Day 3…again…

August 16, 2008 in Uncategorized | 1 comment

The original Day 3 post seems to be pretty complete. I did find a video of the dress rehearsal for Tiananmen Square that day.

Tiananmen Square Dress Rehearsal

I’ll take this opportunity to talk about Orchestra Village some more. The hotel we were staying at was called Fuan Gong Palace. The “village” itself is huge. The perimeter of the wall is 12 miles. This doesn’t include the golf course, parking lots and further gardens that are outside the walls. Across the courtyard from the hotel is the dining hall and rec center. The rec center has a swimming pool, climbing wall, bowling alley, an archery range, and various other sports facilities. A group of about 20 from my high school held a game of laser tag. We had the maximum number of people and it was a lot of fun.

There is one more hotel in the complex that was kitty-corner to ours. I don’t think it was finished yet. At the far end of the village there was a Buddhist temple and a mini-water park. The middle of the city is taken up by a lake and the gardens surrounding it. There are several fountains and statues throughout the complex.

The food was Chinese, but not particularly exotic. Breakfast was on the second floor of the hotel. There were usually hard boiled eggs, sausage, some sort of soup, fried rice, and various forms of bread. Lunch and dinner were at the dining hall. Both meals consisted of various Chinese dishes. There were a few I wish I could have gotten the recipe. Some, like sweet and sour pork were familiar. They also consistently served badly fried french fries. Watermelon was the all-purpose fruit/dessert. The Chinese are also big on Coke, or they think it’s all Americans drink. Either way they offered/served more of that than they did water. There was a water boiler in the rooms, along with tea bags.

In Grand Epoch City there were around 1200 members of the orchestra and 300 Dutch participants of the Chinese Walk Challenge. Here is a picture of them. They tended to come into the lobby singing.

That just about covers most of it. I’ll throw in more as I go along.