Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Jetlagged and happy

Hello blogging world! It's wonderful to see you again. We have just spent the past couple weeks gallavanting about China, where the "bandwidths" of many google-supported sites are "throttled", or so Nick tells me. I know nothing of these things, but I am certainly appreciating not having to load everything in basic html, for hours at a time. But there are so many incredible things about China and our experiences there that we will never forget!

First things first - food.

Our wonderful, patient, and hilarious tour managers from Wu Promotion as well as from various local agencies made sure that we always had at least 15 plates, per meal. Tiny tables were literally stacked with dishes.  And the managers liked to make fun of us for not finishing everything!!!

A particularly memorable meal - lunch on our last day of tour! Beijing-style hotpot, with lamb and STOMACH and these incredible lamb-skewer-things with a kind of dry rub that would've made Texas proud. And Peking duck omgggg

We played lots of concerts too, in awesome halls -
Our first show, at Shanghai Oriental Arts Center. Do you like our outfits? They are quite new. All our checked bags got lost because of a close connection (and I mean CLOSE, I've never run so fast through an airport terminal in my life, with a string of Chinese attendants cheering me on/yelling to go faster) so we spent the morning of our first day in China shopping! <3 I was quite pleased, and so were the boys...
And this was the festival at which we were asked the question we have been waiting for, for so many years: Do we want fog machines. To be honest, this is more of a dream for the boys than for me, but I understand the gravity of the situation. To everyone's immense disappointment, the smoke didn't work out, but do not worry, the light show did. We had no idea we would be performing during the Autumn Moon Festival, but it was really an experience to remember!

Then there was this enormous backdrop-
And believe it or not, an even bigger poster of our faces in Dalian, which was terrifying. Pics of that to come, I believe they're all on Nick's camera

Ahh there are so many pictures I want to post on this thing. But another little detail - the Aeolus Quartet now lives in the Washington DC area, as we have just begun a doctoral quartet residency at the University of Maryland! I have found that a great antidote to jetlag is unpacking all the boxes in my apartment. So as I get back to that important task, I will leave you with this photo of our tour bus -
just kidding. But we did have a lot of fun riding around in these things :)