Japan here we come!!!

Five more days till Japan!!

As you can probably tell I haven't done anything thing much this week other than count down the days. I'm just so excited about this trip! I think that I'm going to give up sleeping while we are in Japan. There is going to be so much to do!!

We have been given an itinerary and it is really mind blowing. But first a little disclaimer, the information that I get is often patchy and all word of mouth. So what I tell you is the best info I have at the time, but it can be unreliable.

Ok, we depart Tbilisi early on the 21st of February and arrive back in Tbilisi on the 17th of March. The orders of cities is Tbilisi > Munich, Germany > Frankfurt, Germany > Nagoya, Japan > Tokyo, Japan > Osaka, Japan > Tokyo, Japan then returning via Frankfurt, Germany > Munich, Germany and finally Tbilisi. Our flight path looks something like this:


View Japan Tour in a larger map

Never mind the planet and all the green stuff, we are just going to take a massive detour in the opposite direction to Japan!

We are doing a total nine performances: six of Romeo and Juliet and three of Giselle. We are performing at a heap of different theatres and towns that I haven't documented yet. (I need to get someone to translate the notice on the board for me.)

Anyway, there is so much to look forward to on this trip. The new environment, people, culture, food are just the starters. The whole company is especially looking forward to the shopping. Everyone has a list of electronic gadgets that they want. Laptops, cameras and ipods are all high on the list.

Personally, I would love to get an iphone. I know, I know, I'm a geek and proud of it, but this device would be a really useful addition to my kit. However the almighty dollar/yen/whatever will crucial in this decision. I need one that is not locked into a provider, which can be pricey. I'm not going to buy a used one. I'm a firm believer that the more sophisticated the tech, the more likely it is to have baggage if it is used.

Other highlights will include a trip to Tokyo Disneyland. I have a friend, Julia, who is working there at the moment and I'm really looking forward to seeing her in action and just generally hanging out.

The next couple of blog posts are going to be like novels so I'll finish this one up here. As a matter of fact, I'm not sure what country I'll be in when the next one comes out! So please forgive me if I'm not totally on time.

Speak to you next week,

Rodney Cuthbertson
DreamChaser

It's Snowing!!

Hello Everyone,

Another week done and another week closer to Japan tour (Whoop whoop!) We leave on the 21st of Feb which is just around the corner really. As you can probably tell, I'm really excited for this event. It's going to be the event of the year!

Rehearsals for Romeo and Juliet have started in earnest now and I'm back to doing at least two rehearsals a day. At the moment it looks as if I will be doing a decent amount of dancing in the show. It's all just general corps work, but I'm not complaining. After a month of doing nothing other than contemplating extraction of my dead brain through the nostrils, this comes as a welcome change.

Another positive from this week is that at long last, I finally got my visa.

Yay! And with it came my new temporary residency card. Getting it was a bit of a process though.We all took a trip out to the head office with Gvansta. There was a huge cue in the office so I thought it would be a case of pull up a chair and have a sleep. However, we had the backing of the Foreign Affairs Minister. As soon as they knew we were there they took us behind the counter and got us to sign a heap of documents and then told us to wait 20 minutes while they printed off the cards. Inside an hour we had the cards that had given us so much hassle over the last couple of months. Wow! Friends in high places!

In other news we had a huge dump of snow on Thursday night. It was quite surreal to wake up and find that everything was covered in 3 cm of cold, gleaming, fluffy whiteness. Now I understand why people call it magical. It is so pretty the way it organizes itself on everything. So even flat and calm.

It hasn't snowed again since, but there is still heaps of it around. Roof tops, cars, trees and fields are all still white capped. It is also beastly cold. I know that this isn't going to make any sense to you guys basking in the Aussie summer, but we are not even going to get above 0 degrees this week! BRRRR!

So all in all, it hasn't been a bad week. Hopefully it will continue.

See you all next week.

Rodney Cuthbertson

DreamChaser

Ho Hum....

Hello World,

I'm afraid that this post will be in the running for the shortest and dullest post ever. Not a lot happening.

The company did a couple of performances of their triple bill in the beautiful Rustaveli Theatre which is just down the street from our theatre. The program included Africa, Serenade and Sagalobeli. I wasn't able to find out much about Africa which is kind of bad considering that I was understudying it for three weeks. Serenade is the beautiful Balanchine piece and Sagalobeli is an awesome ballet piece set to Georgian folk songs. I can't even pronounce the name of the choreographer so I won't try to spell it.

The company left on Saturday to take this program to Cairo, Egypt. Will and Yasha were cast so at the moment it is just Lola, Oliver and myself in the mansion. We haven't been doing much other than class and general hanging out. We are all trying to save money at the moment which has put a bit of a restriction on our activities. It's a very nice day outside today, so I'm going on an expedition to a park that is a bit out of town a bit later.

On the visa front, the issue seems to finally be coming to a resolution. We all paid the fee and Gvansta has started the bureaucratic wheels turning. So hopefully in a week or so we will have our cards and I'll be here legally again.

On the bright side, it is now February and which means that its only three weeks till the Japan tour. (Whoop whoop!) We've all been looking forward to this trip for some time now. Just the prospect of being somewhere other than Georgia is going to be such a welcome change.

That's pretty much all the news from here for the moment. Like I said there is just not much happening. Maybe next week something dramatic will happen.

Rodney Cuthbertson

DreamChaser