It is 5am in the morning and we are getting ready to go to the van-station to wait for our van to bring us on a 2 hour van-ride through the scenic view from Jakarta to Bandung. Bandung is a nice hill resort style kind of town where the air is much cleaner and cooler than JAkarta. This town has streets lined with shops after shops offering mass factory-produced clothes. It is virtually a shopper's bargain paradise.
We arrive in Bandung at around 10am and go straight to the Auditorium Graha Kadin, the selected venue of choice for our Music Fiesta and MPA activities arranged for by Andry Effendy. After a bit of checking out the equipment and tuning of the pianos, we proceed to lunch. After lunch, the activities begin with the MPA performers coming on-stage first. After the young talented children have performed, we took out the new Rhythm Game cards and proceeded to have a game with them. The game of choice was the composition game as most of these kids were already around the ages of 7 to 8 years old.
It was a very interesting session and htese kids could come up with some pretty nice compositions of their own. I would say that this group managed the games very well because some of these kids managed to write some pretty impressive music at that very young age.
Later in the day after the MPA session was over, it was Wilson's turn to take centre stage with the children from the Music Fiesta performing the compositions of Christopher Norton and Pam Wedgwood. Again, it seemed that Bandung had quite a lot of good talent as some of these kids performed flawlessly. After Wilson's input on improving performance and technique, we had the photo session. As you can see there were many happy faces as the kids seemed to have received mor than they had bargained for.
After all the performances were over, we had a short break before dinner where we took this time to meet with some members from the locally formed association which looks into the interest of classical musicians. Their role seems to be some kind of a check-and-balance routine for musicians to provide a platform for discussions and performance. For this afternoon we centered our discussion around the topic of the positive and negative attributes of sending young children for competitions.
The evening program consisted of a performance recital from Wilson and also some selected participants from the afternoon's program.
The evening program consisted of a performance recital from Wilson and also some selected participants from the afternoon's program.
She has always attended Wilson's workshops and she is a very open-minded person who believes strongly that music is a never ending learning journey.
Well, Ibu Latiffah, we wish you all the very best!!!!
and here again with the second group.
The lighting in a "bioskop" is not very camera friendly as you can see that some of these pics are quite dark. Anyway, after Probolinggo it will be back to Jakarta for the next few days.
After we finished Surabaya, it was straight to the waiting Kijang and another 2 hours drive to another small town called Probolinggo about 90 kilometers away. 
The venue of our activity is Pro Steak Manyar Ketoarjo and in this pic you will see our host Mr. Heintjie Gunawan with none other than Wilson Quah. It is really a nice and cosy place.
Talk about some exercise to get the blood going again. Well, this is not a therapy session but since there were parents around, so why not have some fun, since music was not supposed to be boring and dull. At least we managed to let parents feel that music is also about rhythm and I mean the body movement type...... and not the Rhythm MP kind of rhythm. 
