Dalian Peking Opera

The Beijing Opera is named a "must see" by many tourism sites and people. Lucky enough Linda's host mother gave her two tickets and she was crazy enough to invite me! The first thing I said to her, "This is me warning you that I am going to laugh through the entire thing. I can't control my giggles with normal opera music so I can't even imagine it in Chinese!" 

She told me that she would just pretend she didn't know me :) Oh boy was I right though. The first person that walked onto the stage was applauded with my laughter and snorts of trying to keep it in. And don't even get me started on when someone opened their mouth. I was in tears trying so hard to keep everything under control. At least when I looked over Linda was in the exact same state of chaos that I was dealing with.

Now lets get to the point. Do I think the Beijing Opera is a must see? Well considering we walked out half way through because we couldn't handle it anymore (and not because we were laughing), no, I don't. It was AWFUL! The most entertaining part about it was whenever the audience would think something was cool or they enjoyed it everyone would yell/grunt EUH at exactly the same time. The first time it happened the look that Linda and I exchanged should have been on television. We completely lost it. But ya, there was hardly any singing and when there was it was piercing and gave me an automatic headache. It didn't help that we had no idea what was going on either…. There were two scenes in the whole entire thing and they hardly moved or did anything. Let me tell you about my version of the story was:

Some woman is fighting all of these random people and then they leave and she twirls batons for an hour straight while the audience is grunting. Then she becomes some maid for an old, creepy guy and they flirt and it gets weird and that's about another hour. So that just about sums up the "must see" of Beijing. I left feeling at a loss of my life. At least we didn't have to pay for the tickets ourselves :)

 

This is the best bakery ever.

That thing on the left is considered a baked potato

These seats right here are 800 yuan!

We were going for the "sophisticated/tourist" look

First scene.

 The baton lady….

and the second scene