Memories and Gratitude May 13, 2010
Posted by Jabez in Saying Goodbye, Uncategorized, Why We Sing.add a comment
I suppose I’m back in my awareness as well as my body, but of course I can’t really be sure about that.
I remember remarking on the architecture of Shanghai's airport, as a way of diverting attention from my melancholy.
The jet lag is mostly over for me, I think. On the other hand, my spouse seems to have caught it from me, because she wakes up in the middle of the night and can’t get back to sleep.
Humans transformed into pandas observe the Forbidden City.
For a few days there I think I was volatile, occasionally short-tempered. It has been interesting to see which incidents in my return to the American routine have triggered the unreasonable emotional response. On Sunday, for instance, I found that someone in the church choir had taken away my choir robe and the cotta that goes over it. I was completely enraged by this and contemplated leaving the choir forever as punishment to (somebody) for the disrespect that my enflamed soul was feeling. Today, I still haven’t found the rightful robe and cotta, but I don’t really care.
There are many other varied incidents in the last week that similarly preoccupied my mind and then evaporated.
I started a new job at the Census Bureau, which actually means that I have undergone three days of training for the new job this week. Perhaps I am feeling like a peacemaker because they actually train us in the matter of how to deal with angry people and dogs and peacably deal with objections.
The UN Singers already have another singing appearance planned, on June 3. I have been invited to come and sing with them and I will attend another rehearsal next Tuesday, May 18. I am greatly looking forward to this because in the last few days, now that I am at home, I have come to realize how much I miss being with them.
There is a special kind of attachment that comes from singing in a chorus with other people. We cut each other some slack for our mistakes. We admire soloists and a job well done by the person standing beside us. We like to hear funny stories from our fellow singers, about singing and about other parts of their lives. If enough time goes by, their faces begin to populate my dreams, and I would have to say I love some of them like members of some kind of family.
So, UN Singers, now that the tour has drawn to its close, I want you to know that I am grateful for giving me the chance to get to know you all and to sing with you. I wish everybody in the world could feel the attachment to each other that I feel with you, right now.
Saying Goodbye (Quickly) May 8, 2010
Posted by Jabez in On Tour, Saying Goodbye.add a comment
I got up before 7:00 and had an American style breakfast, a bacon and egg sandwich on toast. We were supposed to leave at 7:45 to make a train to the airport, but in fact with all the sortation of baggage into separate piles and general sluggishness of the people, we didn’t actually leave until an hour later, at 8:45. At Longyang Station we made our way through the first of what would prove to be many security checkpoints to the train platform. The arrival of the train was the last of the many, many entertainments which our hosts had in store for us, as this was the world famous maglev connection to Pudong Airport.
L-R: Mickey, Marina, and Sonia waiting to board the maglev train.
Magnetic levitation is a new technology whereby the property of magnets of the same polarity to repel each other is used to lift the entire train off of the surface it is resting on and the successive change of polarities along the surface is used to pull the train forward. Since there is a space between the body of the train and the “track,” there is no friction except from the surrounding atmosphere and the train can fly faster than any other form of ground transport. In our case the train’s speed increased rapidly to about 270 miles per hour and held that speed until we arrived directly at the airport about five minutes later.
Once we had passed the formidable security apparatus, a number of us sat around drinking coffee until it was time to board. The actual departure took place a mere 15 minutes after it was scheduled. On this flight, the electrical outlet positioned on the back of the seat immediately in front of me works. This means that since we took off and began the 14 hour flight, I have been able to write four blog entries and save the words for posting when I arrive home this afternoon, by the clock a mere four hours or so after I left China.
Speed indicator aboard maglev train = 268.75 mph.
I suppose it would have made sense to sing a song in the airport as a way of punctuating the end of our fabulous tour in China. However, by the time we would have gathered, so many people had fallen away to take separate itineraries that there was hardly enough of a chorus to make it happen, and many of them were either buying last minute gifts or looking for the place to change their Chinese money back into dollars. C’est la vie.
The Final Pageant May 8, 2010
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On Thursday I stayed in the hotel all morning performing edits and sound level adjustments on the digital files of pretty much everything I have been able to record since we got here. Part of the time the chorus’s president, Chuck Appel, who is my roommate, was looking over my shoulder and getting a tutorial on how I do these things. This is a long lesson but I have to say Chuck was really interested in being able to do this himself, perhaps because he works at the UN’s own radio station and thinks it might come in handy on his day job. While we were doing this everybody else was going shopping, so at least we could tell ourselves we saved some money.
