The Great Hall of the People is indeed a hall, but is not in fact "Great".
This morning we awoke to the sound of my roomie’s alarm clock and I popped up out of bed like a jack in the box. WTF? I am SO not a morning person normally, and I popped up like it was my job. Maybe it was the fact that I had thirteen hours of sleep last night? After dinner we were all so exhausted that we went straight to bed and passed out totally. Our schedules are still a little off, but I managed to sleep for about four hours at a time even though I did get up around 4 AM and have to force myself back to sleep.
The hotel where we’re staying is really nice, and it has the biggest towels I’ve ever seen. You could wrap two of me in those suckers, and that’s saying something. Hotel rooms in China have a couple of very interesting features—when you walk in the door, there’s a card slot on the wall where you slide in and leave your room key to activate the power for the room. If you take out the key, the power goes out, as I found out when I was leaving to go down to breakfast and took the key, leaving my roommate in the dark on the toilet.
Speaking of toilets, here in China there are two types—the regular seated kind, which are rare and usually only found as handicapped toilets or in places where you’ll find a lot of foreigners, and the infamous “squatter”. Basically this type is a urinal turned horizontal and installed on the floor. You have to squat to go, and it’s been interesting learning to balance and aim. Fortunately for us the hotel has the familiar kind, although the venues will probably force us to expand our repertoire a little.
We decided to go down to see the Forbidden City this morning, and we piled into two taxis to get there. It’s about 9 km from our hotel, and walking would have been a long haul, not to mention we’d have to dodge traffic. We get directions from the concierge and took our hotel cards with us so we could get back. (There’s no guarantee that you’ll be able to find anyone that speaks English in the city, so the hotel provides you with cards that list the name and address for the hotel in Chinese so the driver can understand where you need to get to—the Chinese names bear no resemblance to the English translation most of the time.) The cab ride was interesting and we bumped through traffic for about thirty minutes to the North Gate. When we arrived, of course there were lots of guys waiting to sell us tchatchkes, fake watches, and fake Olympic gear, but we had our fearless leader Cello Chick, who promptly sent them packing.
CC has been to China before, and is full of advice about what to eat, what not to eat, and all sorts of protocol and custom. The tap water isn’t drinkable in China, so everything you drink and eat has to be made with filtered water. That means of course, no drinking water from the tap, but also no brushing your teeth, no fresh produce that you can’t peel, and no salads (they’re washed with water). Of course, this problem isn’t necessarily China-specific—when I was in school I had a really wicked case of the trots for about three weeks after I moved to Phoenix. That shit ain’t right, so bottled water it is.
Anyway, the Forbidden City was really incredible—we hired a guide and hand a good hour and a half to tour the site. Our guide’s name was Linda and she was really great—funny, knowledgeable, and her English was excellent. (Pictures here)
We had to leave early for our concert venue, the Great Hall of the People at Tiananmen Square. This building is also the venue for the Chinese congress, and seats about nine thousand people. When arrived there, we were ushered through security to the hall and shown a roundabout route to the dressing rooms, which were moldy and a little waterlogged from a leaky toilet. (This later overflowed, and the whole bottom floor smelled like a herd of yak.) The audience section of the hall itself was gorgeous, even though the wood floor of the stage hadn’t been properly cared for and was splintered and broken across its whole expanse. It was a pretty surreal setup—colored lights and these shiny balls hanging from the ceiling that reflected different colors. They had to mic everyone because of the acoustics of the hall, and we found out in spades in our rehearsal that we couldn’t hear ANYTHING.
This was probably a good thing in the case of the cello section in particular. The official story so far is that they couldn’t bring their own instruments over due to flight restrictions (we think it’s more like the promoter didn’t want to pay for the extra seats needed to fly them in—cellos and oversized string instruments are normally given their own seat on an airline so they won’t be crushed in the cargo hold.) So thus far they’ve been borrowing instruments wherever we go. In Orlando, this wasn’t a problem because some of the section was from there and had a couple of extra instruments.
When they received their loaner cellos at the Great Hall, the looks of horror were intense—these were basically the cheapest and worst student instruments any of us had ever seen, and not only were they bad instruments, they were in terrible repair as well. There was a frenzy of fixing and tuning and adjusting, accompanied by the *pop* of strings breaking. They consigned the worst instrument to use for parts and cannibalized it thoroughly. They made it though all right, but CC and the Licker (he’s a cellist, obviously) looked like they needed either a beer or a shotgun by the time it was all over.
For our part, the woodwinds had a decent night, even though we really couldn’t hear anyone else. I started getting really sleepy during the last couple of numbers, but made it through all right in the end. It’s kind of like pulling an all-nighter and then playing a jury when you’re in school—more than a little foggy, but as long as everyone gets out alive you count it a success.
One more concert in this venue tomorrow night, then we’re on to Wuhan. Feh. It can’t come soon enough.
The only downside of a lush landscape like this one is the fact that everything grows, including the mold on the walls of our hotel room. In Cellco Chick and Pixie B's room it was really bad, so CC is sleeping in our room and Pixie's staying with Sassy Jo and TinyFlutist, since the hotel was completely full up and there were no more rooms available to switch them into.
Schlepp to the airport, wait wait wait. Our flight was delayed two hours, so we walked around the terminal looking for food and lo and belhold, found a 7-11. WTF? All I cared about was that they had DIET COKE!!!!!! (Or rather, Coke Light. Same thing.) And yogurt and pistachios and Kinder Bueno chocolate bars. They also had KFC and McDonalds, but I'm still not that desperate yet.
I need to take a moment here to talk about someone I loved dearly who passed away this week-- Dr. Gerald Loren Welker. He was the Director of the University of Alabama School of Music and the conductor of the Wind Ensemble and Contemporary Ensemble when I was in school there, and inhabits most of my most vivid memories of that time.