Pictureless updates

Much to my dismay, it seems that we are now blocked from loading pictures into our blogs on Blogger/blogspot. Hopefully this is just temporary. So I guess I'll continue the tales of recent days sans pictures. :(

Let's see...
Friday night we performed. All of the offices of the (12-17) colleges of our University held a performance. We didn't find out about it until the week before and didn't really know what to expect. Jian told us we were singing "Jingle Bells" so we figured it was just some small time New Year party or something. Somehow word got out about me dancing at my students Christmas party and they asked me to dance. Actually, it went more like this:
Jian: "Ally thinks it would be cool if you danced at the performance."
Me: "Oh, really?"
(two days later)
Jian: "I've been trying to get in touch with you! I need the music for your dance!"
Me: "Huh? What dance?!"

That afternoon we went for a run through of the performance in the performance hall where we saw that this was no small time gig. A) We were in the huge Music and Arts performance hall. B) The people ahead of us had swords and were doing acrobatics to a man belting out a triumphant Chinese song. The people that were just walking in had Olympic hoops and costumes. This didn't look too promising.

Not many people could come for the rehearsal. Katie and I were the only foreigners with a couple of other Chinese office workers. When we got to the part where we were supposed to sing Jingle Bells, it was ridiculous. Jian had picked a four minute hip hop Jingle Bells version that had singing on it! We were practically Nilli Vanilli! We immediately started our campaign to change versions, suggesting acapella (no way!) or guitar (not enough time!). We went back to the office and found an instrumental one-minute version. Whew!

Thankfully Katie agreed to dance with me. We have dance lessons together every Tuesday afternoon so we've been working on the Shim Sham and Charleston moves. I spent Thursday morning choreographing my first routine ever, and we spent the rest of the day practicing. We performed in front of all of our friends trying to make sure we wouldn't forget anything! So Friday night finally arrives...

So the performance went something like this:
Katie and Ally did an intro in Chinese. Katie and I danced (and it was fun!) Then we all filed out to sing Jingle Bells. Well, I accidentally started the song a bar too early and ridiculousness ensued. But it turns out that Jian had named our performance something to do with being stupid or funny, and we were the only college with foreigners, so we won 3rd place.