CSP6 Day4 (continued)

Our evening ended with a sumptous meal at a hotel where we were greeted by officials from the GuongZhou district...
The evening proceeded on with several performances by the delegates (which definitely show signs that they were put up hastily) and some relatively much more professional show hired by the local officials...there was this guy who perform with various kinds of traditional chinese instrument, including a leaf! then there was this super enthusiastic guy with the sax and shakin his bong bong and got the crowd going even though i personally think his music suck...but the most amazing performance will have to be the traditional mask-changing magician (in the pic above)...basically she can change her mask in 1/100 of a second and i'm really not kidding...there was this time she changed her 'face' from a brown mask to a totally black one right in front of me (probably just a feet away) without covering up her face for even one bit...you've gotta see it to believe it!

And finally, the night ended with this...a whole delegation singing the CSP song on the stage...frankly speaking, it wasn't as united as it seemed in this pic...many of us still feel kind of awkward for the zealous enthusiasm and an almost forced-upon obligation (guess they call it "group think" in psychology) to follow wat everyone's doing...i mean...we only know each other for 4 days...and now we are singing songs abt csp and china...i don't mean to be disrespectful of anything that's gone thro thus far...in fact i'm really impressed with the organization of the whole trip, considering the size of our delegation...but this sort of reminds of the 'conformation manaufacturing' that i read about in some books...for a moment i thought we were doing it (all the singing and cheering and shouting that we're zhong guo ren) are all abit of a show for the officials...or for the video camera man...the thought that i actually got used to this sort of zealous-singing or 'show of unity' over the rest of the trip frightens me now as it just shows how easy one can fall back to the comfortable zone of conformation...for sure, i do feel a sense of unity with my teammates towards the end of the trip...but the almost-daily onslaught of such supposedly emotion-arousing acts still put me into a rather uneasy position...perhaps i'm just not good with showing too much emotion for occasionally i do see some sincere expressions or even tears when we started singing those patriotic songs...