hello from Krakow

sorry it's taken so long to post. here is the e-mail i sent out last Friday...

On 5/19/06, Sylvia wrote:

i'm here! i have only a few minutes in this internet cafe. wish i could send you the picture i just took, looking out to Ryneck, the market square, in the center in Old Town. full of people, old and young. they are shopping, chatting, eating, flirting, biking, etc. it feels good to be in a city again! Beautiful, old, buildings; so much history; good food; crazy language; kind people. check my blog for pics later.
do widzenia.
-sylvia.

good day

at first, it was quite hard for me to open up and talk with Polish folk. most of those my age and younger speak English, so the language barrier is not as big a problem as the fact that they are introverts and so am i. anyway, Saturday my team broke intsmall groups and we spent the afternoon touring the city with a handful of Poilsh university students and so i got more comfortable. what did we do? well, we ate "pancakes", more like crepes, for lunch and then toured the main Krakow attraction, the Wawol castle, which dates from the 13th century. beautiful. before meeting up with the rest of the big group for supper we behaved like the locals and strolled along the Wisla, the river that runs through the center of Krakow. unlike the locals, we taught our Polish guides how to play cribbage. :)
while it is still not easy for me to walk up to people and chat, today i was able to overcome some fear and talked with a lovely young lady, Ange, at our first outreach at her university apartment complex, what they call a "student hostel". my teammate Crystal had been talking with her and a few of her friends for awhile before i joined them. after i asked them where i could find a "toalety" - public bathrooms are scarce in Krakow - she lead Crystal and i up to her dorm room. over the tea and small sandwiches she offered us - gotta love European hospitality! :) - we continued our conversation through broken English, French, German, Polish and gestures. Ange is in the midst of studying for exams - ten of them! - and said yes when i asked if we could pray for her about these. Crystal told me that she and Ange had talked earlier about the Pope (big dude here!) and Jesus, and that Ange said that the old pope was in her heart while the new one is in her head. And Jesus? he is in here heart. hmmm.... there was a sweet presence in the room when we prayed and after we finished she placed her hand on her heart and smiled at us. i did too. i felt like we had found a sister...
more to share, but gotta run. paying to use the internet so need to keep it short. hope ya'll are well. blessings from the other side of the world. and thanks to all of you who helped me get here. :)

You know it's gonna be a fun week when...

...the power goes off campus-wide on the first morning of finals.

I arrived at the Morrisson Center around 9:20 to meet up with my accompanist. I noticed that the computer lab was dark and thought "that's odd", and as I walked in further I smelled something funny. Then I went to get my violin out of my locker and found the instrument locker room pitch black, and I was like, "Oh dear". So glad that I had my bike light in my backpack. "Always be prepared" means I'm usually carrying more than enough junk to keep me outfitted for the first year after a major disaster, but it has its advantages at times. After I got out my violin and music, I chatted with the department secretary who told me that she had heard about a professor giving a test orally, and maybe "he sang the musical examples"? I headed up stairs to warm up and find my accompanist in her usual practice room. Instead, I found the conducting class crowded in the hallway, using the electricity from the room to power a boombox CD player so that they could do their final exam. I sought out another practice space and was about to get warmed up when the power died in there, too. Groans of exasperation came from other rooms where students were getting ready for their performance juries (kind of like finals for private lessons). I finally found my accompanist and we rehearsed to the "mood lighting" from the small amount of sunshine that made it into her husband's office. After a good little rehearsal - my jury isn't 'til Wednesday and I think it is gonna go well. :) - I left the office and found a bassist reharsing in the hall with his accompanist. They had pushed a piano out from a window-less classroom to utilize the emergency hall lights that were still on. Probably the best scene of all was of the aforementioned conducting class. Now without power from the practice rooms, they had migrated out-of-doors. When I rode past the group on my way to work, Mary was conducting her final to band music blaring from someone's car with the rest of the class and the prof seated on the sidewalk watching her. Hey, that works!

I love it when people are forced to improvise. While it can bring out the worst in some people, it brings put the best in most and makes for this fun, quirky atmosphere. I love the smiles passed between folks who usually walk past one another without so much as an acknowledgment, and the laughs, the sense of comraderie. Makes for a good ending to a good semester, don't you think?

flight

wow. today is the last day of classes, the end of the semester, the end of my first year at Boise State. where did the time go? just flew away i guess. yesterday i performed some solo Bach in String Area Class. i played a movement of the E major Partita from memory, which was a little nerve-wracking, but it turned out all right. in Area Class, as in Studio Class, the profs and the students in the audience give feedback after each person's performance. one guy said he liked the dynamics in my performance, that my fortes were loud and strong, and my pianos were soft but they didn't disappear. that made me so happy to hear, especially since in the past i have had a tendency to get weak whenever i try to play softly. somebody else said i filled up the room, and since i was playing in a 200-seat recital hall, that's a pretty sweet compliment. i had a couple little memeroy lapses and, in those spots my tone got funky and i made up a few notes in order to just keep going, but overall it was a good performance.
wow. i remember at the beginning of the semester looking at the performance calendar for the violins and seeing my name at the bottom on the last Area Class and wondering how it would be; it seemed so far away, and now it's gone.
now on to another project, another bunch of stuff to finish before the i am done for the school year: performance juries and a 10-page paper and accompanying presentation and a pedagogy final. then there's getting ready for the trip to Poland/Slovakia and moving and a little recital with my students the day before I leave Boise for three weeks. after a road trip up to Bozeman, MT, i meet up with my team on Monday the 15th and then head out of the country.
wow. i'm really going. i can't wait to fly...