China - Aug. 3

I went to bed the previous night still in my jean shorts, I was so tired! I didn't wake up until 2 am (one hour before I had to get up) to put on pajamas and brush my teeth...

Most Husky Band people got on bus #8, and were crammed in, but all of the mello girls got on bus #7 and we had two seats per person. And we're supposed to stay this way for the rest of the trip! Our guide's name is Echo. She told us that she got her name from Greek Mythology and told the story. She's a rather sweet person. It's sort of funny that her name is Echo, because the microphone on the bus reverberates, so it's a little ironic.

Our boxed breakfast was... interesting to say the least. We had three small "breads", one kind having a chocolate filling and the other having some sort of bean paste. Normal things included an orange, a hard-boiled egg, and a juice drink. To augment this, there was some sort of mystery meat. Rachel said it tasted like liverwurst, but I'm not familiar with that so I couldn't say. I thought it tasted quite strange and pasty. It looked like a mini hotdog.

I stayed wide awake all the way to Beijing. This was my first chance to see China outside of a hotel village and a big, modern city. We drove past lots of corn fields, small red brick enclosures with lots of small, red-brick houses inside them. This was one of the poorer areas, to be sure. I saw a sheep herder with a flock of sheep that he was driving on a dirt side road that was near the highway we were on. There are many odd-looking trucks and cars about. They are mostly squatty and many times the trucks are over-flowing with stuff. No one on bikes or motorcycles wear helmets! There is a special lane for these vehicles and pedestrians to the side of the highway. We had to go through at least four police checkpoints on our way to Beijing. And it only took about an hour of driving time for the whole trip. There are policemen everywhere! Especially around Tienanmen Square, which was our destination.

I took so many pictures when we got to downtown Beijing. It is an immaculate city, or so it seems from the well traveled parts... Every lawn is manicured, even under the freeway interchanges! That's definitely not the case in Seattle. There were strange things - such as trees made out of potted plants. Very noticeable, was the lack of billboards on the freeway into Beijing. The only ones that were up were advertising the Olympics. People stared at us on our buses, especially people on city buses that pulled up alongside us at stoplights.

We drove straight to Tienanmen Square and spent a lot of time standing around and gawking at the big buildings and the huge painting of Mao on the outside of the Forbidden City. Apparently, it's the largest square in the world, surpassing even Trafalgar Square or Red Square. We were in our dress uniforms with the capes, for the first time. They are made of very thin material that someone in our group compared to tissue paper, and I suppose for that, we should be grateful.

We were the finale for a celebration of the Olympics. There were many different small groups of Chinese cultural dancers that performed before us; some with drums, others with flags or fans, and even a group that dressed up in two-person Chinese dragon costumes. The entire event was broadcast nation-wide in China, and there was a camera crew from NBC and one from a local tv station from Washington State: King 5 News. We heard later that it got some airtime on the later one.

The performance went well and the crowd enjoyed it. We arrived at the square at 7am, performed around 8am and were changing into normal clothes around 9. Already by then, the sun was beating down hard from a cloudless sky. Natalie and I found a little shade behind a big pole while we waited to perform. The air has been surprisingly clear so far on our trip... until this afternoon. It gradually built up during the day; by afternoon time, it was very noticeable. My mellophone is covered in some sort of dirty particle stuff; at least there are nice showers at the hotel!

After we changed our uniforms on the bus, we had a couple hours of free time. A bunch of us went shopping at the small shops across the street from the square. I had my first experience with haggling (I was unprepared at my first purchase, but later, slowly caught on - it's awkward and embarrassing at first, when I'm used to America), got left behind by my group a couple times, and experienced some Chinese Eastern style toilets. Oh, boy. That smelled. It was pretty overpowering - 20-30 stalls with a porcelain hole in the floor. It's unbelievable that eastern peoples think that it is okay. I had experienced them when I went to Japan in 2005, but not with this magnitude. Yuck.

Lunch was provided by the tour, and it was a Dim Son style of restaurant. We had a sort of glazed fish (still with bones), a "black fungus with egg" (which I actually liked), lots and lots of rice (I'm eating a lot of it on this trip), a couple of strange things I didn't try (they were too squishy), a tasty vegetable soup, some steamed vegetables, and more normal things like beef and chicken. Interesting and educational.

I slept some of the way back, because I was exhausted, but not before I read a little Sherlock Holmes and saw the Olympic stadiums. Closer to home, I saw a donkey pulling a cart. Once I was back in my room, and waiting to do something with two other mello girls that are three doors down from me, I plugged in my camera battery, because I had worn it out over the last three days. Kaitlyn and Rachel went and did their own thing, so I went over to the sports complex and shot two rounds of 12 arrows. I got two bulls-eyes with the first set of 12! Not bad for not shooting in months! It was a low poundage bow that they had, and that was probably good because it hurt my fingers to pull back with no finger guards.

I quickly got tired of being alone, so I went back to the hotel, praying that Natalie would be available and would want to do something - and that I could find her. I had forgotten her room number. Surprise! She was in the lobby when I walked in, trying to get stamps for postcards she bought (they were out). And she was looking for other mellophones to do something with! So we went over to the complex and I showed her around, because she had been sick yesterday when we all toured it. We played a bunch of badminton (with no rules because we weren't feeling competitive) and then bowled one game. My gosh! I've never seen a worse bowling alley! The balls kept getting stuck behind the lane and we'd have to get the guy to fix it... like 7 times! And then the thing that sets the pins up sporadically knocked over a pin when it set up a new turn. And once, between my two throws, it didn't put one of them back down, but then dropped it down, right before I was going to bowl! A little surprising to have a pin falling out of nowhere! We did have fun though, and I ended the game coming from behind with a spare on the final frame to beat Natalie 120 to 108 or something like that.

We then went back to the hotel for our water bottles and then played cards (competitively - I always play cards competitively) until we got hungry enough for dinner. Strangely enough, a lot of the things at the dinner were the same that we had at lunch. We finished quickly, because we weren't very hungry. I then took her to see the pools and the statues around the village. On the way back to the hotel, we came across a shell of one of those bugs that have been making so much noise in the trees. We got several good pictures of it to show to the others, because we had all been talking about them. They are not crickets, like we have in America, but are huge locust-type bugs called "cicada". They can be 10 times as loud as the loudest crickets that I've heard in the Midwest. And they're very ugly.

Once back inside the hotel room, after escaping from some very horrible polluted air (it has finally come upon us) we watched some Chinese tv. There was a great Japanese game show with Chinese subtitles... that made it that more understandable. I discovered that Asians can act as stupid as Americans do on those things. (I generally don't care for game shows) It was entertaining for a moment though, because the girl with the "buzzer" bell - had the bells strapped on her head. And then there was this guy that had to hammer these blocks out from under these girls that were attached to the ceiling with a harness whenever a contestant got a question wrong. They described it as "very dangerous" in English. Um, I don't understand.

And then we went to sleep.