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| The french countryside... |
The countryside was so pretty!! However, it hadn't really hit that we were in another country until our first rest stop: my friend Jack and I went to order food from this very nice woman, and we, not thinking, ordered in English, which was a language she wasn't fluent in by any means. I'd heard about language barriers multiple times, but this was the first time I'd experienced it. Without a doubt, it wouldn't be the last time, either!!
After we'd eaten, we wandered outside to discover this strange adult fitness center, or, as we interpreted it to be, a giant playground.
Finally, our free time was up, and we boarded the buses again. We'd have a few more stops (and getting lost, which took about two hours to sort out and get back on track) before arriving at our first host community at 3 o'clock the following morning. Our conductor and the chairman of the community began to call out names, and eventually my name was called, along with two other girls (Risa and Margo). Our host mom smiled at us, kissed our cheeks, and whisked us away to her car and eventually to her house atop a hill in a nearby town. Because there wasn't enough room in her house, there was also room in her art studio for two of us to sleep, so Margo and I took the studio and Risa stayed in the house with our host mother. We made an agreement, despite the fact it was quickly approaching 4 in the morning at this point, for everyone to wake up around 9 so we could have enough time to have breakfast with our host mom.
Well....
we tried....
Margo and I both woke up at the same time the next morning, but it wasn't 9... oh, no...it was 12:30, GAH WE MISSED BREAKFAST!! O.O OUR POOR HOST MOM WAS PROBABLY ALONE AND WONDERING WHERE WE WERE AND WHAT SHE SHOULD DO!! So, panicking, we jumped out of bed, got dressed, and ran to the main house in time to meet our host mother, Jean, coming out of her house to wake US up. She was totally okay with the fact we'd slept so long, as Risa was also still asleep. While Jean prepared brunch, Margo and I woke Risa up (we all agreed that, though it was a bad situation, at least we'd all slept in to almost the exact same time, which helped make it a little less awkward, both between the three of us and with our host mom, and we shared some laughs over it all).
After we ate, the four of us packed into Jean's tiny car and sped off towards Aix-en-Provence. Aix-en-Provence was SO beautiful!! The architecture was so fantastic and old, it was like being in a book - it didn't feel real, but it was also impossible to refute.
After wandering around for a few hours, Jean left to go to a book convention, so Risa and Margo and I wandered around a nearby library and drank coffee and talked, which was really nice!! Margo and I didn't know Risa as well (Margo and I were in a cabin together during Intensive Week, and Risa joined later - her and two others were our exchange students from Germany who toured with us the entire time), so it was nice to sit down with her and swap adventures from Intensive Week and before. After we all got home, we sat down to dinner and talked and laughed for hours. The next morning, we had our first overseas Blue Lake rehearsal, so after breakfast (yes, we woke up in time for breakfast), we had to leave early enough to visit a castle (I didn't get any pictures of it, but Catherine de Medici stayed there briefly at some point during her life) and for Jean to go to a doctor's appointment for her hand. Once this was all said and done, we left Aix-en-Provence to a town called La Roque-d'Antheron, which is where our rehearsals and performances were. Because we were slightly early, the four of us went to a nearby cafe and relaxed for a bit before having to go to our rehearsal space, the Salles de Fetes.
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| Pretty building near the cafe.... |
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| Risa, Margo, and I!! |
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| The beautiful Abbaye de Silvacane!! |
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| Inside the Abbaye... |
After the performance, I met up with my friend Mel, who I'd met last summer when I attended Blue Lake as a regular camper. Mel's family and Jean had worked it out that after this concert, I'd go home with Mel, spend the night with her, and the next morning she'd bring me back to La Roque-d'Antheron for tomorrow's rehearsal and second performance. This entire plan worked out perfectly, and after saying goodbye to Jean, I spent some quality time with my dear friend and her family, who were all very wonderful!! The next morning, I said goodbye to Mel and was returned to Salles de Fetes in time for our second and last rehearsal in France.
What we didn't know, though, was how horribly, terribly bad an evening to go.
And we learned, my friends... we learned. o.o
This night of nights began with a terrible, horrible revelation- the Abbaye had an echo. This echo, which we knew from yesterday was exactly 12 seconds by the time the sound totally ceased, hadn't really affected us during the Symphonic Concert, but, for lack of better phrasing, our Mozart/Beethoven concert COMPLETELY went to hell. At one point during the second movement of Beethoven, everyone was so lost and confused, we ALL stopped playing at the exact same time, producing this horrible, terrible awkward silence. Thank the Lord though, we picked it up again almost immediately, and we finally finished the concert with a relatively good finale. Our audience was amazingly kind, they gave us a standing ovation and everything. After the applause died and we gave gifts to the important members of the community (we did this at every concert to show our appreciation), round two of chaos erupted. We were told that we had to be out of the Abbaye entirely, equipment, music, everything, within fifteen minutes of the concert ending, as we had to get to our next rest stop (we were loading the buses and leaving for our next community, Wittstock, Germany, this very night) in time to pick up the next drivers.
Well, it was a nice plan in theory.
I was one of the students on librarian crew, which means at the beginning and end of every rehearsal and performance, myself and five other students clean up a specific section's music folders, make sure everything is accountable, and report to our head counselor (who was also my cabin counselor, the awesome Willow) that everything was there. We didn't really have a way to get new music if someone lost theirs, AND all the markings for the music from the past year were in everyone's original copies, so making sure everything was present was vital. Before we even left for Europe, Willow announced to the rest of the orchestra that ONLY the librarian crew was to handle music- we couldn't afford to lose it or damage it, and it was easiest to collect in order and if left on the stands. We never had a problem with this, and we'd worked out our system to a tee by the time we left for Europe. However, because things were so crazy and we were working with such a short time frame, a few other people started randomly grabbing and stacking folders while the librarian crew was putting their instruments away, resulting in this motley pile of mixed music. We got it all sorted out, only to discover three folders were missing. Panicked, we ran to Willow and Willow and myself ran back to the Abbaye to look around more to see if we could locate them, maybe they'd been dropped somewhere?! No such luck, alas.... We rejoined the other Blue Lakers, who were waiting outside the buses, all of us dejected and miserable. Emotions were abound- we were saying goodbye to our host families, it was midnight, we were exhausted, and we couldn't load onto the buses as our drivers were still helping load the instruments. As we waited around though, a glimmer of happiness shone through at last- Willow and another counselor started yelling my name, and when I'd found them, they happily announced they'd located the missing folders, WE WERE BACK IN BUSINESS!!! :D
FINALLY!! Once the instruments and collected music was loaded, we were allowed to board the buses, and we all bid our farewells to France and departed to our next great adventure and country: Germany.
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