A few photos from today, including fabulous 'firepot' dinner - they give you all the ingredients raw and you cook it yourself in a pot of boiling flavours in the middle of the table. Twas delicious, and washed down with Baijou - the local 52 per cent. The whole thing for three people cost 28 euro. More snow in Shanghai than has been seen for 50 years apparently. It wouldn't make too many igloos though! Lovely easy day browsing and eating, eating and browsing. [View Full Entry]

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Hello again. I deleted my subscriber list, just in case it's annoying getting all those "Roisin has written a new blog" emails. You can subscribe again if you want. Or just look at the website to catch the latest news from the Roisin channel. The girls in the photos kept peeping in the door (I accidentally wrote 'peeing' first, but no!) to have a look at me...so I had to go out and be inspected. They are here for their piano lessons. [View Full Entry]

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Well I've just woken up from my Saturday morning Shanghaibernation, eaten a deeeelicious lunch of fish (head and all), shrimps, mixed veg and rice, read the paper (I love Saturday!)...and tis all a-snowing. Apparently snow in Shanghai is a rare and much marvelled-at fenomenon. Normal life is postponed at the first sighting of the white shtuff. So no choir rehearsal today. The boy next door has, however, braved the flakes to struggle in for his weekly dose of Czerny, Bach and Mozart and he is again the accompaniment to my blogulations, along with the excited singing and human metronoming of his [View Full Entry]

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Write a blog, they said....but why is it always so hard to think of a first line? All down to my impossibly Shanghai standards of hilarity, no doubt. Finished the Kodaly kodalliance today, a day early as students are heading off tomorrow on their Chinese New Year holidaze...yippee! Really enjoyed the few days with the methodology girls (not the best name for a pop band...it's as well they are into music education) and believe it or not I didn't notice Hailing taking about 1000 photos during the classes. But fair play to her she hopped up to the piano and gave [View Full Entry]

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Hello dayre, Life is certainly a whirl around here. Out early, home late, and any amount of excitement in between. Classes went really well today, plenty of laughs and buckets of enthusiasm, though I'm afraid that from now on they'll be a bit boring now that all the Kodaly pedagogical showstoppers have been used. Some of them might have to be encored. Feicimid. The teacher went astray a few times, even resulting in an impromptu example of 'how not to teach this song'...which ended up being probably more effective than the original plan. Neverdeless and not without standing Mr Kodaly caused [View Full Entry]

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Oh my Buddha! I am so tired! Didn't sleep a wink last night. Everything has had blurry edges since about 3pm. The classes went very well and I found myself safely on the side of too much preparation rather than too little..whew! Kodaly did a good gig, and the accompanist wasn't too bad either, even with the composer's penchant for serious sharpage and particularly flattage. Invited with others to lunch by the director of the music education department. The conversation was mostly in Chinese and luckily didn't involve me much. Just as well seeing as I was scrabbling with my chopsticks [View Full Entry]

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Not much to write about today because I slept through a lot of it. Hailing went out to teach piano in the morning and her mother stayed in to teach piano, so there was no escape! I drifted in and out of Hanon scales, arpeggios, flying Czernys (Czernies?) twiddly Mozarts and demonstrative Liszts. The boy next door came in the afternoon to play his pieces, the practising of which could be heard through the wall since I arrived...Hailing should have just called her instructions out through the window. I was glad but of course not surprised to see that she is [View Full Entry]

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Well! My first time to write a blog: it is very strange to write without knowing who will read it. Anyway - no point dwelling on that! Ta me anseo i Shanghai (albeit without fadas)! Itt vagyok Shanghai-ban! Here I am in rainy, puddley Shanghai, smiling and waving and thumbs-upping to Hailing's mother while our translator is out at her choir rehearsal. The clock is lying to me: the time I'm reading is definitely not the time I'm feeling. My day began with hitting the road in rainy, puddley Budapest around 11.30 on Friday (today/yesterday..Jaj Istenem! Ni chreidim e! aggh!) and [View Full Entry]

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