Day Two

Our day started out with a 5:30 am wake-up call. There were some strange goings on in the night. My husband said a woman knocked on our door at 10 p.m.(I was asleep)and asked "Massagee?". He declined. Other folks reported mysterious phone calls with people speaking in Chinese to them and then hanging up. Maybe we're just sleep deprived!
Breakfast was at 7 a.m. The hotel was a little overwhelmed so the breakfast buffet took a while. We were divided into 3 buses for the duration: the Senior dancers, the Junior dancers and some of their parents, and a parent bus. My husband and I were on the parent bus. Our guide went by the name Winnie. She did a great job for us, explaining the sites before we arrived and getting us to the cleaner restrooms.

Our first stop was the Forbidden City. Due to the size of the palace and our time constraints, we pretty much just walked through and took some photos. It was an impressive place. Winnie told us that the Empress used the kingdom's budget for an entire year to build it. There are 9000 rooms in it!

After our walk through, we had lunch at the Forbidden City tourists' restaurant. The food was quite good and everyone got a kick out of the unusual sinks in the restroom. They had red lower women's bodies attached to the front's of them.
We boarded our buses for the ride to the rehearsal for the big parade. They parked the buses in a large parking lot of a university and after unloading, everyone walked over to a large track field to rehearse. First, there was lots of socializing with some of the other cultural groups that will also be performing. The company was interviewed for Chinese television and got a chance to be photographed with lots of different groups.



They are number 37 in the parade and it was in the mid 80's so it got quite uncomfortable. We were able to sit in the shade and watch the other groups, but the dancers had to stand in the sun. The entire rehearsal took about two and a half hours and they were exhausted by the end of it.
Our day isn't over yet, however. We boarded the buses for an hour and a half ride to the Beijing Polytechnic Institute. At the university we had our first major cultural shock: the squat toilet. Most people, myself included, made the best of it and soldiered on. But most of us also never truly adapted.


The Institute provided a buffet dinner for us and then hosted a show with our dancers, performers from the institute and performers from the art school. Our dancers performed several small group numbers as well as one large production number. The art school performers had drummers and a group that did a very beautiful dance with oriental fans. There was also a few Chinese singers. There was a gift exchange between our dance company and the other performers, which is apparently the Chinese way, and then we made the long ride back to the hotel totally exhausted.