Nanjing Road, which is apparently one of the world's busiest shopping streets. Our group mostly just walked around sightseeing (though we browsed a bookstore for a bit, where Nick and I found an English-Italian phrasebook and learned a very Italian-sounding word which we would proceed to use the rest of the day ;)



Everyone and their mom uses bikes to get around here.



Or public transportation.



It's not pictured here, but we got boba tea off of Nanjing Road and it was sooooo good. They really need to open a good boba place in Santa Barbara.



Fairly tall buildings.



After we all met up with each other where we had been dropped off, we walked en masse to the Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition Center, which you see below. These almost 1984-esque flag banners were on the street right next to the center.



One of the first sights that greeted us upon entering was a model of Shanghai's downtown area. This is totally my kind of thing, so I was stoked to see the miniature skyscrapers, bridges, and ships. Little did I know that this was awaiting us on the next floor...



Somewhat impressive, I'd say.



And it lights up at "night."



The top picture is the view from the top floor of the museum.



Here's another museum we went to. It had a lot of jade art, old currency, and other such things that are of less interest to an engineering physics major :)



That evening, we had a performance at Fudan University. Beforehand, we had lunch in the college cafeteria...now that was an experience! Brad and I talked to each other in gibberish for a while to prove that when you're in a crowded area, you can say anything and it'll look like you're having a real conversation. The things we do to entertain ourselves...

Before rehearsal started, we threw a frisbee around on the lawn in front of the auditorium, and several Chinese guys joined in with us. We had a blast, but it left us overheated for the performance. Dang it!



Here's Rebecca playing the Saint-Saëns Cello Concerto (not to be confused with the earlier Saint-Saëns Jello Concerto), with the support of our other wonderful string players. Wait a second! Is that Jack Sparrow?!



The next day we went to the Jade Buddha Temple. It's interesting to see the mix of ancient with the modern rising silently in the background.



I always wonder what it's like to attend a church/temple that's also a tourist attraction. It must be so strange to be practicing key aspects of your religion while dozens of tourists look on. I had the same thoughts come up at the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris; I feel like I would be really distracted, were I in the that position.



Buddha.



Curly hair lions.



Chinese lanterns, a huge bonsai tree (probably Roku and Hoshi's, may they rest in peace, great-great-great-grandfather), and monks.



Amigas.



Another smoke offering.



And then came the time for our last China tour performance; this was at Shanghai University, where both our orchestra and theirs got to play together! A great reminder that although our respective native tongues may be lost in translation, music certainly isn't.





And then Dr. Shasberger cued in the choir for the Hallelujah Chorus.



Afterwards, we got a group picture with everyone from both orchestras. I'd say that's a pretty decent size for an orchestra...



And yes, we gave out free Westmont Brass Men Calendars :)



Speaking of the brass, here are the trumpets! Love these four. That guy second from the left is kind of a tool though.



That evening, we had our farewell dinner, where the seniors gave out their awards to the continuing students and we voted on the orchestra leadership for next year. All I'm sayin' is, watch out for Chairman Gee next year; I heard the word that best describes his term in office is "fear." :)



After dinner, we took a ride on the Huangpo River (the last significant tributary of the Yangtze, or so they say). We had a great time taking pictures together before heading off our separate ways for the summer the following day, and I couldn't pick just nine or ten pictures to show you, so you get to see a bunch. And Ethan, I included pictures of me just for you ;)













The next day, we drove to the airport for what would be our last several ours in the People's Republic of China. I'll leave ya with one more funny anecdote before I end the post.

When we walked into the airport, Toni and I were directed by a certain fellow brass player (we still love you ____, don't worry!) to head to the international terminal, so we took the train to that terminal, went through the security screening and customs, and proceeded to play UNO because we didn't see anyone else from our group. Well, over twenty minutes pass and still no sign of anyone, so I found a public phone and called Ping, who instructed us in high-decibel commands to return back to the first terminal to be with the group. We follow his instructions, go back through customs, where the officials have to unregister us from the customs computers, take the train back, join the group, reboard the train yet again now accompanied by the rest of our friends, and then go back through customs. We wait in the line to be told that we have to go back to the first terminal again and get new boarding passes because our last ones were voided. In summary, we got really good at going through customs, taking the international terminal train, and we still made it back to America.



Well, this is where my China posts end! I want to give a special thank you to Dr. Shasberger, our wonderful music secretary Trinity, Dr. Ficsor, and our tour guides for the countless hours they put into making all the logistics of the trip work out. It was definitely a once-in-a-lifetime kind of experience, and I was so blessed to experience it alongside some of my closest friends. So, as they say in China, "再见！"

Tourchestra 2012: Suzhou

Hola! Or I should probably say, "您好！" Last I left you, the Westmont Orchestra was on an overnight high-speed train, headed away from Beijing towards the city of Suzhou. We arrived early the next morning to two additional tour guides (the guide in my bus was named Ken, but nicknamed Rabbit, Banana, Bamboo, and a plethora of other names) and some rather rainy weather.



