Wednesday, May 19th Visit a university and leave for Shenyang
We started this morning pretty early again. There were about 2 dozen breakfast dishes, most of them pretty normal and only a couple odd ones. Today we had French toast. I couldn’t resist and had 5 pieces. It was good, but not great. One of the pieces was pretty much just egg and only a little bread, but still good. We checked out and headed to the North Campus of the Chang’an University for a performance and lunch.
The students from the university and our students performed during the concert. The first set was a percussion trio, clarinet ensemble, and trombone quintet by our group. Then the University students had two groups. One was an ensemble of a traditional Chinese instrument I do not know the name of and some drums. It was pretty amazing. The other group was an accordion choir group that was also pretty cool. Then we did a trumpet quintet, bassoon quintet, and saxophone quartet. These were followed by the university students performing an Erhu rockband quartet and their school band. The two traditional Chinese instrument groups and the accordion ensemble were amazing. But the Western style band was not as great. There were then some awards given out and we went to lunch.
We had an aloe vera and peach dish, donkey meat, a garlic salad, dumplings, chicken, veggie platter, fish, squid platter, sticky rice pineapple, and some other more normal dishes. There were a couple different dishes of chicken. One of them was obviously just a chicken cut up and put on the plate. Oh, and they included the head on the plate. The squid platter had 2 different kinds of squid on it and crab. The pineapple dish was similar to the pumpkin dish the other day. The pineapple was scraped out with sticky rice inside. There was one dish we ate that we did not recognize. It wasn’t bad, but also wasn’t good and we didn’t eat very much of it. Later we found out it was chicken gizzards.
After lunch we hurried to the airport to catch our chartered flight to Shenyang. Because it was a chartered flight, we did not have to worry about being late. We got through check-in pretty quickly and would have made it to the gate in time, but our flight was delayed because the plane wouldn’t fly. We weren’t sure what that meant but we had to hurry up and wait around for a couple hours. We boarded the plane and left the airport at 6:30. After hearing that the plane wouldn’t fly, I wasn’t sure what to expect, but the flight went well. We made it through a bit of turbulence and landed safely after 2 ½ hours. We picked up our luggage, met our new buses and tour guides, and headed to the hotel. After about an hour’s drive, we pulled up to a fancy looking medium-size building with a huge welcome on the front. We all thought this would be another great surprise. We walked in and the lobby and hallways were great. But as soon as we walked into our rooms, we were unpleasantly surprised. First we had to shove the door to get it to open. The room itself wasn’t too bad, but the bathroom was pretty odd. No bathtub, just a shower head that sprays into the corner and the water runs all over the floor, around the toilet, under the sink and into the drain in the opposite corner. I’m not complaining, but it’s definitely different than the previous hotels.
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