it was just brought to my attention that people are actually reading this.  so now i feel obligated to talk about the music.  so i am playing with the national orchestra, opera, and ballet of vietnam.  people have been asking so let me clear this up.  no it is not a college, no it is not a high school, for heavens sake no i did not come to vietnam to play with a middle school. hahahaha.  yes, so it is a 'professional' orchestra.  i used quotation marks because the people in this band to make a living playing with this orchestra.  however it is the nationally funded orchestra of a communist country so as you can imagine it is not the best orchestra of all time.  i have heard the principal cellist and the concert master play solo and they are both absolutely amazing musicians and i am sure that most people in the group are individually but they all have a serious counting and watching problem when you put them together.  also there is a weird discipline problem with the whole country.  linh's sister is a piano performance major at the conservatory and she only practices 30 minutes a day.  plus in rehearsals it is not uncommon for someone to be talking on their phone while we are playing or for people to start packing up 20 or 30 minutes early in the middle of rehearsal.  

now if you have made it this far i would like to say a word about the basses.  i am saying this in the nicest way possible because i truly think its not them personally its probably because of the lack of good instruction on the bass, but the players here are not very good.  they have serious counting and intonation problems.  its kinda funny though, i was practicing the dragonetti concerto (which is pretty hard but not to crazy at all) and they were all drooling over it.  but then every single bassist can play the dittersdorf concerto and bottasini's grand duo (not very well but...) and those peices are harder than the dragonetti.  i found out that music is extremely expensive and hard to get (mostly because of the govt) so the only person in the city who has solo bass music is the teacher at the conservatory and he only has 6 pieces.  some of them are easy, some are very hard but its all they have so they all know how to play them.  sad.