Here we are trudging through the rain with our instruments. I just noticed this now, but I'm pretty sure our friend Cameroon has a checkers set in hand. So cultural.



Our first activity in Suzhou began soon after entering the city (and no, I'm not counting our fast food "breakfast" as an activity - what was it, KFC?). Suzhou is located by the Yangtze River and is right on the shores of the Taihu Lake, so she's (hope you don't mind me personifying Suzhou) lined with a multitude of canals from her medieval (I'm using what is commonly listed as the second and more colloquial definition of that word, in case ya wanna get all technical on me) days. The moats are so extensive that you can see a good portion of the city via boat, so we boarded water taxis and got our first impressions of the city via the Grand Canal. Sitting in the boat with David's sign is our new friend Bamboo.



A street view from the boat.



You'll notice throughout this post that Suzhou is a lot greener than Beijing. This is partially due to a wetter climate, but I think also can be attributed to the fact that it's not the sprawling metal-and-concrete metropolis that Beijing is (though it's still a big city).



That's the driver (pilot?) of our boat on the bottom right.





“这是第七单元三角洲。请求权限启动对接程序。超过。” *

*not intended for native speakers



We stepped off of the boats at what I believe was some sort of temple...



You can see it in the upper right of the above image and verify for yourselves whether you think it's a temple or not. On second thought, maybe it was a guard tower for the city. By now you can probably deduce how good my memory is...ok, just checked the itinerary: it was the Panmen City Gate. Whoops. At least I'm honest! Now that I think about it more, the cannon probably should have tipped me off. You don't typically see cannons at temples...



Josiah has a staring contest with a Chinese snail.



Plants everywhere. I like this place.



That afternoon we had a performance at the Suzhou Art and Design Technology Institute. These pictures are from our rehearsal beforehand (I finally brought my camera to a rehearsal).





After the performance, we had free time for the evening. I can't seem to remember what that chunk of time entailed, but I do remember lounging in bathrobes being part of the equation. Now that I think of it, I think this was the evening we went to Pizza Hut for dinner. Before you start having associations with the concept of cheap pizza in your head, I should tell you that Pizza Hut in China is swanky. It's a sit-down restaurant, and the interior was decorated accordingly to the level of swank that I attributed to it in the previous sentence. After finishing our food, we proved to the wait staff our American-ness by playing the Whose Line Is It Anyway Props game with the irregularly-shaped pizza platter. On the way back to our hotel, we made a stop at McDonalds (still swanky) for some helado. I also stole Rebecca's rain jacket so I could look trendy, but unfortunately I don't have pictures of it (if you doubt me, Danielsan can verify exactly how trendy I looked).



The next day we were scheduled to leave Suzhou by bus for Shanghai, but before we hit the road we made a stop at the Master of the Nets Garden. To steal from Wikipedia once again, "The garden demonstrates Chinese garden designers' adept skills for synthesizing art, nature, and architecture to create unique metaphysical masterpieces. The Master of the Nets is particularly regarded among garden connoisseurs for its mastering the techniques of relative dimension, contrast, foil, sequence and depth, and borrowed scenery." ← Yeah, what he said.



Here are some of my friends enjoying the garden!





More amigos.



Dr. Shasberger and Madison (she's turning over a new leaf with her full name, in case you hadn't heard :) are happy, trinkets abound, and Chinese ladies are texting.





After the garden, we made a stop at Pingjiang Road; it's more than 800 years old! It's a really popular location for portraits. The people on the upper left were one couple of two or three having a shoot in the short time that we were there.



This is the canal right next to the road.



One of our stops before heading to Shanghai was a silk factory. Before we were shepherded through the silk store at the end (ok, I'm being too cynical - I did after all buy gifts there :), we got to see all of the steps of the silk-making process, and were even allowed to feel live silk worms! On the bottom right, Bri is helping stretch out a tiny piece of unfinished silk fabric into a huge thin sheet; it was crazy how large a small piece of fabric could become.



And I must conclude this post by lauding Jerome's skills as a jello sculptor. Here you see an immaculate 1:325 scale model (assuming an average height of 6.5 meters for the Great Wall and a jello height of 2 centimeters) of the 4780th segment of the Great Wall.

Later that afternoon, we had a small casual performance at the Suzhou Center for Disability (our musicians with bigger instruments didn't have their rental instruments for this one, the stage was rather small, and there were no music stands available, so improvisation was key :), and then we started the long bus ride to our last destination, Shanghai. But that's for my last China blog post, so you'll have to wait a bit longer for that! Until then, adios!