We met the musicians playing for our performances in Beijing. They are officially called the Symphony Orchestra of the Chinese National Opera and Dance Drama Company, and are a good group. Our guest conductor Charles Barker is pleased to be working with them.

The drive to the rehearsal hall impressed me with what a huge city Beijing is. It was relatively easy to get around walking in Shanghai (once you learned how to cross the street without getting run down), but I can see I’ll need to take cabs everywhere here because of how spread out everything is.

The musicians of the orchestra are very friendly, especially a young violinist named Andy who studied in Germany and has gotten me to shake the cobwebs off my high school German and chat a bit. The managers of the orchestra have shown us much hospitality, keeping us supplied with green tea and filling up lunch plates for us from the cafeteria. I met the librarian of the orchestra. He keeps their collection (mainly Chinese operas) in the percussion storage room stacked in loose piles on some metal shelving. (Click here for photos of how I keep things back in San Francisco.)

I have great respect for our conductors, who have to cope with teaching the intricacies of playing for our dancers to a new orchestra in each city we visit. Most orchestras can play Swan Lake, but very few have ever played for an actual danced performance, which requires a wholly different approach to the music. The musicians have to be constantly alert to subtle changes in tempo that can be different each night. It’s difficult for the conductor to transform a symphonic orchestra into a good ballet orchestra in the short time we have to work with them, and our conductors do a splendid job.

Charles Barker and I went to the Silk Market after the rehearsal. We found ourselves being patted, tugged, grabbed and tackled by the most enthusiastically aggressive salespeople I’ve ever encountered. It’s all good fun if you don’t take the strongarm tactics seriously, and get into the game of good-natured bantering that goes on between the salesgirls and their targets.

China's leaders and spectators waited at Tiananmen Gate before the start of the parade. (Photo by David Gray/Reuters)

We wanted to go see a bit of the big 60th anniversary parade today, but the entire city seems to be shut down and we’ve been told we won’t be able to get anywhere close to Tian’anmen Square. I guess we’ll have to be content with watching the festivities on TV like everyone else in the world. I’m hoping we can at least see some fireworks tonight.