Update #7 - China Tour

Tuesday, January 5, 2010, 10:00 am local time

Monday, January 4, 2010, 7:00 pm Tucson Time

Dear SASO Friends and Supporters,

Thanks for all your emails. We are delighted that our updates have helped you to share in our adventure. Following are some more updates from Linus and from me.

Best wishes,

Tim,

Tour Manager

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After a very interesting train ride from Shenyang yesterday, we finally got to our last destination: Beijing! As they say here, if they like the orchestra in Beijing, we are successful! Well we will see tonight when we do our last performance. The theater is another Poly Theater and right below our hotel which makes everything quite convenient, especially when you have a very cold day (the coldest in the last 33 years in China).

After the big snow storm yesterday, everything looks pretty outside and the sun decided to show up. Beijing's energy is quite different than the other cities we have been. It is a vibrant and alive city like New York. The hotel we are staying is a quite comfortable and good taste 4 stars..and the breakfast again very good. I think I am getting fat here in China!

I am so looking forward tonight's concert because we are playing at the theater where all the big orchestras and artists of the world played before. Yesterday there was a Austrian orchestra playing there but Anita Hansen (our first cello player) who attended the concert said that our program is better and has more energy...well we will see tonight!

There will be people from all over the world attending our concert and very important people such as teachers from the Beijing Conservatory and musicians from other orchestras and conductors. I am not sure that we were ever reviewed in any of our concerts but the feedback we got so far has been amazing! I shall write more tomorrow when it is our last day and we are done with the performances.

;-) - Linus

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Our last concert was phenomenal ... probably the best we did in the tour. It was without doubt the best audience we had in the whole tour. They were very responsive to all the music and not just at the end. Again a standing ovation and 3 encores!! The orchestra played at a professional level and everyone was happy. We had a lot of people from other orchestras as well watching us...such as the people from the Viennese orchestra that played yesterday. I am so proud of SASO and their achievements on this trip. It has been a wonderful experience for all and very rewarding. We now have stories to tell and we made history. We will all go back to Tucson with a smile in our face and with so much pride!

- Linus

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After the concert

We were in the mood to celebrate after our Beijing concert, the last of the tour. Clusters of tour members assembled in the lobby and ventured out into the freezing night air. Our group fortunately included Larry Lang, who knows Beijing well. One stop on the subway took us to a street with a row of restaurants that are open late. In front of each was a man trying to persuade us that his restaurant was the best. We settled on one after Larry negotiated a special deal with them. The ten of us sat down at a round table with a Lazy Susan. After a while a stream of dishes arrived such as tofu soup, spicy pork, dumplings, lotus root, deep fried fish (we had inspected it while it was still alive), Peking duck with little tortillas, Chinese 'pizza', fried eggplant, and various interesting fungi and vegetables. All that and 10 big bottles of beer made a memorable and delicious meal, for about $11 per person. The variety of food in China is much more than we find at a typical Chinese restaurant in the US. Getting back to the hotel was not easy, because the subway was closed. Normally it would be a pleasant 15-minute walk, but not at near-zero F temperatures. Taxis were hard to find. Eventually four of us piled into a little 'black-market' taxi for the short ride to the hotel.

-Tim