So far... but two days old :)

It has been a while since I last blogged. A lot has been going on. Saturday after church I went to Auggen where I got picked up by another member of the orchestra. From there we drove to some city in Graubünden (some canton in Switzerland) where we had a quick run through the music. Some of the songs were very differently interpreted and some parts I had to sight-read. Fortunately the song was not as fast as we play it in Adventus Domini Deutschland.
The atmosphere within the orchestra is different from ours because the conductor likes having authority and therefore there is no chatting in between. The concert at night was the best one I have ever witnessed. I actually lived with the music and the music was talking to me. It was incredible. Handel truly is a great composer and the Messiah is well described through music. After we finished the concert we went to our sleeping place. It was an old military station with 30 in wide beds. There were 20 beds in our room and we were only 5 people so each of us took two beds to have more room. The mattresses were extremely thin but I slept comfortably and besides all the stupid things we did I even managed to study a bit.
The next morning I decided to join Manuel (who picked me up at the train station in Auggen) in hiking. The scenery was beautiful and after about an hour of our hiking tour the path was covered with fresh white snow and it was getting cold. It got steeper and steeper and only 2 of the 6 of us had hiking shoes on, the rest was more or less sliding along the way. Luckily nothing happened to us.
With the self timer in my camera we took a few group pictures of which I posted a couple.
Later in the afternoon we had another two concerts and I had a hard time concentrating and those concerts got recorded for a DVD. I didn’t find out why a DVD is done. I don’t really get it because this is not the purpose of any Adventus Domini orchestra and choir. Oh well, it wasn’t my decision.
I forgot to mention that in the email it said all women had to wear a long black skirt and something white for the top. This seemed so strange to me but I followed the instructions just to find out that those instructions were chorus instructions only meaning I wouldn’t be dressed appropriately. Now what to do? Several people offered me black clothes and I left my khaki shirt on :). All in all it didn’t look horrible since the light got turned off but oh man: Never again! From now on if I ever have to go black and white again, I will take some black shirt with me as well.
On Monday I got an email saying that I can have apartment 42 (which I wanted) and tomorrow I will go and sign the contract. All my savings will be used up just to pay provision for the real estate office, the security and the first monthly payment.