Hello, world! I'm now home from China. What a fun trip. :-)
This post will likely be a mixture of stories along with some additional follow-up posts with more stories and experiences that we had while there. Among all these experiences, I'll have a few parallel stories with my good friend, Katy, but as told from a different perspective.
First off, we had to get to the airport. Cedar City is a great little place, but the flights don't really go anywhere, so we started by going to St. George to catch up with the shuttle to the airport in Las Vegas, flying to Los Angeles, and then to Guangzhou, China and finally to Wuhan, China. My parents took Heather, Katy, and me to the rendezvous with the airport shuttle. At first, we went the wrong way in St. George, but got turned around and got there just in time to get on board the shuttle.
In Las Vegas, we had to be "corralled" for a while because we were so early for our flight. The lady running the flight queue was well-dressed... joke... She was kind of manly in the first place, but then had her blue uniform top with a black knee-length skirt, mid-calf white socks, and black heeled shoes. It was kind of funny. We were corralled for about 30 minutes, then got our boarding passes and headed for the gate. Since we were so early, we ended up finding something to eat in another terminal, thus going through the security line not once, but twice!
Our flight boarded about an hour after lunch, and was uneventful. In LA, we had to head into the international terminal. When we got there, we had another 5 hours to wait before our flight, so we just kinda hung around and enjoyed the air conditioning. Around 11, we boarded our flight to Guangzhou. This is that kind of flight that takes 280 people overseas. This thing was HUGE! Over the next 13 hours, I slept in about 30-minute increments. It was a little rough, not gonna lie. Until we were on the way, I didn't know that our flight plan was to fly up the western coast of the US and Canada, follow the coastline in Alaska into Russia, down the coast along Korea and eastern Asia, and going through China to Guangzhou (on the south end of China, near Hong Kong).
Our project in China was a "Large Modern Dance Drama," which is kinda like a ballet. We had two composers working on the project. All in all, there were about two hours worth of music and dancing, incorporating some of the major events during Helen Foster Snow's life. From Cedar City, Helen went to China in the 1930s and stayed for much of her adult life. She was a journalist and spent the next several years working for the US government in China, documenting the events of the revolution and the changes in the culture and so forth. She met Edgar Snow, whom she later married, the two of them helped keep China economically sound following invasions from Korea and Japan. The work we did was to celebrate Helen's life and her compassion toward the Chinese people.
The first morning we were in Wuhan, we had a rehearsal with the orchestra and dance company. My section was a 28-year old bassoon player, me - a 25-year old bassoon player, and a 25-year old contrabassoon player. We had such a great time. Those two were super nice and we had a lot of fun with this production. On day one, I made a reed for each of them, because of the limited availability to get reeds in Wuhan. I guess (at least for contrabassoon) they have to special order bassoon reeds in Beijing, give some money to the orchestra liaison, who flies to Beijing to pick up supplies for orchestra members, and come back to give them to the players. Usually, it costs around $20-30 per reed to buy them this way. In Chinese currency, that's 120-180 RMB (Yuan) per reed. It doesn't seem like a lot, but that a lot of money if you play a lot, since a reed is usually only good for about 8-10 hours of playing time before it get worn out, you need at least two of them to use during a week.
I think that's probably sufficient to now. I'll write another one or two with more funny things that came up. :-) All in all, it was a great trip, and I'm happy to have been there.
