Saturday, May 8, 2010

Guangzhou Concert Hall and Seeing Iron Man 2 in China

A while ago I got invited to check out some sort of symphony orchestra performance at the concert hall on Ersha Island, so of course I went for it.

The art museum near the concert hall, with the IFC building in the background.

Cool statues outside of the museum.

I actually forget what this building was...whoops.

Development in the area.

Some of the future performances; I have a flyer advertising the "Duck Ellington Orchestra" - haha, whoops.

(They meant the Duke Ellington Orchestra...)
 

We couldn't figure out what this building was, but it looked cool.

Bike rental nearby - you can ride them around the island.

Inside the concert hall.

Starting up!

It ended up being a youth group that plays in their free time, with many participants from universities. The maximum age is 28 in order to join.

Afterward, we drove back to our district, and past the trade fair (known as the Canton Fair).

I think this was an apparel day...

Note the many lost foreign businessmen wandering around.

Traffic...was not fun...

I saw this later that day on my own: it's basically selling "foreigners [read: white people] that teach you English." No, that's not what it translates to, but I still thought it was funny.

Seen at one of my schools. I usually just refer to it as "ink" but I guess this works too.

The power went out today for a couple of hours...it wasn't fun when I was trying to get lunch, especially because of how big an area the outage affected...

McDonalds is in the above picture, not letting people in due to the outage; they had a decent group of people dying to get in, too.

The brand new mall at my district's [relatively] brand new metro station. I went over here when the power was back on to check out the new restaurants.

I ended up at "Cafe de Coral" - a restaurant I had seen a bunch in Hong Kong. They had pretty good discounts for their grand opening, so I figured "why not?"

Cool interior. Lunch wasn't bad, either.

I somehow surmised that the signs outside this brand new sushi place next to my brand new movie theater were advertising 50% off their sushi, but I wasn't positive. This was definitely something worth a risk like that, though!

Fortunately, I was right - 37 yuan and a pile of these plates later, I was one happy camper. ($5.42 USD)

It's really funny going into places that don't expect foreigners because you end up with half of their staff trying their hand at English, since they don't get to do it very often.

The movie ticket ended up being 30 yuan ($4.40), and another 12 yuan ($1.76) for a small popcorn and a tiny soda.

Delicious kettle corn!

There ended up being 3 other people in the theater for the showing, and one guy kept falling asleep and snoring...but it wasn't so bad, because his buddy was quick to smack him to wake him up.

Iron Man 2 was really great to watch in this theater, but they have a VIP theater for less than twice the cost that I want to check out for "How to Train Your Dragon" next week or the week after.

At these discount prices, it would have only been  50 yuan, or $7.33 - we'll see if it's worth it, though.

The weirdest part about the movie was that they censored the words "Russia" and "Russian." They didn't bleep or completely blank the audio out, but they distorted the words enough so it sounded more like gibberish, yet you could figure out what they were saying given the context...

Really bizarre.
-T

No comments:

Post a Comment