Check out this new layout!

I've been toying around with the layout on my blog to try and find something that's pretty simple to navigate but still has a lot of info.  I looked at some other blogs and saw things like "to-do lists" and "what's on my kindle" and "what's on my iPod."  Well, there are almost 30 books on my Kindle because most of them are free and there are thousands of songs on my iPod, so I just put the books I'm currently reading on my Kindle on the list and won't worry about the iPod thing.

So, almost everyone in this house got sick the last few days.  We believe it was the local cuisine.  Before one of our concerts, since there was a very small window of time, they gave us some pre-made sandwiches.  Most of the people who ate them had an upset stomach that night or the next couple days.  Of course, I had a fever before I ate it, so I'm getting by.  Don't eat the local food!  That's the moral of the story.


I was thinking this morning that my French has gotten good enough that I may see if there are any nearby Rotary clubs that I could visit.  Well, I just got finished searching and I can't find any, sadly.  I didn't really expect much on this little island, but one could hope.


I have started reviewing my Italian grammar again.  I'm also trying to think of most of my phrases in both French and Italian.  Come to find out, our Italian tenor is actually from southern Italy, so he uses a different dialect and isn't very useful for practicing speaking because he doesn't understand anything I, or anyone else who speaks Italian here, says.  Alas....


So, one solution I've found for people getting e-mails about my blog postings is to subscribe via Google Reader.  If you have a Gmail account, log in and look at the top of the screen and you'll see "Reader" and click on that.  If you've never used Google reader it should walk you through pretty easily.  But all you have to do is click on "Add a Subscription" and then just copy and paste my blog address (googlyelmo.blogspot.com) into that blank, click add, and you're done!  That should take care of it.  I think you may still have to check Google Reader, or have Buzz turned on.  Let me know if it works for anyone!

Let's try this again!

Okay, so I'm going to try posting again.  I mean, if you see this I was successful, and if I fail, then no one has to know about it!  It's just been discouraging to sit down and try and type a lot again after losing an hours worth of work on another spectacular post.  Here I am now though!  I'm recovering because yesterday I apparently got some sort of 24 hour bug.  I had a fever and chills and just aching.  I actually went ahead and went to a recording for France Musique last night and to our Musique Sacree concert, but after the first half I decided I couldn't stick around.  So I came home, took some meds, and went straight to sleep.  Rough night, but I feel much better today.  Just a headache now!  :)

So, in my last post I was talking about all that we have going on this week.  Saturday was supposed to be a day off, but they decided to have a rehearsal for Cosi, and thus we had to work in the middle of the day.  It's interesting how most of our rehearsal are scheduled from like 11 a.m. to 2 or 3 p.m.  So, right when you may decide to have lunch through when everything for lunch is closed.  Very odd.  Anyway, on Sunday we had a morning rehearsal for a concert that night that featured all the young artists here.  Fun concert.  The people were very nice afterwards and talked to us a lot.

Then Monday we had another Rigoletto performance.  Tuesday was Cosi pre-final dress and the sacred music concert at night.  Today is the final dress for Cosi, tomorrow is another Rigoletto performance, the Friday Cosi opens for real.  Very stressful.  Also, France Musique is here.  They're recording some performances and such and broadcasting them around the world.  It's pretty cool.

Oh!  What I worked so hard to go into detail about in the last post!  Our second performance of Rigoletto.  So, the very first bit of staging that we do in the show is to come out in a party scene and blindfold a couple girls then put them up on a table with food and plates and stuff on it and have them walk across it.  Blindfolded.  From day one I thought this was a terrible idea.  The table is secure, but very bouncy, plus they are stepping on plates and sometimes fruit and stuff, so we have to hold on to them and then take them off the other end.  Well, during the second performance we ran out onto stage and there was a bowl of fruit on the table.  A glass bowl of fruit.  The bowl was also huge.  There had to be 20-30 pieces of fruit in there. So we began walking the girls across the table.  For the first girl I think we moved the bowl out of the way and then put it back in place.  But then when I was walking my girl across the table there was apparently no one there to move the bowl.  She stepped on the edge of it and sent it crashing down in front of me.  It was actually really cool to see happen because it sort of dematerialized in front of me.  Fruit went everywhere, apparently some of the glass ended up in the orchestra pit.  We all just started kicking the glass under the table and then realized that we had to move the table, so a couple guys got brooms and dustpans and began sweeping it up. The rest of the night was a little scary, but we got through it successfully.

