China Day Four - Dalian

The first few days of concerts are all very much a blur to me now so I'm relying heavily on these photos to jog my memory.  They aren't very interesting photos, but they are representative of what I saw.  I didn't always remember to take a picture of each concert hall and hotel room and the pictures out of the bus window are not particularly interesting either.  But they do represent what this portion of the trip was like.  My main impression of these first several days of concerts can be summed up like this: travel, eat, play a concert, eat, sleep, eat, travel, eat, play a concert, eat, sleep, eat, travel, eat, play a concert, eat, etcetera, with the concert being the highlight of each day.

We played some Christmas carols at the first few concerts so that the audience could do a sing-along and we had our own delightful session of Christmas caroling on the bus on Christmas day, accompanied on the ukelele by one of our trombonists, who also happens to be a Flying Karamazov Brother in real life.  China seems to be very much into Christmas decorations and Santa Claus.  Every place we went had fancy and festive decorations.

Our first four concerts were in the northeast section of China, well north of Beijing.  The weather there was cold, windy, and very dry.

Here we are on the bus for the airport to fly from Qingdao to Dalian:

Qingdao Airport:

Getting on the plane:

This was taken from the bus window as we headed to our hotel in Dalian.  This was a typical scene everywhere we visited or passed through - huge apartment complexes under construction.  I guess they are getting ready for their population to double or triple or quadruple.

The view from our window at the Everbright Hotel.  I promptly started calling it the Ever Dim Hotel.