Chinese Traditional Music 國樂

7 月15号我們去中正紀念堂听国乐音乐会。那个国乐乐团有差不多一百多位的演奏家。舞台的背面都是打击乐器，前面最靠近观众是指挥者，還有中間有很多人拉二胡和大提琴。在音乐会上，他们表演了差不多八首樂曲。最令人印象深刻的歌是他们休息之前的那一首樂曲。在演奏前幾首樂曲時，我就已经开始习惯了国乐的风格和樂音。但是，到樂曲的中間時,，觀眾席中有及個人忽然站起來,讓其他觀眾忍不住想:到底是怎麼會事?然後他们开始吹乌笛，整个包厢就充满了蝗虫的声音。我刚开始有一点困惑。后来我开始欣赏舞台上的乐团和观众席里的樂手共同演奏的音樂。

We went to watch a Chinese Traditional Music performance at Chiang-Kai Shek Memorial. Many big performances are held here, and a part of our ICLP program was to attend this program. My reflections can be found in the Chinese above, a cut-and-paste job from one of my assignments.



If you couldn't read the Chinese, musicians hiding in the audience stood up to play a flute-like instrument. It ended up creating an atmosphere that felt like there were hundreds of locusts in the concert hall.

Hualien Trip, Day 2

For the second day, we went to a lake to foot-paddle some boats. If you've done this before, you'd realize that at about 20 minutes in, you're bored. So what did we do? We decided to reenact ChiBi 赤壁　Red Cliff. This movie talked about Cao Cao's rampage down to Southern China, where he was stopped at the Red Cliffs because of a flawed (but impressive-looking) naval strategy. His strategy was to link his boats together with metal beams to prevent his boats from rocking too much, and therefore, his soldiers from getting sick. So we linked up I think 9 or so of our paddle boats and paddled together. Yeah, we were a sight to behold.



Later on, we visited a Buddhist Medical School. It was interesting to see a religious medical school, they had an interesting tradition of calling the cadavers that they use for teaching, "teachers," signifying their respect and the purpose of the bodies.



After visiting a Buddhist temple, where we learned some Taiwan history and the local landscape, we headed to the beach, which to be more precise, was a rocky seaside. The rocks were pretty painful, but being Americans, we were really excited to hit the water. As you can see in the following picture, the hills rise steeply from the slope to down deep in the water.



Besides a large number of failed (uncoordinated) jumping pictures, we managed to grab a few group shots:



Finally, we also hit a Mochi shop. Apparently Hualien is reknown for its mochi, and gosh, it was sooo gooddd....We had a guide too, to show us the process. and free samples ^.^









So ended our Hualien Trip. We took the train back, and as usual, played games the entire way :)

Hualien Trip, Day 1

We went to Hualien for our first overnight trip. Some people barely woke up, while others took their bed with them. We took a train over and played 九九　ninety-nine and 杀手 mafia on the way, opening up a new favorite game among the students.
When we got to Hualien, we rode tour buses to various locations. Our journeys were punctuated by vivid and frustrating logic games, along the lines of "Black Magic", "I like Coffee but I don't like Tea", and "Whose Got the Ball?"

We visited Taroko, which is a scenic national park defined by caves and cliff faces. At one point, we had to cross a narrow bridge. Sometime during this, apparently Mona was sitting with her feet dangling off the bridge when she lost one of her sandals.


During the night, we headed around the town, dropping by for 小龍包　buns, not dumplings. We also walked to the nearest night market, a good ~40 minute walk. There was an awesome drumming game which by the end of playing it, my forearms were pretty much on fire.


Finally, when we went back to our hotels, (which had miserable 8x10 paper thin "towels"...luckily for me I brought my own) many of us hung around learning a little break dancing from Chris Ma and Sam Li. A couple of us also hung out with NTU buddies to ~3AM, playing again, mafia and 'Sea Turtle Soup'.