Tuesday, May 10th. First Sightseeing Day
Boy oh boy! Today was our second full day, or should I say, packed day. I had another wonderful breakfast of dim sum and rice; breakfast is definitely my favorite meal here. We then headed for the busses and drove out of the city, under a mountain, and to the Lingyin Temple.
Today was Buddha’s birthday, so there were many people at the temple visiting and praying to Buddha and watching the ceremony. Before entering the temple(s), we walked through the Stone Carvings at Peak Flying From Afar. These were statues of Buddhas that had been carved into the wall of the hills and mountains around the Temple area.
We were a little late leaving the Lingyin Temple, so we had to postpone our tea museum trip until tomorrow. We headed to lunch and had our best meal so far. Over a dozen dishes, not one of which I was 100% sure of the name. We had the usual beef, chicken, pork, vegetables, shrimp, and fruit, plus others.
After lunch we drove to the University of Zhejiang of International Education. This is the university where we will give our first concert tomorrow evening. Before our rehearsal, we had time to hear a lecture about research universities in China and hear from a student about the university orchestra. Then we had a few moments to talk and meet some students and some of our students gave a short recital for them.
We then went to the auditorium and started unloading our instruments. Carla and I were a little worried about unloading the harps. We shipped them with the percussion instruments over two weeks ago and didn’t know how they had fared. We opened the cases and were pleasantly surprised that there was no damage or broken strings and they were still in pretty good tune, though that soon changed with the major humidity. Our rehearsal was about 1 ½ hours long and we all felt pretty good. We haven’t rehearsed since Friday and many of us weren’t sure how our instruments were going to react with the weather and traveling. It was also kind of hard to adjust our sound to the University’s auditorium as it is pretty much the complete opposite of Hill Auditorium at the University of Michigan. But we weren’t expecting it to be perfect and it’s good to be flexible.
This evening’s dinner was by far the most interesting and quite authentic. We had the usual meats and vegetables, but they were prepared a little differently and there were a few new dishes many of us had never thought about trying before. Such as duck tongue, snake, and eel, all of which I did try and was quite surprised. The taste and texture of the duck tongue was exactly what you would expect a tongue to taste like, chewy and a bit…….. tongue-ish. The texture of the snake was slimy and didn’t taste like anything I had ever had before. The eel was chewy and salty and quite good, actually. After dinner we headed back to the hotel and went to bed.
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