Return from Beijing Tour
The tour was awesome! I’ll have some more photos up soon – suffice to say the trip was exhausting and exhilarating. Beijing is a vibrant place with many surprises. We played five shows over a week and had a few days at either end to do some sightseeing and shopping.
The weather was cool – similar to Canberra winter temperatures. The language was completely alien to us although by the end we had learnt some useful phrases – like the greeting: Ni Haou, yes, no, and No Way! But there were always enough people around who spoke English for us to be able to get around without problems.
The traffic is truly chaotic! Pedestrian crossings exist only to concentrate the targets, red lights are treated as ‘advisory only’ and they somehow manage to fit six lanes of traffic into four lanes of road! but for all the chaos we were soon crossing roads with care, and trusting to the skills of the taxi drivers. On the taxis – look for ones with low numbers on the side – they have been licensed for longer and are more likely to know their way to your destination.
The shows: The John Bull Pub was fun – I think they expected us to sit quietly in a corner and play wallpaper muzak – instead after about half an hour we looked at each other and said ‘nah – time to show our stuff’ so we launched ourselves at individual tables and played requests and did silly antics – and the crowd loved it – soon we had them singing along and a great night was had by all!
The Bookworm is like a Parisienne salon of thirty years ago – the place is lined with books – it doubles as a lending library for expats – the place serves excellent food and drinks and offers a wonderful respite from shopping at the Yashow market.
The first time we played there it was a jam with some local celtic musicians – including an expert gallic linguist who sang some wonderful songs. We also met the piper who had been flown out from Scotland to participate in the St Andrews Ball – the highlight of our tour. Make sure you get good directions though – I wound up walking around a dilapidated hutong, or dingy residential back alley way for about 30 minutes before I stumbled on the place… scary!
St Andrews Ball at the Great Wall Sheraton – a formal Highland Ball with piper and Full Circle playing scottish music for the dancers – we played until 0530AM – a full 12 hours from sound check to pack-up! Exhausting but fun:-) This is the first year they had brought out a band and I don’t think it will be the last! We were able to tailor the pace and the start-finish of the dances to suit the dancers – something a CD can never provide. We made many friends that night and I hope we get to do it again next year!
Sights included the Great Wall – a truly amazing structure! We also visited the Lama monastery, The Ming Tombs, the Forbidden City (need to spend at least two days there!) and the ancient observatory – one of the overlooked gems of Beijing!
We saw an acrobatic show at the Chowyang Theatre – truly amazing performers
Beijing is certainly a place to visit again before the Olympics!
cheers
Jerry
