hrm!

So. Blog eh. This must mean katie is ridiculously bored, or simply is procrastinating from practising. Oh well!

I don't actually remember when I last wrote in this thing but I'm assuming not since new year. Several things have happened!

1. it became 2009
2. I went overseas on tour with the Tagiev Chamber Orchestra, henceforth to be known as TCO
3. Our water tank filled up a bit
4. I got a credit card, and proceeded to put myself very close to debt land (although I blame this on going overseas)

A bit about the tour. Probably more than a bit.
It was a random kind of tour. We went to Shanghai, Estonia, Seville (in Spain), and New York. Shanghai was depressing and grey, although I think we just didn't go to any cultural places so it was the bad part of the city we saw. Many of us got ridiculous eared hats, which proceeded to get us lots of stares (even more than usual - instruments attract a lot of attention). Best part of it was probably the high school orchestra we played with in our concert there - they were fantastic.

Tallinn (in Estonia) was amazing. We had about 3 hours of true daylight or less every day, there was SNOW. Snow is excellent. We enjoyed it very much. By enjoy I mean threw ourselves in and chucked bits of it violently at each other, and kicked at each other, and shook off trees. It was WINNAHHHHH. xD. I was homestaying there with a family from the orchestra who came to Australia early last year, which was great because not only did they look after us, there was homecooked food which was a relief after being violently sick from oily Shanghai food. I now have a recipe for carrot and potato soup from Estonia. Hooray for soup!! It was not so cold as I expected there, only about -4 or -6, so it was pretty comfortable what with all our clothes xD Their history there is pretty fantastic too, they had a singing revolution in the late 1980s! Must research that more. We went to the Baltic Sea on our bus tour, and promptly fell through what we thought was the beach covered by snow, but was actually thin ice, into the water. It was awesome XDDD. Wish we could have had longer in Estonia, it's such an interesting and beautiful country.

Going back in time again, we got to Madrid, and found snow. That was odd. But we were not to stay there, our destination was Seville. Seville was beautiful and very very old, but rainy, which kind of made everything unbearably cold and wet (especially feet) so we weren't able to enjoy it so much :( we did however find a Haagen Dazs store and guzzled on that and were happy for a while. Starbucks hot chocolates were similarly joy-inducing. Spanish people are super super friendly but mostly can't speak a word of English which was amusing. They also had trams, which were a novelty for us Brisbaneites, and we nearly got very slowly run down quite a few times, to our amusement.

New York. is. insane. I lived there when I was little, but didn't really notice anything except for our apartment, the footpath, the awnings on all the buildings which say what number they are, and school. You go to Broadway (which we did, and some of us - Michael, his mum, Lily, her mum, Kate and I - went to see Wicked, which was MINDBLOWINGLY AWESOME OMG MUST SEE AGAIN /rant) and everything is there. Literally everything. They have enough theatres to house all the productions in the world, I swear. Then you go to Lincoln Centre and everything classical music, dance, etc is there. And then there are all the art galleries - the Met, the Guggenheim, blah blah blah didn't get to see them but they were THERE. Oh, for Brisboring to have a tenth of the culture that NY does. It was also ridiculously cold - even for their standards! -16 celsius half the time, -10 the rest. It meant that our feet froze the minute you stepped out of the building/bus/whatever, but also that it actually snowed on us. It was brilliant!! Our concert there was pretty milestone-y - we got to play in the Weill Recital Hall which is smaller than the concert hall, but beautiful and with magnificent acoustics. Sadly on our day off, we were taken to this factory outlet shopping village thing in woop woop New Jersey, and had to stay there all day - if we had known this we totally would have done our own thing and gone to Manhattan instead. So lame!! So we got up early the morning we left, and I saw the sunrise and freaked and took a million photos, and we went into Central Park and I went sheet music shopping (!!!!!!! so good!!! XDDD) and saw a bit more of the city before we had to leave.

I was a bit iffy about the company on the tour beforehand - most of us are kids (like, 13 or 14) and I didn't really connect with them in rehearsals, but 4 of us - Michael, Hamish, Lily and I - formed a nuclear family and were awesome together. Lily was driven insane =3

Now I am back and disliking Brisbane summer quite a lot. Oh well. Such is life! At least I have (or had... most of it is gone now lol!! XD) 3 kg of chocolate to console me with.