Touring China

The city of Kunming, as seen from my hotel room. 

 Kunming by day.

 China was a sea of high rises

 We stopped here for an afternoon to get some food. I'm not sure of the name of the city. It was in the Sichuan Province, and it was cold!!!

 Decrepit, yes. No worse than Baltimore though. If you look at the plants, you can see love in these homes.

 I must've gone into every store on this street. One had heat. The rest, people wore winter jackets with their work clothes over top. People were incredibly friendly, but the communication barrier was sad. I couldn't tell them my name or what I was doing there. It was a great place to buy thermal underclothes.

 Hangzhou

 A truck farm! Looked like New Jersey from my hotel room.

 And then the West Lake reminded me of Lake Como in Italy.

 Starbucks! Real coffee!

 We took a high speed train later, and went south to Fuzhou.

 I saw many nuclear power plants. I did not manage to take a picture of the one with two cooling towers next to the sea of high rises. It's like a lot of people live here or something.

 A more rural area.

 Then we arrived in Fuzhou.

 Photo taken from Wuyi square park.

 This was the venue we performed at. Pretty cool building!

 It was New Year's Eve and this photo ended up being the only thing I could use in the wee hours of the morning to get help from a stranger to navigate back to my hotel when I got lost. Thanks, Chairman Mao!

 The karaoke bar the orchestra rented out. You rent a room and have a private party.

 Several glasses of champagne later, the aquarium in the bar caught my attention.

 Then later, where I still kind of knew where I was, this tree caught my fancy.

 The scenic spot in Fuzhou included a mountain temple.

 This tree was sacred, both for the rock it was growing out of, and the fact that it looked like a dragon's head on the left.

 Chinese zodiac garden!

 Then we flew again, this time to Nanning, via some other city. Shenzu, perhaps? There were boats.

 Many, many boats.

 Nanning!

 Helpful instructions.

 Goody basket from the hotel.

 Nanning was just beautiful. It's in the south west, towards Vietnam. It was super warm, too.

 Like an impressionist painting, that.

 They're big on mopeds in China. They also give them lots of room! I'd drive a moped if I lived there.

 Over there is the pavilion for the Asian Expo thingy. It had some acronym I can't remember.

 Practicing in the hotel, POV.

 I don't know what this building was, but it was massive. Bigger than an american football stadium.

 We got seat covers for this concert!

 Mountain park and temple in Nanning.

 Notice the neon sign on the temple.

 This was a peace tower. I wasn't able to get a pic of the whole thing, the lighting was bad.

 Food market! Street meat! Dumplings! Weird fruit you've never heard of before!

 Blinded by the light...

 Some of us were running short on black socks by the end of the tour.

 Shanghai, at last.

 The Oriental Art Center of Shanghai. Great venue, fantastique acoustics.

 The view from the cocktail bar, for our end of tour drink.