The Beijing Opera

With my Rou Li Qu group from Chaoyang Park (the dance group that uses the little "racquets and softball"), Bri and I went to see the Beijing Opera.  I guess every community neighborhood has a senior center, and somehow they interacted with the Rou Li Qiu group, made up mostly of senior citizens, and organized a trip, including transportation to and from, to the Beijing Opera.  On our wechat group, there is a lot of chatter between the dance ladies that I usually ignore because they take the dancing very seriously and are practicing it every day.  But then I translated some of the new chatter, and discovered they were planning this activity.  I figured that the funnest way to experience something new in China is to actually go with some locals that can help us appreciate it.  And luckily my Chinese-American friend Jing was going to attend too.  So we had a translator throughout the whole performance!

One of my teachers sitting by the window and a fellow classmate sitting next to her.

My friend Jing and my dance teacher who I call Laoshi (Mandarin for 'teacher') sat by us.  We walked into the theater, and immediately, Laoshi called to us to come and sit right in the middle of the row, just three rows up.  Awesome seats!  She was really watching out for us foreigners!  Laoshi is making a heart with her fingers in the picture.  I learned because of this picture, that it's a common thing to do among Chinese in picture taking.  I also learned close to this day at the Opera, that just as we say, "cheese" when taking a picture, Chinese say, "qiezi" which means eggplant.  It's a word that keeps the mouth open for a smile I guess!  I laughed when I heard it, but I also learned that they don't think saying eggplant is any more funny than saying cheese.  I think it's probably has something to do with the fact that the Chinese eat a lot of eggplant like we Americans eat our cheese!  ;) 

The orchestra was amazing, but I thought they were even more amazing that they can play such "hard on the ears" music for a few hours during performances and practices, and they continue to love doing it!

The costumes were amazing, along with the makeup!  They were all done to perfection.  The storyline was also cute with arranged marriages and tricks to switch who they were to marry.  The "ugly sister" here on the right played by a man, made us laugh most of the time.Here's a groom excited to unveil his new wife, only to find out that he got the "ugly sister" instead of the pretty one.  The shock is shown in the following pictures:

And here is the other groom that thought he was going to get stuck marrying the ugly sister but discovered her to be the pretty one when he unveiled her, and he's begging for her forgiveness that he wasn't more excited to marry her.After the performance, Laoshi asked a few of the performers if we could take a picture with them.  We ran up there and smiled, and then realized that we were the only ones taking the picture or that got to take a picture with them.  Laoshi really took care of us!Briant and I are so glad we went and that we went with the Rou Li Qiu group!  We're grateful for the organized activity that was so well planned and organized with transportation and everything.  We loved the acting, however the singing was a lot harder on our ears than we thought it would be.  It's definitely a different art form, one that we're not used to, so we think it might be a one time thing for us. ;)  We had thought maybe we should bring the kids another time, but after sitting through the whole opera, decided against hearing their complaining the whole time, especially because they wouldn't understand anything anyway!  We went home and showed them some videos and pics we took.  That will have to count!