Year of the Rat

Happy Chinese New Year! It is the year of the Rat. We celebrated by taking the kids to their first symphony at the Chandler Center for the Arts. A friend of ours, Robert Luster, plays in the Chandler Symphony Orchestra. Last night they had a special program with all the music by Chinese composers and with professional Chinese soloists. They had lion dancers before the performance and they danced right in front of our row - We could have reached out and touched them if we wanted to. Christian and Declan thought that was really neat. Cameras were not allowed inside, but we were able to get a picture of Andy and Declan with the lion head afterwards. The boys loved the music and sat on the edge of their seats for most of the performance. I wish we could have taken pictures inside, even if just to take one of the boys. Declan had both of his pointer fingers up and was pretending to conduct the orchestra. The first soloist was Joy Jia Ye Pan who played the violin. Then Youliang Zhou played an instrument called the Erhu which was really neat. The last soloist, Jian Liu, played the piano.