Free Day

May 12, 2010

We had a free day today! Woohoo! Well, it wasn’t REALLY a free day. We had rehearsal this morning at 11:30-ish because we’re trying to get ready to sing with the college choirs at Oxford and Cambridge this weekend. I’m not sure how the other groups are coming along, but we’re having a bit of a struggle. The Magnificat and the Nunc Dimittis that was chosen for our assigned college are both really hard and really long. They’re written for double choir and organ. As the leader of the group I can tell you how challenging it is to try to play those parts and teach this music. It might be easier if it didn’t change key, meter and tempo nearly every single page. We’ll get it though, I’m sure of it. One nice change for today’s rehearsal was the fact that we got to use a real piano instead of a roll out keyboard with just over a two octave range that excluded most of the bass range. Along with the piano, Alan Buskirk helped me out a bunch at the keyboard in playing parts. I was so grateful. I just hope we’ll be able to follow the conductor of the group. What I’ve seen so far of conducting in England is pretty much a disaster to try to follow. I’m hoping for the best. We practiced until about 12:45 at the Hyde Park Chapel. After our rehearsal, everyone headed back to the flats for lunch. I made myself another dish of tikki masala over rice. After lunch, most everyone headed off for the British Museum. Michelle and I had already spent an entire day there, so we declined the invitation to join them and instead went to the Science Museum. Like many others, this one was free. I LOVE free museums here. We had a total blast going through it. It was one of our favorite museums so far. We started in the basement with the intention of making our way up through the floors. We spent most of our time down there though looking through an exhibit on the history of technologies in the home. Among our favorite things was the history on home security, which had some really neat hands-on things. They had large models of different kinds of locks so that you could see exactly how they worked. There was a station where you could wire the circuits for different kinds of alarm systems. There was a light sensor security system you had to contort your body to get through without tripping the burglar alarm. We really liked the displays on hair dryers, irons, washing machines and drills. Nearly every exhibit had hands on activities with which you could see how those technologies worked or developed over time. After a long time in the basement, we went upstairs to see some other exhibits. We stopped in to ride a simulator. It was sort of like Star Tours at Disneyland but it was for two people and was really lousy by comparison. We laughed about it though. After the simulator, we spent tons of time in a hands-on physics exhibit. There were all kinds of demonstrations of centripetal force, gravity, vacuums, levers, pulleys, etc. There was a free demonstration for children about bubbles that was really fun to watch and to see how much the kids loved it too. (Everything kids do here seems just a little bit cuter than back home because of their little accents.) We spent nearly 4 hours in the museum until it closed upon which we vowed to come back some time because we didn’t get to see even half of what was there. It really was fun. After our visit to the museum, we went grocery shopping for the week. It’s always fun to see how to put meals together on a budget in a foreign country. We tried to hurry so we could make it to Les Miserables on time. If you show up last minute, they release some extra tickets for a HUGE discount. We were too late though. So, instead we made our own fun. We formed a great plan to dress up like bums so that we could pan handle a little bit but we didn’t want to do it without making some kind of offering like recorder-playing or percussion of some kind. Since we came up empty handed, we went around for a while jumping over things like garbage cans, signs and road cones. It’s always fun to just horse around with Michelle. We decided to do something musical, so we got dessert at Café Concerto. It was delicious. I had a piece of Death by Chocolate Cake and Michelle got a fruit tart. We ate it on the edge of a water fountain. It was really delightful. For our next adventure we decided to get on any bus without knowing where it would go and to randomly choose a place that looked fun to get off. It was a brilliant idea, but we got off after only one stop because we saw a movie theater that was playing the new Robin Hood movie with Russell Crowe. It was a pretty good movie. I won’t comment much more on it to spare those who haven’t seen it. On the tube home we had a pretty good laugh because of the antics of some of our fellow passengers. There were a whole group of young people from Spain who were clearly drunk and enjoying the evening to the fullest. They kept singing songs about how great Spain is. One of the young men made a habit of complimenting the behinds of all of the women on the tube as they got off. He did this in his native tongue, so Michelle and I were the only ones laughing (I had to translate for her, or course). It was really funny. I’m looking forward to tomorrow. After class we’re taking a boat ride to Greenwhich to experience it before sitting in on the rehearsal of The Sixteen and then going to their concert that evening. SO EXCITED! Pictures will be forthcoming.