Day 1 : April 16th, 2012

We just got off the airplane, and are no on the bus, so that is why my writing is sloppy.

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Right now we are in front of a school Kung Fu training ground. There are two schools that these boys are from, with a total of 30,000 students. There are some students now that are running around in a circle which is shown as a darker patch than the cement. I found out by looking at the other people that the track is made by other people throwing buckets of water into a circle. This I think is very cool. The people in front of us are doing spear exercises, but most of them are running. There are also bags of sand hung up on polls that I bet are for punching. Now there are some people doing stretches. I guess they are split into groups and then they rotate in different stations. I see now that only a few people are using the water-made track. There are now people shouting some type of lesson to their teacher. There are some guys that are doing hopping on one leg then jumping over other guys, other the leg though so it is safer. That is all I can see them doing now.

The mountains here are beautiful. They are really tall, and there are lots of trees all over the place. The sad thing is that we have to climb up one tomorrow; this will take 4.5 hours round trip.

There are no girls here at all, but they might be doing other stuff. The spears make a sort of rattling noise when they are moved

There are lots of purple flowers here too. I don’t know what they are, but they are sure petty. They are on trees. Madelyn (my friend) said we have to write a journal for Chinese too, so I will put that at the back of the book.

There are so many boys here, and I wonder what they hope to get out of all of this. Like their jobs and stuff. How will these 30,000 boys get good jobs? They do not have time, at least I don’t think they do, to learn any things such science, math, or any of that stuff.

Now there are people doing cartwheels, like 10-20 in a row. And there are some during the leg stretching on other people’s back thing. There are also push-up-kick things. I just heard that they are doing a show in about 5-10 minutes.

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The performance was really good, the whip thing especially, it sounded like thunder! The fake sword thing wasn’t as loud as I would have hoped, but I guess that it might be because it was outside.

We went through a temple, which was really cool. It helped that I was in the Chinese group and the monk told us the correct history of the things there. I also found out that the purple flower is called zi jing hua. Right now we are waiting to go to the hotel.

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I just lifted some weights. One of them was 40公斤for sure, and the other one felt heavier. 40公斤is, I think, 88 pounds. We are on a bus going to the hotel.

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We are now in the hotel room. It is more like a house with numbered rooms in them. We are in house #29, room 11. Just as I was getting my stuff on my bed and I saw a big spider. I was going to try and squash it, but then it wouldn’t squash, so I put it on my clipboard ad threw it out the door. Madelyn was scared and Hanako (my other friend) was saying how she liked spiders.

Just now we heard music, and Madelyn sat up on the bed to get her phone, but then she fell over off the bed and hit her head. Me and Hanako were laughing really hard, but since Madelyn was talking to her mom we tried to hold it in. So when she got off the phone we were laughing our heads off.

We are now waiting for Mrs. Li to go with us to buy stuff from the store.

2012 Shaolin Field Trip

As some of you may have heard, we (our class) recently went to Shaolin Temple for a week long field trip. During that time we had to keep a journal of what we did and what we saw, so I will type it up for you to share here. I will put them up as 5 different posts.

Pictures on Picasa

Easter Bird Nests

Thanks to my Aunt, we were able to make delicious Easter bird nests. We were supposed to make them out of pretzel sticks, but here in China, it is very hard to find them. Then my mom thought that it would be a good idea to make the nests out of Chocolate Haystacks. So this morning, I started making the haystacks. They were really easy to make, but they took a long time as well; plus, it was hard to stand over a hot stove for any long period of time during a Chinese spring. But eventually they were done and we were able to put take them out and form bird nests with them. Then we put the little chocolate eggs that my Aunt sent into the middle of the haystack. They turned out really good, and since it is not actually Easter until tomorrow, we are saving them until then. Hopefully they will taste as good as they look!

Pictures on Picasa

Eton College Boy's Choir

Last night our family and a lot of the teachers of our school went to go see the Eton College Boy's Choir preform. They were really very good. I am not sure how old they all were, but there was a large range. Their voices were really good, but I found some points that sort of disappointing me.

1. Not all of them looked at the choir director
2. Not all of them dropped their mouths while singing
3. They fidgeted a lot
4. They had to have the music in front of them

I know it is probably not fair for me to say that, but it is true. Plus I have had them hammered into me the past few weeks. On Picasa I have uploaded some picture and videos.

