There and Back Again

Yes, its true. One of the things i miss the most about not being in school and rooming with bert is the runs to walmart, and the movies we would invariably end up buying. Messiah has started up this week, so maybe that is why I think of this, also that i just cracked down and went out and bought the 4400 season 1, and Kung Fu Hustle. Both Great Movies

I have been thinking i might go up and visit messiah monday maybe… or if not then, i will have to find some other time to do it in the near future. There are a lot of people i want to bother up there. and some ppl like bert who are still there, and I also have a cousin who is starting as a freshman! I am slightly jealous about those at messiah. It was a very stable world. (I hear the freshman movie on the lawn is going to be HitchHikers Guide to the Galaxy!!!)

Anywho, yeah, thats all.

We are coming home already! as of now, we are still on schedule, but we have yet to make either of our two flights, so we could still be delayed. If you need to know when to come pick people up from landisville (or landisvalley, i forget which one) you can call Clarence Rutt, his number is (717) 898-2996. He will know about when we are getting there hopefully around 3pm. Since we are currently scheduled to land around 2pm, and are going to be calling him when we do land. We “get” to wake up around 4ish am here to head off the the airport, so i am gonna go catch a few winks i think.

Ok, time for another pic update, not very many this time. But we will all be home fairly soon, and then everyone can see all the pictures that they could ever want to. The first two are from bulgaria, on a day we went on a crazy roundabout drive to find a lake to swim in, and on the way back we came face to face with a huge truck and no passing room, so the bus driver (bosco) had to back up for a long while until he found room to pull off into the woods. The rest are from Hungary, with the final pic being a shot of some of the people here at the Crescendo institute, who shared some music with us the one night, it was excellent.

That about raps it up for me, today is our second mostly free day in a row, which is a very welcome relief, so I think i may do some more interesting sight-seeing today, we shall see. I can’t wait to see some of you, and hope to hear from some of you as well. bye now.

Now that I have gotten your attention with that heading, I better start explaining. First with the phone calls. So far we have had two very interesting phone calls made by members of our choir, the first was by David Sauder, and then he shared his success story with the choir and convinced Heidi and Holli to give it a shot as well. The interesting part of the whole ordeal came the next day as we were checking out of the hotel from where they both made their calls.  They were both confronted with bills ranging from 40 to 70 us dollars, depending on the length of their calls and whether they got ripped off when exchanging money to cover the bill. I know David Sauder found the price worthwhile in being able to talk to his wife, but i am not sure how Heidi and Holli feel about the cost of their call

The castle we visited yesterday wasn’t really a castle at all, more of a mansion by my reconing, but we had a fairly successful concert there, we were the second half of the program that was being done by the crescendo institute. It was reasurring to get praise back from an audience that was mostly comprised of musicians, many of whom had perfect pitch. It has been interesting to see how much of a response we get back from the few spirituals in our repetoire, as someone from our choir mentioned, “spirituals are like rock and roll to them, it doesn’t matter how many mistakes you make, everyone still loves it”. I think Kristofer said that…

And now to explain the pitfalls. I that had something to do with playing lots of rook yesterday. I enjoy being with several people on this trip that enjoy the game of rook, I have been trying to find people to play with for a long time. We had a very interesting time late last night playing, and I think by the time we decided to end, almost everyone had negative scores . We also had some fun teaching scum and mafia to a few new people during our bus trip from the boat to the castle yesterday, Thankfully Rosemary knew german, so she was able to translate and teach the games to the non-english speaking people we were playing with. All in all it was a great day.

After finding each place we went to be more comfortable than the last, it is a bit of a shock to find ourselves in old dorm rooms, lacking toilet paper and many other ‘modern’ conveniences. We are now part of the Crescendo institute, having meals with the other students here on a college campus, and being part of the classes in the morning, then having our own concerts in towns in the evening.

The mornings are pretty cool, we only had one practice so far, but it was fun to see how the various conducting students varied in their technique and ability to convey their thinking. For those that don’t know, we are the test choir for the conducting class, so for two hours every morning we sing parts of the Requiem over and over again as the student conductors have their way with us.

Wednesday is going to be a free day for us, in keeping with the European culture or something like that. There are some planned trips with Crescendo, one involves a boat trip to a nearby town with a castle, and the other one is for sightseeing here in sarospatak (heres a website of this town, i doubt you could read it, but there is a logo for Crescendo on the top right of the page, http://www.sarospatak.hu) I am a little iffy on the exact details of what we are doing weds, since I don’t think they have room for the entire choir to go along on the boat trip, but I would be happy to tour Sarospatak as long as I can still see a castle somewhere

Time for me to go, There are several others waiting to use the library here, since it is the only internet access we have found so far, and has limited hours. It is hard to believe that we are in our last week, but we still have many new things to see and do before we return to the states.