TMB Tours China!
In October of 2014, TMB took our show TRACK 3 on a one-month, 3 city tour of China. We started in Hangzhou, went to Shanghai and then hit Beijing. This is a small part of my photo journal of that trip.
Hangzhou
We stayed at the Hangzhou Qianguqing Theme Hotel. It’s in Songcheng, a theme park devoted to the Song Dynasty. Each day, what must’ve been 75 or more buses would arrive and people would pour out of them for the park. And we’d be jostling with them for breakfast or whatever. The pix in the link above make it look really nice, clean and up-to-date…but when we went…it was not. It was a surreal place to start our tour.
We took a day trip to West Lake and a tea…plantation? Estate? Garden? I’m going with plantation. It’s called Meiwu Wencha. After a cool tour and demonstration of how they roast the freshly picked tea leaves, they sat us down for the sales pitch. And yeah…I bought some. My new favorite tea: Long jing…or DragonWell.
While we were in the area we also got a tour of the China Academy of Art. It was very cool. Here’s just a few snaps of that.
Shanghai
After a week in Hangzhou we made our way over to Shanghai. What a difference that short trip made. It was like a world away.
We stayed in the French Concession. Lots of great restaurants, clubs, bakeries. Tons of people, too. And the Pudong District is it’s own, tall world of money.
We had lots of time during the days to explore so I got to walk over to the Jing An Temple. Just beautiful. What seems like an ancient spiritual structure dropped in the middle of a bustling city. I loved it.
While in Shanghai we also had a river boat dinner cruise with ‘The Professor’. He’s one of those people you hear about with connections who gets things done, but you don’t really have any clue about the details and when you ask…the subject quickly gets changed. He was delightful and it was an amazing way to see The Bund.
Beijing
This was the last, and longest, leg of our trip. We spent 2 weeks in Beijing, and performed in 3 different theatres. They were all quite a distance from each other and in very different neighborhoods.
The first week of our shows in Beijing played at the Drum Tower West Theatre, which was in a hutong and had only been open for 6 months. It was actually really nice, and had a lovely little cafe.
This is the place where we not only had ushers yelling across the aisles to patrons and each other, to stop recording the show, but two ushers got into an argument just in front of the projectors that were translating so one whole side of the theatre was without translations for a bit. It was a crazy trip.
Gaby, Kendra and I went on a Hunnan Hot Pot dinner adventure. Down a hutong, hunting for an unmarked red door that opened to a small restaurant where no one spoke English and my glasses kept fogging up due to the steam in the place. People kept coming out of the kitchen to watch us, and literally point at us and laugh. They had a great time doing this along with all the other customers. At this point…we were used to it. 
We still have no idea what we ate most of the time but it was a great night.
One of the things we were told when we were heading over is that Shanghai is like their New York and Beijing is their Washington DC. It’s true. In Shanghai you can feel the money, the commerce, it almost drips off the shiny, new buildings. In Beijing, it’s more understated. You feel the culture and the power.
The Egg
Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City
The Great Wall
Yeah. Wasn’t going to miss this. Getting the opportunity to tour this made me realize that I do, in fact, have a bucket list. 
It also reminded me that I’ve wanted to see the Wall since I was in grade school; doing reports on Chinese history, drawing huge maps of the country, and generally nerding out over a country that was only then starting to ‘open up’ to the West. This was a dream come true.
Closing night bash
At some point the tour had to end. Honestly, it was hard on all of us so we were ready to come home. But we did have a final night bash as a club that was just crazy.
