Fleeing the Goths

Location: Train from Leipzig to Berlin

Listening to: Black Eyed Peas - Meet Me Halfway

Once again, I’m not actually listening to my “listening to” - The forty-something gruff looking man with an “Adventure & Travel” shirt across from me is, however, and it was loud enough for the people in the row behind him to ask about it.  I’m actually listening to some Jason Mraz, courtesy of Samantha K. Wilson.

We’re fleeing Leipzig due a Goth convention - “Goth-fest”, as we’ve come to call it.  I’m not making this up: we had to leave because our hotel is booked by a bunch of Goths from across Europe for a weekend of demonstrations and concerts.  So...off to Berlin!  I suppose I should sum up yesterday, since I was too exhausted to write anything last night.

We started our day with a bus ride to Naumburg (roughly “Newcastle”), a very old and fairly touristy town about two hours from Leipzig.  Most of the city was 750-1000 years old, and the same wine-makers have been there for over a millennium.  Unfortunately, I didn’t have the chance to sample any of it: we were pretty rushed, taking a walking tour of the city and then another of the cathedral and leaving again in under three hours.  I didn’t retain a lot, so I’ll let my pictures tell the story, though I opted not to pay the 5 Euro fee to take pictures inside the cathedral.  The tours overlapped a fair amount of information - if I were to do it again, I’d take the city tour and do a self-guided tour of the cathedral from the gift shop (are you taking notes, Jeff? :).  I’m really glad we had the chance to see the city, though.  It was a stark reminder that this place shares a history several times deeper than the US, plus we got to see the statue of “Uta”, Disney’s model for the Evil Queen from Snow White.

I fell asleep on the bus ride back to Leipzig, and woke up to Jeff saying something about us having 45 minutes to make it from our bus to the hotel, change into concert dress, and walk to the Lutherkirche for our rehearsal.  This might not sound absurd to you, but we were at least a fifteen minute walk from the hotel and another twenty-plus to the Lutherkirche so we were definitely pushing it.  We had a rehearsal, supper, and came back for the concert, which went extremely well.  The Leipzig Baroque Orchestra is an absolutely fantastic group of musicians, and I think we all feel very blessed by the opportunity we had last night, though I’ll be the first to admit I’m not the best at switching between 415 and 440 four times in a concert.  Abby and Mark were great on their solos, and I think everyone in the room had a lot of fun when we performed “Hallelujah” as an encore.  The concertmaster was grinning from ear to ear by about the third bar and almost giddy by the end.

After all that walking and giving a fairly substantial concert, most of us were a very good kind of tired.  Singers and anyone else who plays a “wind” instrument have heard of the concept of stale or dead air - essentially, if you continually take breaths in before you really need to you won’t have your maximum lung capacity.  Sometimes you just need to get rid of the old air to and take a fresh breath to really do your best.  I think that’s the best analogy I can come up with for how musicians feel after a concert like last night - like I used to feel after playing under the lights on Fridays or like I think both of my parents must feel after a day in either of their lives - exhausted but happy and ready to tackle the next day head-on.

On the way back from the concert, Sam was kind enough to buy me my first Döner-Kabob (see picture of the cucumber sauce dripping down my face).  Afterwards, we unsuccessfully looked for some kind of convenience store and ended up pretty lost.  It’s difficult to navigate when you’ve seen many of the landmarks of a city but haven’t really kept track of where you were when you saw them (were we closer to the funky statue or the construction site with the crane?  There’s that creepy Lion! etc...).  Luckily we’re music nerds and recognized the Thomaskirche almost immediately.

Well, the train ride’s over and we’re on our bus into the city.  I guess I could live-blog our bus tour with Christoff, but I think I’d rather take pictures than notes.  Hasta mañana.