The Second Week

It's hard to believe that a second week has already finished!

My flatmates and I went blackberry picking in the area around our house. We got enough to make a blackberry and apple crumble. Very delicious! On Sunday night's we've started a tradition of having dinner with the other studio members, so we hosted the first dinner and had that for dessert. It's nice having time to really plan out meals and cook. We spend about 30 minutes on lunch and an hour on dinner almost everyday. We even spruce up leftovers :-)

Also during our afternoon of scavenging we ventured to the Elmsted Church across the way. It was so interesting to see! However, the church has been desecrated, as Trevor would say. A few years back they decided, in an effort to make lawn mowing easier, to move all the tombstones up against the outer perimeter of the church yard. It is very upsetting to not know when you're walking on someone's grave, and it makes the yard look not like a church. I can't imagine someone back home wanting to do that... they'd probably be attacked by historical societies.

Trevor is having everyone practice at his home for a few hours a few times throughout the course. On Wednesday it was my turn. It is an incredibly strange feeling to know that someone is listening to everything you do while practicing. He was in other rooms of the house getting paperwork done... but I knew that every wrong note, any cracks and all intonation errors were sending chills down his spine - and he was taking notes. I had visions of him coming in and telling me the average number of flat a's I played per 20 minutes. In the end it was definitely helpful and he noticed things in my playing that he never would have been able to in a class setting. I am to return in two months so he can make sure I fixed everything... wish me luck.

Every class gets more and more difficult. On Thursday Trevor added quite a bit of technical exercises to our daily routine, and after 5 hours of practicing (the maximum he wants us to be doing) we still feel we have another 5 hours of work to get done. Hopefully as we improve on those exercises this will improve, but for now it's very frustrating!

Dot, Trevor's wife, has been on holiday with her sister all week, so he made us dinner Wednesday night. I had a "special" meal, because he did beef for everyone else. He picked me up a pizza, and had a type of Japanese dish where there are pots of heated beef stock (fondu style) in the center, and you take very thinly sliced beef and cook it in the pot. Then after you finish, you throw in some vegetables, water, and noodles and have soup! I think he said this part was Chinese... I made him take the noodles and make me a vegetarian version of the soup. For dessert we had a combination of fresh mango and pummelo with cream (similar looking to a grapefruit, but almost dry and crunchy, slightly bitter). It was a perfect combination of fruit, and a perfect dessert after such a heavy meal.

Tonight, Saturday, we watched the first part of an incredibly long French film. I can't remember the name... but it has something to do with flowers and Jean. It's quite depressing, but I think once we watch the remaining two hours it will be much more rewarding. The theme is from Verdi's "Il Fortuno di Destino", which we use as a warm-up in class... it played many times and I kept having flashbacks to Trevor telling us to raise the pitch or "play music, not the flute!".

The past few days have been pretty glum in terms of weather. Raining almost everyday. It hasn't gotten too cold, highs are in the 50s now, but the rain and wind makes it feel much colder, especially for our evening walks! Having rain makes laundry an annoyance, more of one that it is anyway. We don't have a dryer, so everything must be lined dried - which is great for the sake of energy costs, but our clothes end up smelling like farm and we have to plan laundry around the weather. There have been at least two instances where we're running outside to save our clothing form the incoming rain.

In two weeks we're attending a weekend workshop with Robert Dick, hosted by the British Flute Society (BFS). The BFS is giving us each £30 towards lodging and paying for the weekend workshop fees (we are so incredibly thankful for this!). We have to find our own lodging and transportation, and I ended up being the one to do it. I didn't think it was possible for a train system to be any more confusing. After finding a hotel, for under £30 each, for 5 persons, I needed to figure out how we would get there since we don't have a car. Apparently the train system here went independent a few years ago, so in order to find the best price for a train ticket, you have to check 10 different websites/companies. Sure in the States we have to do this for planes, but we can easily just go to expedia.com or some other overly advertised third party and find decent prices. That is not the case here. After a few hours of searching, on dial-up, I did manage to find something through Virgin Trains. But to be sure I was booking the right thing, I wanted to order by telephone. I think the woman I spoke to was Indian, and had no idea what she was doing. It's complicated enough to explain to someone why my billing address is in the US but shipping in the UK, but then to have two extreme accents trying to communicate... I should have just ordered it online, because I had everything sorted out properly to begin with. Now I'm scared the tickets will end up in China.

Well... I suppose that's it...

love,
lindsay

More learnings:

• In Japan people don't have middle names.
• It was common, during the prime recording time of Marcel Moyse, to cut portions of pieces in order to fit them on vinyl.
• Not all Japanese can use chopsticks.
• Sheep cheese is yummy.
• The US is not the only country with a very complicated transportation system.
• ABC.com won't let me watch shows because I'm not in "the continental United States". How am I supposed to survive without Grey's Anatomy and Desperate Housewives?!?!