So, I think that's all for now.  Hopefully I'll be posting more.  Thanks to Jonesboro Rotary and Rotary District 6150 for following my blog now!  I've been getting some good info about my club in Florence and am really excited!

Don't use Scribefire

I've been trying to use Scribefire lately, a plugin for your browser to create and edit your blog posts.  It was troublesome because you couldn't use it upload pictures, but I was still trying.  This morning I wrote probably close to a thousand words (just guessing), but I did spend over an hour writing a post, and then it said that it couldn't find my blog, I put in my blog info, and it erased everything I'd been typing.  No more Scribefire for me. Will try again later when I have more time.

Host Rotarian Found!

I received an e-mail this morning that I have a host Rotarian in Florence!  His name is Michele Taccetti and of course I already did a bit of Facebook stalking and what not. I'm pretty sure it's the right person because that name only appears once on Facebook and the hometown is Florence, Italy.  He has a link to a website, www.china2000.it, and I checked it out.  This is amazing!  His father established a corporation to facilitate trade between Italy and China 30 years ago and it's still going strong today.  They export fine Italian goods such as clothes, leather, jewelry, and foods.  They also have locations in several other countries to help facilitate Chinese exports.  I know the US is in debt to China, but this is not a political blog or a place for arguing.  I think this will be really cool for my experience.  Now to brush up on my Italian!

Also, I've established a general rule of I can't speak French until after 3 p.m.  I sort of made that up arbitrarily, but it's pretty true.

In other news, I cooked chili yesterday.  Several hours on the stove.  It ended up being a lot spicier than intended, but quite delicious.  Ryan and I were frustrated when we sat down to our meal and realized that we had forgotten to make cornbread!  ARG!  Alas, that just means that we have to do it again.  Today or tomorrow I think we're going to make ribs.  I bought some at the butcher a couple days ago for 10.30 Euros per Kilo.  Not bad!  I only got half a Kilo anyway.  I am about to go to the store and pick up some ingredients for cornbread and barbecue sauce.  Sorry Mom and Dad, we ate out a lot at the beginning of the week because our schedule was weird for rehearsals and my per diem from the festival is gone.  Gotta pull some money out of the bank!  :(

Things are really looking up this morning with so much news from Rotary.  It was pretty worrisome for awhile, but I've been getting e-mails almost every day about info that the US Rotary is sending to the Italian Rotary and now I'm getting e-mails from the Italian Rotary with names of contacts and phone numbers.  I still don't actually have a place to live though and Dr. Taccetti is on holiday.

So that's it for now.  Also, to any of you who may be wondering as Steven did as to why Ryan and I are not eating more French food, it's because we are on a small island in Brittany and our French cuisine consists of crepes.  And they're all really expensive, too.  So, enough of that.  Sidebar, I installed multiple keyboards on my computer so I could get proper accents and such for French and Italian, but the French keyboard seems to not have a button for the 'e' with a hat, such as 'e^'.  So crepes is currently spelled wrong and it will stay that way until the French fix their keyboard layout!  Mwahaha!  Bye!

And I rested on the....ummm...what day is it?

Oh dear, it has been quite some time.  I'm still trying to figure out how to get this thing to send you all e-mails when I update the page.  Right now it looks like I can enter up to 10 e-mail addresses to get the updates.  Very odd.  I guess blogspot wants you to return to their page pretty often.  Probably gets them money somehow since otherwise it's a free service.

So, what's been happening for moi??  I'm actually going to have to refer to my last post to see what I last told you all about!  Man, almost a whole week.  Well, since then we've had the pre-final dress and final dress rehearsals for Rigoletto and started staging the chorus into Cosi fan Tutte.  Sadly Ryan and I haven't been making it to many of the Cosi rehearsals even though we're supposed to be covering the roles.  It's just that usually we have rehearsal most of the day and then a dinner break and during that they start rehearsals for Cosi or we have choir things for the sacred music.  Alas, we have gotten the impression that we were never actually covers, but actually just told that to make us happy.

I've been having a lot of fun practicing my French on the island.  Everyone told us how terrible the choir is here and how mean they are, but obviously they've never worked with a community chorus.  They're all the same.  A bunch of older people who enjoy singing, probably aren't very good at it, and enjoy talking.  Sometimes talking too much, but hey, it helps me practice!  It's really nice when some of the older people are familiar with the actual grammar of the language and they can correct my little mistakes.  There is a local restaurant and bar called La Chaloupe and the last few days I've been practicing my French with the waitresses there.