A little before noon we went back out to the Expo site to make one more singing appearance, this time outside the pavilion so that the camera people could show the big UN logo in the background. Still the glutton for punishment, I granted the privilege of operating the digital recorder to my new friend Han Bing, who placed it on the pavement in front of her and guarded it from marauding pedestrians like a mother tiger hovering over her cub.
A cadre of UN Singers waits for the bus to pick them up, outside the Blue Box of the UN Pavilion at Expo 2010. L-R: Mary Lee, Nora, Douglas, and Laura.
After a quick lunch in a restaurant, we went to an establishment known as the Postal and Telecom Club, for a joint rehearsal with the China Telecom Corporate Chorus. That night on stage as part of a big pageant we were going to sing a set by ourselves as the UN Chorus and then join forces with this group to sing a new piece called World, the official theme song of Expo 2010. The Club itself is part of the public relations department of the Corporation, and was a rather extreme example of the differences in attitude towards and support for the arts that one finds in China. The stage was equipped with extravagant sound and light show technology; there is an arts school for children operated by the company; there was a new dance studio on the third floor (used as the men’s changing area) complete with a half-wall sized LCD video screen; in fact, China Telecom has its own dance company; the stage and auditorium do double duty as a state-of-the-art TV studio; and more than this, I am sure.
Pageant participants just before the performance, backstage.
The pageant itself was long and varied, with many song and dance segments punctuated by exhortative speeches delivered by union representatives and a sort of glossy Regis-and-Kathy-Lee duo. Its purpose was to both honor and motivate the young people who volunteer to work at the Expo without compensation. There was a bunch of tween-oriented singing by the male and female stars who appear on the TV ads promoting the Expo and volunteerism in general. Shortly before the finale there was a performance by a famous traditional Chinese opera star who, as one of our women singers said enviously, could “sing like a soprano and speak like a baritone.” He wore white face paint, blue eye
shadow, and a bright red robe that would have driven Ru Paul into a green funk of envy. And his singing was so high in the register that it gave several new dimensions to the term falsetto. Perhaps the proper term would be falsetissimo. We all gathered again on stage to sing the finale, and just before the end of it there was an enormous discharge of fireworks above our heads in the lights (which scared the hell out of those of us who did not know it was coming) followed by an enduring shower of confetti and streamers onto the stage, which gathered in drifts. On my way into the wings, I bent down and grabbed a handful of the colored paper and stuck it into my pocket as a souvenir.
Children singing and dancing at the pageant. Photo by Han Bing.
As weary as we were from two relentless days of programmed cheer, there was still a farewell dinner for us to negotiate. It was in a hot-pot restaurant, which I found confusing. Boiling pots of broth with flames under them stood in the middle of the tables. Waitresses brought small plates with chunk-sized foods and we were supposed to choose what we liked and cook it in either a bland broth or a spicy one. The trouble was, I could not recognize what the foods actually were, nor how long they should be cooked, nor, once they were in the broth, could I find the chunk of whatever I had put there. We all muddled along through this for two hours until it was patently time to go home. As we were waiting for the bus on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant, a man came by with his pets. That is, he had three tiny dogs harnessed to a small cart embellished with flashing lights, about two feet high. Riding in the cart on a cushion was a white and yellow cat. In spite of the hour and the imminent prospect of packing after midnight, the sight of that relaxing cat reassured me, reminding me of the flawless and continuing hospitality of our Chinese hosts.
The combined forces of UN Singers, China Telecom Corporation Choir, and instruments. Photo by Han Bing.
Getting to Know Them All… May 8, 2010
Posted by Jabez in On Tour, Repertoire.add a comment
After fussing around with the exigencies of where to place and how to operate the sound recorder several times during this tour, I finally decided to seek assistance from one of the many telephone company interns that migrates from place to place with us looking for ways to be helpful. I showed him the recorder and asked him to operate it while we were singing our last two sets in the pavilion on Wednesday, May 5. He studied it for a moment and told me that unless I erased a certain large file I would run out of recording space within about six minutes. I confessed I did not know how to erase files from it, and together we experimented until we had succeeded in doing the job. This gave us both a deep sense of satisfaction, not only in conquering the technological beast, but also in cooperating across a culture and language boundary. Here is a link to one of the recorded songs:
http://www.garageband.com/song?|pe1|S8LTM0LdsaShY1e0ams
Between the two complete sets of our music that I have recorded, I should be able to extract something representative and worthwhile for each song; anyway, that was what I intended to do, but I have not had anything like the proper amount of time to assess this possibility and don’t expect to make any judgments on recording quality until I get back home to America. By the way, it is possible to interact with some big sites from China, but not others. I can’t get onto Facebook from here, nor Youtube nor anything else Google. Blogspot is out.