A Monster in Paris

This picture that I have put on my Picasa website is just to prove that almost all Chinese movies are pirated. As you can tell from the title, the name of the movie is A Monster in Paris. This is basically a story of a giant singing flea. As one person put it, "If you put Phantom of the Opera and the giant bug from Mimic together, what do you get? A Monster in Paris." Yes, that tells you a little about the plot. My main point is the cover.
The synopsis on the back goes like this. "Gene Kelly, producer Arthur Freed, director Vincente Minnelli and a skilled production team conjure an entertainment for the ages..." Now, this is where it got confusing for me and my dad. I thought: Gene Kelly? What his he doing in an animated children's show? Did he do the choreography or what? We didn't get it. After watching the whole movie and the credits, there was no sign of Gene Kelly. So I turned to the Internet. I searched up "Gene Kelly and A Monster in Paris". Of course, nothing came up. It either talked about A Monster in Paris, or it talked about Gene Kelly's An American in Paris. It was then that I finished reading the synopsis. "Kelly plays an ex-GI who loves Paris and alluring (but engaged) perfune-shop clerk (Leslie Caron in her beguiling screen debut). Dazzling dance sequences are spun around songs by the Gershwins. And the closing ballet - combining the George Gershwin title piece, Impressionist set stylings and Kelly's inimitable talent for telling a story in dance - lifts this winner of six Academy Awards including Best Picture (plus an honorary Oscar to Kelly), into the ether of timelessness." It was then that it began to click.
The people who had made to cover had put on the wrong synopsis! Instead of A Monster in Paris, they had put An American in Paris. Which I personally thought was, and is, very funny. This could only have happened if it was a Chinese person who didn't know English and they just searched up on the web a summary of A Monster in Paris, and not being able to read English, they put on the An American in Paris synopsis instead. This just goes to show how Chinese movies are almost always pirated.

Includes pictures on Picasa.

Christmas Concert

We had our big Christmas Concert last Saturday, which I am not going to lie, we did a pretty good job on. The choir didn't do too well since at one part the other group that was singing hit the wrong notes and we didn't really harmonize very well. But here is the story in full.
We had to get to the school at 6:30, but I don't know why since we didn't really take that much time getting ready. During that time though I had time to tune up my Saxophone to the piano, which the vice principle told me I had to do. When I had finished that, our choir director told us to meet backstage where we could practice a little bit and warm up. After that, we just had to wait until the second performance and then we would get onstage. Most of us were girls and we were really giggly, and everyone was cracking jocks because they were so nervous. Meanwhile, I was trying to suck on my reed to get it wet without laughing. But I couldn't hold it in any longer, so I laughed. Bad idea. My reed flew out of my mouth and flew across the room, which made everyone laugh harder. When it was finally time to get onstage, we were all very very nervous. When we started singing our first song, the Boat Song, that was when we started going off pitch. After that song was over, we sang Jubilatedaoh, or something like that, which was ok, except we forgot to come in at the right spot. Then Donanobispachem, which was ok until we split. Then we lost pitch again. Finally we sang one song that went ok, Raise Up Shepard and Follow, which I had a solo in, and after the solo I sort of messed up on the lyrics, but when I got back on track we all did good. Then we sang the song we were more used to, Peaceful. That one was finally perfect. After that I had exactly one performance to get my Saxophone assembled. I then had time to stand on stage and worry. But when we started playing, me on Saxophone and my friend on piano, we actually did pretty good, except she got a couple wrong notes, and my Saxophone stopped playing for while, but it wasn't really that noticeable. After that I was able to sit in the audience and watch. The songs were great, and no one else messed up so it turned out pretty good. At the end everyone who performed had to go back onstage to get a group shot, and then it was finally time to go home. All in all, it was a pretty good performance.
Pictures

Intercontinental Hotel

Last Thursday our school choir went to a very fancy 5 star hotel to perform at their Lighting of the Christmas Tree ceremony. We were planning on singing five songs, but then they only gave us time to sing three. "Rock and roll snow man", "Winter Fantasy", and "Peaceful", basically repeating some of the songs we sang at the Christmas Bazaar. We left school at 5:30 to get to the Intercontinental Hotel because it was a ways away. When we got there we got red scarfs and Santa hats to wear, which none of the older kids were very thrilled about. After we had briefly warmed up, we went into the restaurant to eat pizza, but we didn't get very much since the little kids ate almost all of it. Right after that we had a quickly wash our hands so we could go on stage to perform. Then we went on stage to perform our three songs, which I think went pretty well. The thing that surprised me was that there was a lot of people from our class there and some of our teachers, which made us all sort of nervous. After that, we went backstage to get ready to leave, but we didn't leave for a while because the little kids wanted to stay a while to watch the other performances. There was a magician, two singers, and dancers. Then we left and got cookies from the hotel people, which were coated in sugar and tasted really good. Overall, it was a pretty good evening.

I will have pictures up by the 3rd of December.