Thursday May 19: 5th concert at the Liaoning University:
Our first morning at the Liaoning hotel was another different experience. From the outside it looks fancy and expensive, but the inside still lacked. The rooms especially were a lot different. Some of the rooms had normal bathrooms and soft beds, other rooms had really weird bathrooms with really hard beds. I had one of the weird ones. I didn’t mind, it was just funny.
We were able to sleep in a bit and have breakfast. There were about 20 dishes at breakfast, but none of them looked any good. I ate a bunch of dim sum and some bread. About mid-morning we loaded into the buses and headed to the Liaoning University. There we listened in on some master classes and talked to the students. Even though they were all very shy, we still talked some and had fun practicing their English on us. We were asking their ages, and one said 91, instead of 21. Around noon we went to have a Chinese buffet lunch. The food was all very good and they had lots of fruit and even some chocolate mousse
We had to go back to the hotel right after lunch so we could get ready for our 4th concert. In the early afternoon the early group headed to the venue to unpack and set up. The stage at Liaoning was very similar to the University stage in Shanghai. Not the normal shell performance hall, but a curtain theatre stage. Backstage wasn’t too bad, but it wasn’t as spacy as a few of the other halls. The venue itself was pretty, simple, comfortable, and pretty big. There were a couple of sound shells, so adjusting our tone and sound to the hall wasn’t as bad as the other curtained theatre.
The weather was still so nice out, so we had our McDonalds chicken sandwich outside in the breezy sunshine. The concert started at 7:30 and was over a couple hours later. The audience wasn’t too bad and we did the normal amount of encores. By now I think most of the Band is pretty much going with the flow. We pretty much have the routine down pat.
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