A very musical day with Indra

Indra finally suggested imagining the swirl on the wrought-iron gate
was a letter "t" to help me remember "TOUT au bout du chemin" . . .
sounds odd, but believe it or not, that tactic actually worked!  

Today we had no opportunity to go to the Stadtpark.  It was rainy all day, and in the afternoon there was another thunderstorm (though much less dramatic than yesterday's).  Indra and I went again to St. Sophien, the Catholic church nearby, to make a second attempt at recording ourselves singing.  This time there were no services and nobody in the church since it was the middle of a Friday.  The iron gates to the sanctuary were locked, but because the sanctuary is connected with the foyer area that has the prayer benches and altar, we were able to sing through the bars and still get the full church-echo sound.  This church isn't huge, but it is big enough to make a super-beautiful echo without voices getting lost.  We were there for at least two hours recording.  We sang every duet and classical-style song we could think of, and we made some really nice recordings of "Carol of the Bells," "Evening Rise" (the one she taught me at the start of the semester), "Lascia ch'io pianga" by Händel, "O du Liebe meiner Liebe" by J.S. Bach (she taught me this one more recently and it is in German!), and "Vois sur ton chemin" from Les Choristes (the French film we watched last week).  It took me forever to do that last one without messing up--French can be SUCH a tongue twister!--but in the end, with Indra's help, I finally was able to remember all the words and do it right.  The line that kept tripping me up was "Une lumière dorée brille sans fin tout au bout du chemin."  (That means something like "a golden light shines endlessly at the end of the road.")  SO tricky!!!

St. Sophien has such beautiful windows . . .

The recordings have a lot of miscues and talking in them, so Indra has to edit them before she can put any on YouTube or anything.  Her editing program did something weird and put too much bass in the files, so currently some of the recordings don't sound right.  But hopefully at some point I'll be able to post a few on here, because they sounded really, really nice in that church.

 When we got home, all plans of a dinner picnic were off because it was still raining.  So Indra did a special oil and conditioning treatment on her hair and I went to the store to get some stuff for a sort of indoor-picnic-style dinner.  The walk to and from the store was nice, because even though it was raining it was a nice comfortable temperature outside.  (All the way there and back, I sang "Vois sur ton chemin" over and over to be sure I had those tricky lines drilled into my head!)

I got two boxes of grapes (they were super-low price at Aldi so I bought two to freeze some--I've been eating frozen grapes nonstop the last few weeks!), and also some canned tuna and baguettes, at the store, and between us we had green olives, Swiss cheese, tomatoes, and lettuce.  We sliced the baguettes and put tuna, cheese, and olives on them, and then toasted them in the oven.  (This was Indra's recipe.)  It was yummy, and we ate almost one whole box of grapes too!  And of course we listened to Der König der Löwen on Indra's mp3 player.

After dinner we watched Mulan, because Indra had the songs from it on her player too, and when they came on it reminded us of the movie.  We watched it in English though, because I have only seen it a few times and I couldn't remember the dialogue very well.

Tomorrow is my last day to hang out with Indra . . . I don't want to think about it . . . but at least we've had a fun week together.

Oh, one really funny random thing: Indra told me and Petra that there is a German exclamation that is so random it's hilarious.  It is "Heiliger Strohsack!" which literally means, "Holy straw sack!"  She doesn't know where it came from, it's just one of those colloquial expressions.  How random is that?  And I thought "holy cow" was funny . . .

Here's one more picture of St. Sophien.  It really is a lovely church, with a lovely sound to match!