Practicing for the Confucius Institute World Conference Performance

I know that I have been awfully bad at updating my blog. This is the reason:

On the 30th of November Anna and Sofia came to Beijing for the rehearsals before the World Conference performance. It started with a meeting where we had to present our program one by one. No one had told us what we were supposed to present, so in 10 minutes we prepared speeches, a tongue twister and two songs.

We were selected to perform "Gai bian Ziji", a Chinese pop song about how we can change ourselves and the world, together with an Australian girl. Every day we have practiced this number; we were taught dance moves, we recorded the song in a studio (in China everything is playback), we showed it to different directors etc. The days have been extremely long, we start around 9 am and finish around 10 pm. We have a lot of waiting in between our practices, and that's when we take the opportunity to catch up with our studies.

Last afternoon we went to Beijing University of Sports to practice on a stage the same size as the one in the real performance hall. It was a very important performance last night since the Han Ban directors of the event came to watch and speak their mind. We were informed that they might make changes or even cut some programs. This morning the atmosphere was extremely tense in the hall when the directing group announced what numbers had been changed and cut. Several people started crying and Anna, Sofia and I were really nervous about our song. But we went up and performed like never before, and just got a "非常好!" (Excellent!) from the director. YES!

We have two more days to go, and things can still be changed so I won't relax until the show is finished on Friday. It's extremely hard work but I really enjoy it, we meet a lot of people from all over the world and have a lot of fun. Today for instance, the Swedish girl trio were interviewed by Chinese TV. We improve every time, we have been interviewed together about 5 times before. We are confused every time, but we just smile, nod and pretend that we think it's completely normal to be interviewed by CCTV (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Central_Television).