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Wednesday Sept 14, Tonight was the first real gig for the funk band, one that was advertised, and that I actually invited all of my friends to. We got a lot of people out and had a pretty good show, despite some issues with the sound system. My friends really loved the show, so I was happy, regardless of the creepy soldier guys who were dancing in front of me the whole time-- very sleazy. Anyway it ended up being a moderately late night, again, so I stayed at Rob's for the night. |
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Thursday Sept 15th, It's not so bad when your alarm doesn't go off and you're ten minutes away from work. It's kind of a big problem when your alarm doesn't go off and you're about 30-45 minutes away from work depending on traffic. Rob and I woke up at 9am, and I realized that there was no way I would ever make it to work on time, plus I actually was feeling a little ill, so I decided to capitalize on my first sick day. We are allowed three paid sick days for the year, and I haven't used one yet, despite having a major throat infection, spraining my ankle and having an allergic reaction. So I figure it's time. I actually was pretty exhausted, cause I ended up sleeping for pretty much the entire day anyway. |
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Saturday Sept 17th, I got up early this morning to head over to the Daegu Airport to meet my tour group headed to . . . Beijing! We were all super groggy, but really excited. As it turns out, there are a lot of foreigners in Daegu that I've never met, cause out of 62 foreigners on this trip, I only know about 15. Out of my close friends, I was travelling with Evan, Alison, Alison's sister Kathryn, Karen and of course Rob. Everything went as planned for our flight out, no delays or complications. The mood was reminiscent of going on high school music trips, cause we were all so giddy! After we landed in Beijing, we were taken straight to our hotel to check in. Our hotel, the International Bamboo and Rattan Tower, turned out to be gorgeous. It's been a long time since I've stayed in such a nice room! Big beds, clean Western-style bathrooms, mini bars and fridges, the works! I was sharing a room with Karen for the trip, with Evan and Rob across the hall, and Ali and Kathryn next door. Once we were all settled in, our group met downstairs to head off to our first excursion-- the Temple of Heaven. Our tour guide turned out to be this unintentionally hilarious and very campy Chinese guy whose English name is John ("J-O-H-N, it is from the bible, a good name, no?"). He spent the whole trip talking about the god of heaven, luxury apartments (which he is apparently obsessed with) and "genuine imitation" items. Most tour guides in Beijing carry a flag that the group is supposed to follow (which by the way is impossible to follow, because they move so fast, there's ten million flags exactly the same, and there's about 50 million people at every site). Our tour guide decided instead that he would carry a blue umbrella with white flowers ("Follow John, follow the blue umbrella"), so we spent our whole trip chasing a blue umbrella! The Temple of Heaven was quite beautiful. Chines temples have a real different feel to them than Korean and Japanese temples. The actual temple part was round and everything on it was hand-done. There were three gates to every area, one for the royalty, and one for everyone else on either side. Chasing a blue umbrella is not the easiest thing in the world, so Rob promptly got lost, and I didn't find him until we got back to the bus. My crew got separated pretty quickly, and we didn't have a lot of time to explorethe temple, so a lot of my pictures turned out poorly.
In any case, it was still beautiful to look at. Our next stop was dinner. We went to this really pretty Chines minority restaurant that had dancing girls and beautiful floral decorations. We were served about 10 dishes that are put in the middle of the table on a lazy susan, and everyone just picks from the dishes with their chopsticks. The food tasted surprisingly just like Chinese food at home,
good but no surprises. I asked our tour guide to confirm that there were no peanuts in any of the dishes, but I don't think he understood. He thought that I just didn't like peanuts. Fortunately nothing made me die! We also discovered promptly that beer is only 5 yuan, which is the equivalent of 50 cents for 1 litre bottles! Needless to say, my whole table was certainly taking advantage!
After dinner, we headed over to a kung fu show in this really cool red theatre. I thought that the show would just be a bunch of people hitting things, but it turned out to be really gorgeous. It was so graceful, it was like watching a ballet, plus there was an actual story line tracing the development of a boy into a warrior monk. I was beyond impressed. For the night, my crew was supposed to meet up with a friend of my friend Jared's, who is living in Beijing. This guy Kemin had organized a music festival in Beijing that was to feature one of Evan's favourite rappers, so we were going to try to catch the show, or at least go to the after-party. As it turned out, we
were all so tired that nobody wanted to go out, so we all ended up hanging out and drinking at the hotel. It really was like being on a high school trip, except minus the chaperones! Unfortunately our wake-up call was for 6:30am, so we did stay up too late anyway, but
we certainly paid for it the next morning!
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