Our Guide, just before telling me not to take any more photos.
WordPress is in, but very slow I think because the state operates a program that strips out all the Google Adwords content before showing you anything and it may take two minutes just to perform simple operations. After morning singing, we went to a kind of experimental education center operated by China Telecom where they toured us through a sort of model home of the future filled with interactive electronic gizmos: you can turn on your appliances before you get there, you have the whole world of entertainment at your fingertips, etc. I had been cheerfully taking pictures of everything I usually do when we arrived at the magic mirror in the bathroom which actually turns into a real-time Bloomberg info-screen terminal, and when I snapped that the guide told me that picture taking was not permitted.
So, with the wind depleted from my sails, I went back to the hotel and prepared for some genuine human contact with young employees of China Telecom in a sort of motivational seminar. We were paired up one and one, and asked to discuss vital issues like the future of technology and the meaning of Expo 2010. I showed my partner my Kindle and told her how it works, and then we talked about possible reasons why Shanghai is so much cleaner and the public services are so much more efficient than in the New York metropolitan area. Then we all took a break and had a contest to see who could transfer glass marbles fastest from one tall glass to an empty one beside it. Go figure.
Our hosts prepare to sing at the banquet.
Some of the young employees then joined us at the Corporate Leadership Banquet held in the hotel where we were staying (the hotel, I believe, also belongs to China Telecom). I sat next to Han Bing. Han is a fearsomely efficient and charmingly cheerful intern who will graduate from college and join China Telecom officially in August. She told me that both of her parents are teachers of English, which would partly account for her excellent pronunciation. We noticed some fuzziness around the “L” sound and demonstrated for her the proper tongue placement to improve it, which she promptly did perfectly. Then I asked her to practice by repeating the tongue-twister “She sells seashells by the seashore.” My friend Douglas Rose protested that it was unfair of me to do this without offering some sort of reciprocal challenge, and has thus made it his task to collect some Chinese tongue-twisters which I will have to learn and tell you about next time…
Han Bing.
After dinner, there was solo singing, most memorably our strong mezzo, Sonia, presenting us with a beautiful and heartfelt rendition of Deep River, before the evening closed with a small male chorus of Chinese executives, led by the local managing director, singing their own arrangement of (hello!) Edelweiss!?!
Digging a Little Deeper May 8, 2010
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Now that we have been in China for more than a week, and acclimated ourselves a little to the demands of our performances, our hosts have apparently decided we are ready to explore a few places that are decidedly not typical for tourists in China. On Tuesday we started the day by visiting an “Elder Service Facility” in a neighborhood near the hotel. They were ready for us, enthusiastically singing in their own chorus as we walked into the lobby. After greetings were exchanged all around and the neighborhood labor representative made a little speech, some of our singers spontaneously broke into Mo Li Hua and pretty soon the whole combined crowd was busy singing again.
Here I am with my dumpling-making professor, who also sings in the chorus at the Ruixin rest care facility.
We were actually scheduled to perform a set, so we had to tear ourselves away to change into our costumes. When we came back, the place was really mobbed and it was one of those performances where you couldn’t get people to stop clapping their hands (rhythmically, during the songs, except during Shenandoah, of course). We rose to the challenge pretty well, and it turned out to be a good thing we did.
Here’s why: pretty much all the time there is a camera crew following us around taking stills and high-end video of just about everything we do. (One day by chance in an outdoor location I was standing in front of the camera crew while I was also watching a video screen mounted on the side of a building, which was playing the Lady Gaga music video of Paparazzi. I tried to position myself so that they would shoot me with this in the background, but I don’t think they got either the picture or the joke).
