Travel/Changchun

September 11th, 2009

Well after the longest trip I have ever taken 30+ hours we are in our room in Changchun. We left Nashville @ 8:00 am CST on Wednesday the 9th, flew to Atlanta and met up with our drummer JJ Bower. We left Atlanta @ 1:00 pm CST and headed to Seoul, Korea where we landed around 4:00 am CST. We then headed to another terminal where we boarded a plane at 7:00 am CST for our flight to Shenyang, China. We landed in China (after avoiding North Korean airspace) about an hour after that. Then we went straight to the hotel and got a good nights sleep......blah, blah, blah. If wishing made it so!

NOPE! We then waited until 10:00 am CST for our host to arrive from Chengdu, China so we could get on a bus and drive 5 hours to Changchun, China. Finally around 3:30 pm CST we have arrived and are in our room attempting to wind down after this long day. BTW, it is 4:30 am Friday September 11th local time, I missed a whole day! I haven't done that since I worked shift work. Cheryl said it seemed like we were never going to get here!

The big music festival that we were supposed to play for on Saturday was canceled by the Chinese government because of the H1N1 scare. They don't want large groups of people gathering to help try and contain this flu.

Most of you know that our fiddle player Alli contracted H1N1 last week and was not able to go with us. We are still trying to get her to hook up with us later in the trip but we are afraid that they may not let her into to the country or worse quarantine her when she gets here. She is feeling better and actually would be ready to go by this coming weekend, we will see what happens.

The hotel where we are staying is not really a hotel it's more of an apartment for the Jilin University. The bus stopped on this dark street and we thought he was just letting some of our assistants/translators off and take us to a hotel. Oh how wrong we were! We then walked a block or so and up three floors to get to our room/apartment/home for the next three days. It does have hot water and an actual toilet so it not all bad and the air conditioner works very well (I should be able to hang meat in here by about 9 am)

Well, going to try to get some sleep they are letting us sleep in this morning. Bus call is at 11:30

Take care,
Daniel