showtime

06-23-10

Today, I saw the most insane show/performance. After lunch today, Zang took me to a show put on by Beida Medical Center and the various research centers associated with it. Two of my labmates were in it; Lei Lai and one of the teachers. It was unreal. I took tons of pictures; the costumes were unbelievable.

First off, the show took three hours. It started with maybe 20 minutes of speeches and listening to national or patriotic anthems and such, then maybe 16 or so choirs, some with dancers, performed, and then awards were given to the best choirs. I didn’t realize this until afterwards; I had initially thought this was one or two choirs changing costumes. Wrong! Every single choir was a new set of people; no choir performed twice or more than one song. There were more people in this show than were in my entire high school. And they were all random volunteers from the medical centers! Apparently there are like six medical centers/teaching centers plus all ten or so research departments and they all had their own enormous choir; one of the choirs was at least 50 people; most of them were over 25 people.

Second, the entire premise of the show was interesting. I learned from Zang that you don’t have to register in the Communist Party if you don’t want to, but that she was (interesting, I had thought it was compulsory), and that the purpose of the show was, “To glorify and honor the Party and the Medical School.” Cool. But the songs, the songs! One of them was the repeated phrase (in Mandarin): I love my country, I love my country, I love my country, I love my country, I love my country, I love my country, I love my country…

Another song had the extremely unambiguous title, “We Love Beijing Daxue Medical Campus.” I’m not going to lie, I had a hard time keeping a straight face for that one.

OK, enough talk, time for the pictures!!

This is what I had for breakfast; I forgot to ask for no lettuce and then removed it. So far it hasn't given me dysentery.

Here's what the speeches looked like. They were boring.

These ladies were rocking those insane costumes. Yes, the spots are silver spangles. I love this picture. The one on the right looks a bit like my aunty Gwoyin.Check the gold lame dress the pianist is wearing:

This choir won the competition. I took a video of their dancers that came out in the end; they were wearing huge fire-colored dresses with ginormous ruffs framing their heads and necks. Look at how many people are there!

Here's Lei Lai and Teacher; Teacher is the second from the left in the front; Lei Lai is third from the left in the front (to Teacher's right)
This one might have been my favorite/the weirdest. They all dressed up like the Communist Party soldiers. I took a video of this too. I'll put it on Facebook later.

These guys were the emcees.

Loved the accordion

This was the "I love my country" song


The girls in the schoolgirl outfits were the dancersThis was the "We Love Beijing Daxue Medical Center" song.