Anyway, the video guys were trying (I think) to capture footage that the PR office of China Telecom could place as a publicity feature story on a national Chinese news broadcast. Apparently the visit to the Elder Care Facility did the trick, because there was a two minute segment on the national news the next day (May 5) which you can actually see if you click on this link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jilyyaW5hhU
Watch out especially for that handsome devil who makes a little speech towards the end of the segment. You will see that as he is talking he is attempting to learn the process of making the dumplings that you find in dumpling soup. They had trooped us into the cafeteria and paired each singer with a Chinese elder, who in my case showed infinite patience in perfecting my technique. As we produced the trays dumplings, someone spirited them away, and ten minutes later returned with the soup itself, so then we could sit down and eat together. After lunch there was the usual exchange of speeches and pleasantries and a very amusing talk by a little girl who was there visiting with her Granny and who spoke English with no discernible flaws in pronunciation.
Here is my friend Jacqueline Charles of Trinidad, with her new friend, the little girl who spoke to us in perfect English.
As the singers drifted away from the table to go change back into their street clothes, suddenly a new amusement formed itself in the common room. Three Latin musicians from our group had commandeered the piano and added a violin and bandoneon (Argentine accordion) to begin an impromptu tango concert. They were quickly joined by an Argentine singer and several dancers who were slicing this way and that with wild abandon. A dignified, white-haired Chinese lady claimed the singer for herself and they began to dance in a way that indicated she had tangoed many a time before; it even appeared that the tango disease would spread through the entire population; but then Mickey intervened and reminded us that we had to leave for our afternoon meeting.
This was a cultural exchange festival with students at Donghua University, south of Shanghai. The students there performed both traditional and modern (pop) Chinese music, mingling acoustic instruments and voice performances with canned music that came out of speakers in the ceiling. The part I liked best was a chorus of about ten girls dressed in identical incredibly bright yellow dresses with yellow scarves tied round their necks, which you can hear at this link:
http://www.garageband.com/song?|pe1|S8LTM0LdsaShY1e-YGA
The Girl Choir at Donghua University sang with power and conviction.
And if you think our hosts were trying to cram a lot of stuff in before we leave, you are right. After we left the college, we stopped for a little while at the home belonging to Mickey’s mom, which was nearby, had a snack, visited a neighbor’s house, heard a little girl play her koto, got back on the bus, and drove to the Oriental Pearl Tower in Shanghai to have dinner at a revolving restaurant a thousand feet above the city. God in heaven!
Meeting with Another Choir (by accident) May 5, 2010
Posted by adminsn in On Tour.Tags: Chinese opera, church, concert, guerilla singing, Mao Ya, performance, Shanghai Expo, tourist sites, Zhou village
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Since I am a creature of habit, on Sundays my thoughts turn to church matters. You may remember that the week previous we effectively lost Sunday entirely, because we were engaged in the 24 hour travel stint to arrive in China. On Sunday morning, May 2, four of us, singers from Singapore, the Philippines, and America, looked up churches on the internet and found one that looked like it might have English language services. We took a cab halfway across the city, thinking that we would arrive at a Roman Catholic church; but that conjecture turned out to be beside the point, because the next service there was not at 9:00, but at 10:00, and we had to go sing at the Expo at 10:30. So we sat in the pews, soaked up the atmosphere for a while, and gradually realized that we had come to a Methodist church, not Catholic. Then, an energetic elderly man approached one of us in the back of the church and discovered we were UN Singers. Excitedly, he led us downstairs into the choir room to meet the church’s singers. An old woman was pounding on an upright piano in the corner as they worked their way through an anthem by Brahms. Our guide, the retired former pastor of the church, made a little speech introducing us and promptly asked us to sing something. We had no soprano, but the four of us sang through Sia Hamba with alacrity and explained that the lyrics meant we were marching in the light of God. Then a woman in the second row asked if we could sing Mo Li Hua and I said that since we had no sopranos we might be able to use their help and all sing together, which we did.
Whenever I have toured with a choir I have always been a fan of chance singing encounters in streets and restaurants, which I refer to generically as “guerilla singing.” In that church basement room we all felt a little bit like guerillas, and I could feel quite strongly the way that a shared musical experience immediately crosses cultural boundaries even if people can’t speak the same language.
Still flushed with the excitement of our encounter, we went to sing a set at the UN auditorium. For the first time I was confident about setting up my recorder and capturing the sound of the chorus. Later that afternoon we spent more time exploring the Expo pavilions. I went for a long walk through the pavilions of many nations (never going inside, for the lines to get in are fearsomely long) and bought some outstanding presents for family and friends. And that evening we had dinner in a resaurant at the hotel because everybody seemed tired from a busy week.
