Coming soon

In just over two weeks, things are going to change radically at our flat. The winter semester is coming to a close and three of our fifty-second-hand beds will be bearing another set of disoriented exchange students. Of course the end of the semester also means a four-week vacation for all of us. Trips back to Bucharest are being arranged (train, bus or plane? The debate rages on!), amorous phone calls to France are getting longer by the day and one of us can't wait to find out who will share one of the huge double rooms with her (there are vague plans to commit murder in cold blood and elope with the writer of this blog - I'll keep you posted).

As for me, well, the plans are even vaguer. At the moment, there's no time for me to pay too much thought to the vacations (well, if you know me well you'll know this means the only thing missing is the minute schedule for day twelve). No but seriously, I don't even know where I will go. I'll have to pull myself together in the weekend and make an attack on the railway timetables and Google Earth.


Where to go? The choices are endless.

As I was saying, there's a lot to do right now, with three concerts coming up in the next two weeks and the usual study schedules chugging along on their slippery but steady tracks. I left before nine this morning, came back home, went out again to have lunch with Thomas, made some quick shopping at Spar, and went back to lessons. After orchestral conducting, I came home because I wanted to pay our downstairs neighbours for the internet. As it always happens, they were feeling talkative and I was there a whole hour discussing, among other things, the Middle East (they are both architects and have made archeological excavations somewhere in the region) and Helsinki's Jugendstil-architecture (they've seen it).

A little reluctantly yet with a steady will-power, I ran back up to get my things and left back to the university to do some work on my own - but not before Petra, who's enjoying her days alone in the flat studying for an important exam tomorrow, read my mind and stuffed a half-empty biscuit back into my hands with the somewhat robotic words "Mitnehmen! Zur Uni gehen! Essen!". In choral conducting class, we are working on Haydn's "Creation" as well as Schnittke's Requiem, which we're going to perform next week. A recent sneak peak into next semester's programme revealed two of the pieces we'll be working on: Frank Martin's a cappella mass and Stravinsky's "Les Noces". Next time I find myself thinking I would prefer to work on something completely unknown to me, I'll tell myself to shut up and treat myself to the hundreds of scores and cds in our library.