Nearly done in Harbin!

Our run in Harbin has been wonderful! Packed audiences every night, two successful shows in a row yesterday, and our closing show is tonight. Yesterday in the opening, there was some strange feedback coming from the mikes, as if we had a pedal tone (music theory nerds, you know what I mean!) drone going on under the voices! Then when the keyboard came in to play chimes, they had accidentally forgotten to reset the "chimes" voice on the keyboard, so it came in sounding like a piano! It was very amusing, and the nuns all walked offstage and started laughing, which put is in high spirits for the rest of the show.

Yesterday morning I walked next door to the Carrefour to buy some snacks and breakfast food so I don't have to wake up early to get to breakfast in the hotel (it ends at 10). I picked up some batteries that I also needed, dried fruit, muesli, mangos, and soymilk. When I took them to the register, the cashier rang up everything except the soymilk (which had been troublesome to find, anyway!), which she just set aside. She showed me the total cost, without soymilk. I tried to indicate the soymilk, and my money, to show that I wanted to purchase it as well, but the woman simply wouldn't let me! I gave in and paid for everything else, then went back into the store to the soymilk area. By the way, soymilk is NOT big in China - I had forgotten that I saw it regularly in Malaysia, not China, so I expected to find it more easily!

I picked up another soymilk and showed an employee with a questioning face. She came around the counter, put my soymilk back, and picked out another one, that -- voila! -- had a special barcode label on it! Apparently you have to get your soymilk labeled before you can buy it, like fruits and vegetables! But I got in line again, bought my soymilk, and finally found success. Then I came home and had some cereal, and discovered that Chinese soymilk tastes like liquified tofu ... but the cereal was good enough that I could still drink it.

Two days ago a large group of us went on a trip to see the Siberian Tigers. The first part, which was a bus ride, was not very fun because you really had to have a window seat in order to see the tigers well (and I didn't!). Then we got off the bus and went on the walking part, which was really neat! Some people watched the tigers being fed chickens and other fowl, but I couldn't see from where I was on the walking paths, and I was glad of that. We saw regular tigers, lions, ligers (you can guess what those are even if you haven't seen Napoleon Dynamite), a jaguar, and a leopard! It was amazing! The best part was the very end, when we came to a place where you could pay to take your picture with a baby tiger, so we did! I got to hold it and pet it and it was so cute, about the size of a small-to-medium dog!

Unfortunately, after a long day out, it was hard to get the energy to do the show tonight, and I think the kids felt the same way! But of course, they pulled it together, and it went well!

Tonight is our last show in Harbin, and tomorrow we have the entire day off before we fly to Nanning the next day. Nanning is close to Vietnam, and I'd like to visit that country, but it requires a visa, which makes things complicated! We'll have three days off in Nanning while we wait for our sets and costumes to reach us there (it's really far), then three performances before we reach our next destination.

By the way, one of the moms uploaded some videos of the show from before the hiatus. They are a bit slow to load, but here they are:
http://gallery.mac.com/kyanro#101324