On Monday we took bus out of the city and saw the regularly ranged apartment blocks fade behind us until there was only neatly organized intensive agriculture as far as the eye could see. We parked the bus and got into a pleasure boat on a lake, taking an hour-long boatride across to the other side. Along the way a very young koto player labored over a couple of tunes and one of our Chinese colleagues suggested that maybe Mao Ya might play something. Mao Ya, who is reputed to be one of the best folk musicians in China, borrowed the koto and played for while, to everyone’s delight (including the other koto player). When we arrived at Zhou village, where folk arts are still practiced, a choir of women in costumes with tasselled sticks in their hands sang a folk song while performing a local traditional dance to greet us as we disembarked. We walked up and down the village streets seeing living history displays and buying things (I got a Chairman Mao button), and we ended our explorations watching Chinese opera from the balcony of an antique tea-house.
All too soon it was time to leave the opera and go to the folkloristic theater, where a massive, spectacular play is produced every night with hundreds of young singers and dancers. The UN Singers needed to make their sound check on the stage. Our performance would be the first time that any foreign group had performed as an opening act in this theater. We changed into our costumes in a cavernous warehouse building behind the stage, where the only sign of what was to come were scraps of scarves and a few colorful dance shoes scattered here and there on the floor. Immediately after our set we ran around to the back of the open-air theater and took seats in the front rows to watch the performance. The seats were separated from the stage by a small lake, and all manner of scenes were cleverly projected on the walls of the houses surrounding the square where the stage was. The spectacle featured perhaps twenty costume changes, staged battles on the lake, gods and monsters rising out of the water, fireworks, loud and eclectic canned music, hundreds of young athletic dancers performing with the most excellent synchronicity I have ever seen, some commanding and humorous acting by principals, and an enthusiastic response from the audience. I wish I could see it again.
On Sunday Morning we took a cab halfway across the city to find a Methodist church (see tiny cross atop the tower).
Later that afternoon we spent more time exploring the Expo pavilions. Here our tour leader shows off her kitten-herding technique.
On Monday we traveled by bus and boat to Zhou village, where folk arts are still practiced. I bought an excellent handwoven cloth shirt like the one worn by the man in the background for $9.00.
In the evening the UN singers sang a concert for the tourists and locals. We were the first foreign act ever to appear as an opening act before the spectacular dance performance of the local theater company, shown here.
The Big Day May 5, 2010
Posted by adminsn in On Tour.Tags: concert, Ernesto Villa-Lobos, Mao Ya, Shanghai, Shanghai Expo, tourist sites, UN Pavilion
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On Saturday, May 1, Expo 2010 in Shanghai was officially opened. This date is traditionally the international day for celebrating workers and their accomplishments, and in China it is the first day of a five day state holiday. This means that the people would have an opportunity to respond to the copious advertising for the fair which appears everywhere on billboards, in print, on television, in scrolling lights on buildings, on cars and buses, and on the clothing of volunteers who seem to be busily approaching the site from every part of the city.
The UN Singers woke early and left the hotel at 7:00 am. We were slated to sing at the official opening of the UN Pavilion before a group of UN dignitaries, most notably Anna Tabaijuka, Executive Director of UN Habitat. Our program would begin with the world premiere of a new composition by American composer Peter Homans, Preamble for Peace.
When we arrived at the site there was a lengthy passage through security scans, but fortunately enough we all made it through and so did the koto which our liaison with the Expo management had warned us might be rejected. We found places to change into our costumes and then went out onto the stage to do a brief run-through and get a feel for the acoustic. The auditorium is enclosed by glass doors all across the back, above which was a display of peoples’ faces silently talking and singing all through the day. When the stage is not occupied by living people, a screen descends and one person’s visage from the back wall appears to speak about some important issue facing the world, such as climate change, water resources, or how people come to fall in love with each other. Some people find the silent moving mass of faces distracting, but I choose to treat them as real people and sing to them with enthusiasm.
