Weird, Wacky and Wonderful!

November 19, 2014

Cast and Crew Highlight of the week:

John Wiley(physio): “Going out for proper authentic dim sun with our Chinese collegees”

Eimear Farrell (wardrobe): Peta’s party. Brendan as Peta was the funniest thing I’ve ever seen”

Darren Hatch (saxophone player): “Peta’s birthday party. Getting the chance to mingle and get to know everyone”

The majority of this week was spent in the beautiful city of Guangzhou, located along the south coastline of China. Once again we went exploring on our downtime. Three taxi loads headed off one afternoon planning to take a boat trip out to Shamian island. We quickly realised that doing things in big groups in China can be quite difficult! Only two of the taxis made it to the same location which in fact turned out to be the wrong location!!

 

Oblivious to this we hopped on the boat thinking we were jetting off on this big adventure to ‘the island’. Despite all the confusion the third taxi actually made it to Shaiman island. “It was really pretty with lovely little gardens and restaurants. There were groups of school kids and lots of brides. I’d say we saw at least 15 brides in wedding dresses getting photos taken” Meghan told me after.

 

I definitely feel like I experienced the ‘real’ china in Guanzghou. From cathedrals, museums, street markets, food stalls, we saw it all. We even experienced the slaughtering of live chickens on the side of the street!! It was interesting to experience how other people live/work on a daily basis.

 

We came across an Irish bar (of course we did!!!) called The Paddy Field, where we enjoyed some good Irish grub and caught up on the days events. The quote of the day was from Mitch “today I was in a car crash and then went into town where about 100 kids thought I was Justin Bieber”. Only in China!!!

 

As you may already know we love birthdays here in Riverdance. For Peta’s birthday this week we celebrated it with a ‘weird, wacky and wonderful’ theme. Let’s just say it was definitely all of the above!!! We had a special appearance from Ant and Dec(Tom Brosnan and Erin Trevena) who entertained us with an exclusive performance from their takeaway tour earlier this year. Best dressed had to have been our dance captain and lead dancer Brendan Dorris who went as Peta herself.

 

We are now in the modern city of Foshan where we perform two shows in the Qionghua Theatre.

 

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Ellen