The Weekend

Friday

Well, the practise at NTNU (師大) wasn't bad. We left our sopranos/altos at school & used theirs, so I saw a lot of college girls. Mmm.... it seems they don't have enough male singers though. There were like a handful of their tenors & basses. Their orchestra isn't nearly as good as the one I saw at the national concert hall.

Randomly, the conductor said a lot of stuff in English. Like she would count "3, 4, yi" or something, or say interpretive stuff in English... she told the guys to "explode" at a certain part. & nobody got it but me. So I don't know what she was doing... one time she was like "Trumpets, what are you doing? You're playing too loud. You shame me." And then my classmate was like (in chinese) "Why is she talking in English so much?" and I replied in kind "I don't know." But it was louder & more people heard me than I intended.

Afterwards, I went with two main tenor guys & our teacher to dinner. I had REALLY good meat for once, and figured out that there's a different word for tenderloin & sirloin steak (please remind me which is best?). Afterwards, rocked on over to the church... found it was actually a dress rehearsal/tech rehearsal. But somehow it still went really late and I didn't get to bed until really late.

On Saturday I had choir as usual. Good practise of the Taiwanese song, as well as the poppish ones we've started. I don't know what we're going to take to the competition though. First things first... went out to lunch (curry, mmm...) with this guy I had met the previous day. On Friday I'd been talking to him in Chinese about where we were going and NTNU and my church choir and stuff. So this time I let him practise his English with talk of coming from Taizhong and his dad working for Apple.

Then I headed off to meet Charity, Esther, Lynn & this other girl (who I learned is called Elf) at Zhongxiao Fuxing. We went to the theatre, where they informed me we'd be seeing Alexander (thought it was BJ2 but w/e). It was a long movie which I somewhat enjoyed. Lots of interesting topics for discussion come from it, and in some ways it reminded me of Troy. I was surprised at the parts they skimmed over with narrative. Also, more nudity than I expected for a "PG" movie. Afterwards we got more of the small japanese pictures.

The concert wasn't bad. Our choir prepared an encore, which we used even though there were no calls for encore. The gospel mass and ending piece rocked pretty hard in places though. I was all getting into it in my flowing choir-boy robe, as well. 'Fortune' as we call the Philippinean tenor, got a call for encore in his solo work, and he did one. People don't give standing ovations here though.

Today the culture fair was stupid early at the school. I went a little late on the advice of Scott (whom I saw with Claire & tall Luke on the subway coming home last night), and it was still early. Set stuff up, busted out our laptops (Canada had 2, other countries mostly one apiece). We couldn't get the flags to stick to the concrete because the tape didn't agree with flag-material; so, we wore them as clothes.

I got a pretty good pitch going on telling people about Canada. So many of the outbounds brought their parents. Who went with them everywhere. Some of the kids would talk, but the others, their parents did all the talking, even with prompting. The most common issue was "what about the weather? it's friggin cold isn't it" or some Chinese equivalent. I was happy to see Zhang family's younger boy there as well as Esther & Charity. I'm so excited for them. Also, people from my choir were there randomly, not as outbounds, but for no reason.

There was some good fun to be had. I had some good pineapple+shrimp pizza for lunch. Also, finally got some more hugs from Anna. Because hugs are awesome. Unfortunately, I did not get the opportunity to sign anyone's chest with my sharpie. Still there were antics to be had, like 'Fresno' passing the cell phone with his host mother off to people at random instead of talking to her.

Came home recently, did Alleah's html, and that's about it. Talked to Connie & some people as well. K out [57 minutes]