Day 2 - Getting to know you

We woke up early in the morning for a breakfast of NY's macdonalds' - very different from S'pores. After donning our NY Band and Orchestra Festival t-shirts, we went for a masterclass with a conductor who supposedly was resident at the Julliard School of Music. However, we found out later that he was just a freelance conductor (to Mr. T. Sze's disgust) and went through a super boring masterclass. (See first pic)

After that we had our performance at the IBM atrium. it's huge, and built in classical NY style, full of glass and metal. There were art installations everywhere, sculptures and paintings and stuff. Poor Mr. T. Sze wasn't feeling too well, so we had the honour of having our dear Konzertmeister Shawn to conduct for us. The echoes of the airy atrium covered up our mistakes very well, and we sounded just great (See pic 2). The Sony building just happened to be across the road, and lo and behold, there was a giant spiderman hanging from the roof over the door!! With one hand on the doorpost, Shawn and i just couldn't figure out if he was trying to remove the doors or guard them. Here he is anyways. (see pic 3)

Next, we went to chinatown - very uneventful except for the authentic hong kong wanton noodles we had for lunch, as well as the lychee sorbet from Chinatown's first ice-cream factory - and then we proceeded to America's largest Departmental store, the NY branch of Macy's. Built about a century ago, it spans an entire block and boasts historic wooden elevators (see pic 4). Cool eh?

In the evening, we went for a dinner cruise. The first half passed without incident, and i stayed on the top deck most of the time taking photos and talking with people from the other orchestras. I was standing with Lee Zheng and Shawn talking to a 17-yr-old girl called Emma when her friends came and asked us to dance at the discotheque on the second deck of the cruise. Not feeling very comfortable, we told them first that we didn't know how to dance, but they said that "In America, if you can jump up and down, that means you know how to dance!" Then we told them that *Singapore has an age-limit for dancing* and they couldn't believe their ears! They left us alone after we agreed to "go down later and take a look", and that was that.

From the cruise, however, we had a fantastic view of the skyline as well as the Statue of Liberty lit up at night in all her glory, torch in hand. That made a great picture (See last picture). That's all folks and tomorrow i bring you Day 3 of our tour.