Our big moment finally came, a hefty entourage came into the hall and settled themselves, we sang our premiere, then we sang a special performance of Sia Hamba just for Ms. Tabaijuka, and the dignitaries filed out again, to be replaced by a contingent of curious Chinese fair attendants. But then, a few minutes later, there came the moment which expressed most forcefully the unique poer of singing in a world torn by war, climate change and other nasty things. We were proceeding through a series of six songs from our repertoire which represent the six official languages of the UN, and had started to sing Mo Li Hua in Chinese. About halfway through the song, There was a huge electronic clunk! and all the lights went out. But the singers kept right on singing the song without a trace of interruption, and our voices, supported by the koto, filled the completely dark room with a sweet sound of warmth and aspiration. After a minute or two, the lights came back on and the display at the back started again, and we continued our program as usual, but there was no forgetting that moment when we kept singing.
After the performance we took a boat ride across the river and visited with our hosts, China Telecom, at their pavilion. We saw a kind of multimedia presentation where the floor shook to emulate thunder and bits of foam fell from somewhere in the ceiling to represent snow, while no-glasses-3D boys and girls spoke to us from a wraparound screen… you get the picture. For me, all the electronic enhancements in the universe couldn’t recreate the choked-up feeling I felt when we were singing in the dark.
The UN Singers approach their first performance in the company of a koto belonging to renowned Chinese performer Mao Ya. In spite of her fame, there was concern that this instrument would not be permitted through the Expo’s security screening.
A New Generation May 4, 2010
Posted by adminsn in On Tour.Tags: Chinese history, Hai Bao, Shanghai, Shanghai Expo, tourist sites
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As we passed through airport security on our way out of Beijing, I noticed some differences from the American procedure: after checking the picture on my passport, the beautiful and polite female desk attendant asked me to step up to a line on the floor and look at the wall, where a tiny speck of a lens took my picture before she handed my passport back to me. As a moved along into the bag-scanning phase, I noticed that practically all the security personnel were slim, efficient, articulate, and young, none of them over 25 (I think). As if to vindicate my thinking, when my carry-on, laptop, and jacket were scanned in their separate trays, apparently a pen fell out of the bag into the tray and I did not notice it. I had picked up my things and was thirty feet away when the voice of one of the guards called after me: “Grandfather, Grandfather!” and he came running after to hand me my pen.
Shanghai, when we finally arrived here, is a different kettle of fish altogether. Imagine the canyon-y midtown part of Manhattan, where the skyscrapers are, duplicated about three times over in its sprawl, and clean. Oh, also, pretty much all of the skyscrapers are new. The air is mostly hazy with a little tang of ocean, and a westerner will encounter many more friendly and efficient young people.
The Expo, which the national and local governments have been preparing for years, is a city within this city. In order to accomplish it, vast areas of aged industrial real estate had to be razed. Mixed in among the factories and warehouses were 18,000 people who were relocated by the government. This former mixed-use site has been replaced by several square miles of a fully-secured and integrated complex which is now entered daily by thousands of workers and about 220,000 guests, all passing through the equivalent of airport security.
The purpose appears to be two-fold. On the one hand, China and Shanghai want to show how modern and futuristic they are. On the other, they want their kids to attend the Expo in massive crowds, so that they can use their English and get exposure to all the cultures of the world through visits to the pavilions of the other nations.
The UN, and the UN Singers, are seeking to exemplify the cooperation of nations in the actual performance of their songs. We stand and sing a repertoire of about 20 folk songs from all over the world, visually communicating the diversity of peoples by dressing in exotic costumes. Crowds of mostly Chinese visitors come and go throughout the day, hearing our songs. Audience etiquette here is a little different than in the west, so you will find that our recordings will feature casual conversations by our visitors throughout the performance.
On our first day in Shanghai, the day before the Expo opened, we toured the Shanghai Museum and got an overview of Chinese history. I was especially interested in the costumes of indigenous peoples and I spent an hour taking pictures of them in a gallery on the fourth floor. After lunch we visited a park and complex of historic buildings in mid-city (if such a concept is possible in a city of 18 million people). Our excellent and energetic guide explained the meaning of stones, trees, ponds, fish, feng shui, door jambs, and many other features of the park, to the point where he had worked up a healthy sweat and was quite pink. After the culture, we were invited to walk forth into the teeming crowds and shop for exactly 45 minutes and then return to reconnoiter by the Nine Zigzag Bridge. I followed this advisory but had a moment of panic when I got lost on the way back; however, I noticed the effigy of Hai Bao (popularly known in the group as the “blue bubble dude”), and homed in on time.