So, if you ever feel the need to vacation here, I'm sure it would be fantastic for like a week, especially on vacation!  However, we're working and in rehearsals during all the prime hours of the day and when we get out all the businesses are closed.  Also, there are very few resources on the island.  A few things to remember in you travels because you will be hard pressed to find it here:  deodorant, allergy medicine (such as zyrtec), anything sports related such as drinks, protein bars, etc., sunscreen (it's usually around 16-20 euros...), a hoodie or sweatshirt (cold nights!), and sandwich meat (1.10 euros per SLICE!).

So, the main singers here are pretty amazing for the most part.  I put up a video last time of a teacher of mine singing in the quartet from Rigoletto.  This time I'm putting up a video of the girl who is singing Fiordiligi in Cosi.  The only thing I could find was some Handel stuff, but it's still great.  She has already sung the Queen of the Night at the MET.  The video is in two parts, so the second one is the pain to the left.  So here is Amanda Pabyan!  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kX93GDsFTBc

Well, I started writing this a couple hours ago, then Ryan made dinner and we ate, then I answered some Rotary e-mails (exciting things happening!), and now I've lost my train of thought.  So, until next time I guess!

Summer nights, summer nights

I'll probably reuse this post title later because it has interesting and slightly fond memories from CMU.  Anyway, the summer nights here are amazing because it doesn't get dark until after 10 p.m.  Usually from about 10-10:30 is a really cool twilight (not the book, the real thing) sort of glow around the island.  Several nights here I've looked up and seen a planet in the sky, but I don't know what it is!  Of course, I could easily figure it out using google, but bonus points to anyone who happens to know what it is already.

Well, now that I've uploaded these pictures, I can't see the planet!  It's to the right of the moon, which is the white dot.  As you can see, this was after 11 p.m. and it was still pretty light out.  Fantastic.

Ryan Brock is here!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  So very excited.  He got in Saturday night after coming straight from the states.  That's a really rough trip.  Two planes, two trains, a ferry, and a car.  We've finally gotten all settled in and it's really nice to have my best friend here with me so we can get into all sorts of trouble on the island.  We've done a bit of hiking, which sucked for me because I didn't bring any hiking boots/shoes.  And last night we went running, which sucked for him because he didn't bring any running shoes.

Rehearsals look like they are about to settle down because we have two shows here now, which means that half the day has to be put to the show that we're not in right now.  Of course, Ryan and I will be sitting in on a lot of the rehearsals as we are "covering" some of the roles.  I talked to Richard and apparently we're going to start having master classes during the days, so I need to get some arias together and probably some duets with Ryan.  Ugh!

I found out at a party the other night that my French has gotten quite good, but my Italian has suffered.  There is a new tenor here who is Italian and I was trying to talk to him, but to no avail.  I ended up speaking to him in French and English, not Italian :(.  It will come back though!  I had dreams last night in both Italian and French, so it's still there.  For me I think the biggest thing for the switch is to switch my accent.  Words sometimes look the same but sound different, so if I can switch that in my mind I will be fine.

So, until later!  Also, since we are singing Rigoletto a lot of the music keeps getting stuck in my head.  Then I remembered this video existed!  Three huge name opera stars and then one of our teachers from CMU whom I adored!  The woman acting all sexy in the yellow dress is Mildred Miller Posvar.  She's fantastic.  Enjoy it!  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DD9MxhSxSCM

Bon soir!

I need to start coming up with more creative titles.  Anyhoo, I've been in Europe about a week now.  Yesterday was a rough day of rehearsal, mostly because we didn't really know our music (our own faults) and it was also a super long day, made worse by not know music and getting griped at for it.  I personally felt bad because I was being so unprofessional.  So, I stayed in instead of going out for Bastille Day (or 14 julliet en francais).  Today was still a rough day of singing, but we worked mostly on act I in staging and things were a lot more secure.  However, tonight will be another night of act II study.

So, on a lighter note, I took some pics today!  Let's start with when I got off the train at Quiberon and went to catch the ferry over to Belle-Ile.  This was the first beach I saw and it was FULL!

This is the Citadelle on the island.  It was an old fortress and it has a museum and hotel inside.  We rehearse and perform in here, but this year it's apparently really complicated because they have a wedding going on and also an art auction, with a few Monets actually!

That's what it looked like when we rode up on the ferry.  And now, for today's pics.  As I was leaving the Citadelle I decided I just had to take some pics of the water.  You can actually see the different depths of the ocean and way out in the distance you can see part of the mainland.  It's really quite beautiful.  You can definitely see the mainland of France at night when it's all lit up along the shore.  Maybe I'll get some of those pics soon!

Hope you all enjoy!