Chinese Opera and Taiwanese Aboriginal Dances

  Taipei, Taiwan
Saturday, July 5, 2008

So we went out the the Chinese Opera last week. They have one that plays every Friday and Thursday and a venue called the Cement Hall, which is...you guessed it! made of cement. It was however surprisingly un-bunker-like. We got our tickets a little cheaper because Ryan had his student ID so that was nice, they were about, 700 NT a piece. So not too bad. I was afraid the wouldn't have any tickets left because we hadn't reserved ours. But there were plenty of seats. They even had an English translation on the side we sat on so we knew what was going on. The Aboriginal dances were first and during the wedding dance my friend Nadia got pulled up on stage along with another fellow from the audience.

Nadia married a guy with a funny hat

We lamented about what we were going to tell her boyfriend when she came home married after only one night of going out without him.

marriage dance

It was a pretty cool ceremony at one point they were both on their hands and knees and the "priest" hit them both on the butt with some leaves. Anyway so while we were all having our fun laughing at poor Nadia we didn't notice that the other dancers were making their way toward the audience and promptly lead us all out on stage to dance. What goes around comes around. We had a lot of fun and I glanced around at one point to see Ryan stomping in a circle and raising his hands up and down...one word: Hilarious. During intermission they had a fortune teller downstairs who was the most unfortune tellery fortune teller I've ever seen. He had a girl who was translating for him and seemed way more interested in m fortune than I did. The second half was a the Chinese Opera and we all decided afterwards that ear plugs would be a good idea next time.

Oh you didn't know we're in the Chinese Opera

Every time someone said something it was so high pitched. We enjoyed watching the acrobatics though. That was amazing. Overall it was pretty good and they change their show monthly so who knows maybe we'll go see it again. I know Ryan would be thrilled.