Park joys in Fuzhou

We are now in Fuzhou and I'm almost over my recent illnesses! Yesterday, I was thinking about the fact that we have a show tonight, and I felt like I had been absent for a long time, since I performed none of our eight shows in Guangzhou feeling well. What a shame! Now I'll appreciate the show even more, coming back to it, in a sense. I also started getting my sense of taste back, and had some bread with peanut butter yesterday, and it was the most fantastic thing! Funny what you come to appreciate, after having lost it.

Fuzhou is quite nice, so far. We had been warned about the hotel (although I don't know who warned us, because nobody had seen it) and felt some trepidation over what we were to experience here, but it's totally nice! The rooms are significantly larger than the midget rooms we had in Guangzhou, and that's enough for me! Our hotel is right next to another (fancier) hotel that has a fabulous and not-too-expensive restaurant, where we ate our first meal here. I had the beef stroganoff and it was really good, with vegetables and all! Yesterday a small group of us went shopping at the Carrefour (my favorite store, still), and we were all hungry, so we made a routine stop at Papa John's for lunch. I think I've had more pizza (from Papa John's) on this tour than I've had in my life altogether before tour!

Last night another group of us walked from the hotel, through the park / waterfront, to a nice Thai restaurant some people had visited the previous night. On the way through the park, we saw big groups of children and teens rollerblading in a cement area. This seems to be a theme in China. The meal was tasty and just spicy enough for someone getting over a cold! Inexpensive, too. When we walked back home, we walked along the river through the park again, and this time we passed a huge group of Chinese people doing what looked like line dancing, or easy aerobics, or the electric slide, with music being played over a loudspeaker! It was so neat! A little farther down, some other music was being played, and older couples were dancing with each other, old-fashioned dances like my grandparents try to teach me, like the fox trot. They were just there, outdoors, in the park, and it looked like anyone who wanted to could join the dancing. People who weren't dancing were milling around listening to the music and watching. Now why don't we have this in the US? What a fun and neat idea? This is actually something that my hometown (Davis, CA) would do, but they would probably charge money for participation. Other events people have witnessed in parks here have included morning tai chi (groups or just single people) and aerobics! This is something that should be brought to the USA.

Today I'm having a rather quiet day before the show, mostly because I have enough leftovers in my room to feed myself for several days, so I'm trying to eat some of them and not go out and buy more food today! Several people on the tour are battling sore throats and other minor ailments, and we hope that everyone pulls through and is able to perform.

I still don't know what I'm going to do when I get to New York in the fall. I'll be in CA for at least two weeks after the tour ends, and then I'll fly to NY, but I have no place to live! I don't want to get stuck in a sublet (with strangers) in case the show IS brought back this fall, which is possible (they are storing the sets in China for now, just in case), and in which case I would have to break a sublet agreement to leave again! What a hassle. I wish my parents lived near NYC like a lot of my castmembers' parents.