I think a note of thanks is due here to Peng Fei Mi, known as Mickey, a UN Singer who is also in essence our host here. His mom works for China Telecom and they are in fact our hosts, guiding us through a series of enchanting and surprising experiences and never losing sight of our goal to promote understanding between the various cultures we represent.
The ubiquitous mascot of the 2010 Expo here in Shanghai is a gumby-like character called Hai Bao (which means “sea treasure”).
Everywhere we looked we saw the laughing faces of these two enthusiastic and artistic photographer-girls, hired by our hosts to record our visit to the Nine Zigzag Bridge and the Garden.
Our host, Mickey, peers out through a hexagonal window in a pavilion of the ancient gardens.
The piercing curiosity of some of the local people is still apparent, even in a massive metropolis like Shanghai.
Post Catch-Up May 3, 2010
Posted by adminsn in On Tour.Tags: posting problems
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Sorry readers! A number of Jabez’s posts got filtered away from my inbox to our over-active SPAM filter. Didn’t even make it to my Junk mail folder! Gotta love technology.
I will post the three I found right away and back date them to when he intended them to be post.
-Katie, Singer Network
About Walls (and things which might lurk behind them…) May 1, 2010
Posted by adminsn in On Tour.Tags: Bejing, Great Wall, local flavor
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On our last morning in Beijing, my friend Jackie called at my door just after 7:00 in the morning because she wanted to go see something “real.” We were all scheduled to pack and check out of the hotel right after breakfast because we had to drive to the Great Wall, and it didn’t look like there would be another chance to experience Jackie’s idea of local color. I had promised her I would accompany her into some interesting back alleys which I suspect she was afraid to go into alone.
The entire neighborhood around our hotel was surrounded by networks of tiny alleys which housed untold numbers of people. The alleys and the slightly wider streets were filled with pedestrians, dogs, workers doing masonry jobs, tree pruners, women sloshing around with pails of laundry, and rag pickers with bicycle carts wailing repetitive ancient calls for paper, metal, or other waste materials. Their activity continued unabated from about 8:00 am to after midnight. So Jackie and I managed to spend fifteen minutes getting a last glimpse of it, before the bus took us away.
On the way to the Great Wall we stopped at the Ming Tombs and the Underground Palace. There were massive galleries of tourist trap souvenir stands. I quickly discovered the importance of aggressive bargaining. The woman running the stand yelled out that she wanted a hundred and fifty yuan (about $21.00) for a nice T-shirt I had pulled from the rack. My companion, an Egyptian woman, said to me, “Don’t offer her more than 30.” I thought this was rather harsh but I went along and sure enough, got the shirt for 30 yuan (about $3.50). The shirt had a huge chinese character painted on its front: Dragon.
The Great Wall is actually hundreds of interlacing walls built across mountaintops to prevent one kingdom or another from invading during a span of over 2000 years. I think the tour’s original plan was for us to exit the bus and then take cable cars to a mountaintop entry of the wall. However, President Sarkozy of France, on his way to the same Expo in Shanghai as the one we are attending, was on top of the mountain and his security detail forbade us to enter. So we went to a brand new Great Wall museum just down the hill and regathered ourselves at a different wall entrance an hour later. There, in the courtyard just outside one of the gates, our Red Cross hosts had us deliver “E Si Fa Sera” and “Sia Hamba” to a delighted crowd of tourists. Behind us, high on the mountainside, reminsicent of the Hollywood sign in Los Angeles, was an enormous billboard structure residual from the 2008 Olympic Games, which delivered the encouraging motto: One World One Dream.
I could easily see why the Chinese Red Cross wanted us to sing some songs about togetherness and understanding with that sign and the Great Wall in the background. On the other hand, in addition to being a commercial tourist destination and a national symbol, the Great Wall is a historical treasure for all humanity and when we started walking on it I understood why that is, too.
It is immediately and without equivocation very steep, in a way that takes away your breath and makes your thigh muscles sore within about a hundred yards of climbing. I felt as if I were in the presence of an enormous and continuous past which had laid the foundation for me to continue on with some kind of work and perhaps make things better. As I looked at the serrated edge of the Wall’s battlements marching in unison with the line of the ridge, I thought about the time in Arizona where Anne had found a Navajo man selling wooden flutes that he made himself. He told us that the best way to learn to play it was to look at the line where the hill met the sky and to play that.
