Busy . . . you know, like a bee.

I don't know how so much time has flown by since my last post! It does fly here, though - seems like all of a sudden I got crazy-busy every day. But, unlike home, it's crazy-busy actually being a musician, so I am in fact loving it. :)

Last post, we were in the middle of Giselle performances (which feels like a million years ago!) . . .

After the second performance of Giselle, I went with two friends (violinists from the orchestra) to a party - my first here! It was such a blast! It was a birthday party, and the guy with said birthday was a fireman, so the party was on the roof of the fire house. It was beautiful, with lots of people, food, drinks, and dancing. And at some point (remember the drinks part?), my friends and I ended up playing some improvised trios. To be sitting with a bunch of new friends on a warm night and look up at the upside-down constellations . . . well, I am a lucky girl.

Some interesting things regarding eating/drinking at the party: I tried some cow tongue (on a piece of bread), which actually wasn't bad. When hanging out with close friends, the custom here is to share a cup. So you take a few sips of beer and pass it on. When empty, it gets refilled and resumes rotation. There are pros and cons to this.

Pros:
- After a few beers, I normally tend to start just holding the cup and forgetting to drink. The people waiting helped me remember it was in my hand.
- At the end of the party, there were like 11 plastic cups to clean up instead of 200. This is good from both the cleaning up angle and an environmental angle.

Cons:
- It is not at all possible to keep track of how much you drink, or even to have a reasonable estimate.
- I'm pretty sure this is where I got sick. We'll get back to this in a bit.

Because we had another concert the next afternoon, we had only planned to stay for a few hours. However, when we discovered our ride home passed out drunk face-down on the concrete floor, we resigned ourselves to dancing all night. Rough life, right?

Morning came, and eventually got home just fine in the end. Here's a pic watching the sun come up from the roof of the fire station:


Fortunately, the final performance of Giselle went well despite the lack of sleep. This is after the final performance, with my friend Aldo.


See? When you're good and patient, you get pictures. :)

Well, with the combination lack of sleep and sharing a beer cup with at least five other people, I woke up on Monday with a cold. I suppose if I must wake up feeling like my head is going to implode, my day off is a good day to do it. Still, lame-sauce. And it's weird to have a head cold when it's in the 90s every day. Just seems wrong. Anyway, staying in bed all day and drinking lots of water got me better enough to make the rest of the week bearable, so moving on . . .

Tuesday, we began rehearsing Lohengrin. Aaaaaaand we will continue this in a new post.