Skipping over Shanghai…

Not really, but the group travel experience takes up a good deal of time and mental energy. So far, the choir have done two of their concerts. The first concert had a smallish audience, which took time to warm up. Last night was more of a success, with a large audience and a better location in an extablished concert hall.

We have done some sightseeing as a group, plus a little on our own. All of our meals are catered for on the tour and so far we have only skipped one of the provided meals.

This was today’s lunch, we tried counting the number of dishes we were served and came up with 21 or 22. It was a little unclear because they were being piled on top of one another by the end, plus some empty dishes had gone back to the kitchen.

We have been travelling around in two large buses, but to travel to this new city, Suzhou, we had three buses, probably because they knew we would need extra space for all of our luggage. Suzhou is a comfortable two hour journey from Shanghai. We have been here before, but we think there are probably many new buildings as we don’t recognise it at all.

We are staying in Holiday Inn Express hotels which are located well away from the tourist attractions, unlike when we travel on our own and choose carefully for location. Fortunately in Shanghai we were close to an underground station, which was useful when we went out on our own. Mostly we go out with the group in our two buses.

I’ve taken lots of photos of the first few days here and hope to do some more posts with the photos to help jog my memory.

The featured image at the top shows what the choir looks like on stage. We have a baritone and soprano soloists and a little group of young people doing percussion, plus two pianists as well as about 50 choristers.