To SoCal and Back

So like I last posted, I was down in SoCal (Southern California) with the Mendicants last weekend. It's a tour the group does every year during the weekend with Martin Luther King Jr Day which is a public holiday and falls on a Monday, so we get a long weekend. Shaowei very kindly let us use his car while he was in Nigeria. We left on Thursday, came back on Monday. I've been pretty busy this week so haven't really had time to update my blog until now.

Here's a rough sketch of what we did:

THURSDAY - Left Stanford and drove to Irvine, about 70 miles south of LA. We reached Irvine at about 1am the next morning cos of this really bad accident on the freeway that left traffic almost at a standstill - apparently some truck had exploded and in the process flattened a car along with it or something like that. One of the Mendicants, Henry (also our music director), stays at Irvine so we stayed at his house most nights of the trip. His place is REALLY NICE, it's really spacious, and it's quite high up on a hill overlooking Irvine. The city of Irvine in general is really nice. HUGE open roads, everything's far away, houses are nice etc. Solomon (from the Mendicants) commented to me one time that if you just owned a plot of land the size of an intersection between two main roads you could build a pretty nice house. ;)

A couple of photos of Henry's place:

Check out the city lights in the background:


Inside Hank's place:


Views from his place in the daytime (notice the mountains and city in the backgrounds respectively) :


The daytime photos were of course taken on another day. Just figured they'd fit at this part of the blog.

FRIDAY - Woke up at the earth-shattering hour of 8am. *yawn*

That's (from left) Joe, UB, Joey and Lance.

We left in the morning to sing for Henry's high school's choir groups (we sang for 3 of them, but there are like 7 in total... crazy...) and we also did a masterclass for one of those 3 groups. In the afternoon we went back to Hank's place to slack, then drove to a suburb in LA where we met up with Stanford's all-girl a cappella group, Counterpoint. They go on the same tour as us every year too, so we perform together quite a bit. Stayed at one of the girl's places. Wasn't a very eventful night although it was quite funny (sorta) watching Greg when he was drunk.

SATURDAY - Drove back to Irvine, went to the beach which was really nice. Lotsa seaside houses, quaint little shops, a small funfair, basically quite a pretty and pleasant family-fun kinda place.

Picture taken from a boat:

Hank (in the maroon t-shirt) discovered he could get the attention of all the seagulls in the area by throwing his french fries at them. Think it made the 2-3 bucks he paid for his fries even more worth it:


Performed at a concert at the Irvine high school in the evening together with Counterpoint. Here's a photo taken just before singing. We often run in with roses at the start of our performances and give them to whoever we want - usually girls. (Yes xmmp, I can hear the snickering...) :


SUNDAY - went to San Diego to sing at a church (not a church service). Was another combined concert with Counterpoint. Unfortunately our concert was at the same time as this big football match so not that big a crowd came. Still, it went pretty well I guess. =) After the concert we went to makan (eat), then Solomon and I went to an evening church service while the rest went bowling. Drove back to Hank's place after that.

MONDAY - LOADS of driving. Left at about 9:30am for Stanford, reached Stanford at about 4pm. But the driving was much nicer this time 'cos it was in the day so we could see the scenery around us. On the way back we saw two separate instances of cars on fire. (Saw another one on fire yesterday (Friday) - Shaowei suggested it might be prophetic. ;) )

Overall it was a pretty fun trip, good performances, got to drive around, but we didn't really get to see downtown LA or San Diego so I was a little disappointed 'cos it felt like too much driving for so little touring. Still, I'm thankful for it.

Shaowei and Ai Lin came back from Nigeria yesterday. Gonna meet Lisa, De Wen, Shaowei and probably Ai Lin for dinner later. Quite looking forward to it, miss hanging out with them. :)

Oh, and before I end this -really long- post, if you're reading this, feel free to drop me an email anytime to ask about me or tell me about how things are going for you. Non-email-list emails are always a joy to receive, especially from friends and relatives. =) God bless!!