Music and Travel

...are pretty much what have been occupying my mind recently. Not a whole lot exciting has happened since I last posted, I've been working on my last papers (only 4 the entire semester) and hanging out on campus a lot. Here's the big things though:
The last week of February my friend Matt and I went to see Spoon, an American band from Texas that I've been listening to since last spring (but they've been around since I was about 7). Both they and the opening band were quite good live, and the tickets were reasonably cheap. I got to have my first legal beer at a concert! I felt oddly grown up, after years of going to small-venue concerts back home and watching the legals casually sip their beer. Big moment for me.
After the concert, we were approached by a very peppy American girl who'd overheard us talking and recognized our accents as American (not difficult). She introduced herself as Nasi and talked to us for a while. She even invited us to come hang out with her in London if we were ever around. Americans are ridiculously more outgoing than the British. :) We hung around the venue for a while and got our tickets signed by the lead singer, talked to the opening band, and bought their cd (which I've really been enjoying).
Unfortunately, we stayed a little too long and by the time we got to Waterloo we'd JUST missed t the last train back to Egham. After frantically calling our friends who lived in London and wondering when the tube shut down, we ended up on a train to Staines, the next town over from Egham. We got into Staines around 1am. It was rainy, dark, cold, and deserted. Matt wanted to walk back. I was almost ready to comply because the cab company we called to price check said it would take 18 pounds to get us back to campus, until I thought about what I thought Mom and Dad would say if they knew I was stranded in a deserted town in the middle of the night with a *vague* idea of how to get back home. Correct me if I'm wrong, but what I imagined them saying was "don't worry about the price and get home safely." Then a cab pulled up near us and I dragged Matt over and made him get in with me. The driver was an incredibly nice Afghani man who took us straight home and charged us I think way less than he should have (10 pounds! So 5 pounds for each of us). Matt later reluctantly agreed that it had been a good idea.
Side note: this was about 4 days after Matt had gone to see a concert with Janine and ended up missing trains/buses and spending the night in Heathrow airport. Lesson learned, keep track of your OWN time when you go see a concert with Matt. :-P
The next exciting music-related thing is that I've been able to MAKE music! My friend Janine has nearly the exact same taste of music as I do, but enough different to expose me to things I wouldn't have listened to otherwise- namely, music/beat poetry hybrids. Janine writes a lot of poetry (very GOOD poetry) and realized quite early on that I love to sing and arrange music in my spare time- then our friend Zoe bought herself a guitar in town and suddenly we formed a band. We've called ourselves the Postcolonials (Zoe's Australian, Janine's Canadian, and I represent the American colonies- together we're all ex-British children). We've even written a song already!! Janine wrote the lyrics, Zoe gave us a few chords, and I composed a melody over it. It's So. Awesome. I've never been part of a group that could just sit together and "jam"- but we've been doing it a lot recently. We have a few more songs in the works now, too. :) And the NEW best thing- Janine and I were talking about how we wish we could add some new instruments (besides the tambourine she bought) when I suddenly remembered that I had a friend in London who was an amazing violinist. The next day I called Alexandra and found out she had miraculously brought her violin to London with her, and the next weekend Alexandra came to visit and had her FIRST EVER improvisation experience! I was so proud of her. She was really self-conscious to come, but I knew she's always wanted to branch away from classical music (much as she loves it) and obviously I knew she was amazing (though she always tells me otherwise) and it ended up being like the best thing for her self-esteem ever, cause Zoe and Janine loved her. So- HOORAY!!
The best thing is that we might actually get to play a gig on campus- there's a bunch of kids on campus who are into acoustic folk/indie music and put on various open mic nights and the like and apparently there's going to be one more in the summer term (May-June) before we leave. There's also talk of an open-air concert being planned on campus.
I can't say enough how much of an amazing experience this is- it's an amazing rush to create music from scratch rather than reproducing what other people have written, and I'm getting better and better at it. I've decided that if I can afford it (which is questionable), I'm going to buy myself an acoustic guitar for my birthday and learn how to play some basic chords so that I can entertain myself and my friends and have real sing-a-longs when I get back to Wellesley. It's the best free therapy ever.
I've got to sign off soon, my neighbor is having a birthday party (the big 2-0) and I need to make an appearance, but I wanted to share with you all my travel plans for the spring break, cause it's really incredible. The cities that are on my itinerary are as follows:
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Berlin, Germany
Prague, Czech Republic
Vienna, Austria
Budapest, Hungary
Munich, Germany
Tallinn, Estonia
Helsinki, Finland
St. Petersburg, Russia
Stockholm, Sweden
Before you have a heart attack Helsinki and St Petersburg are going to be day trips- but everywhere else I'm staying overnight for at least two nights!! I'll be spending the most time in Estonia- I'm staying there a week at the end of my trip. I'm SO excited for Estonia, I've been falling more andmore in love with it, partially because it's so cheap to stay there ($23/night at our hostel for a private 2-person room!) , partially because it's so close to helsinki, st petersburg, and stockholm, and partially because it's a country/city that I knew NOTHING about before I started planning this trip and it's so exciting to be exposed to something completely new.
This that I am looking forward to the most on my trip include:
visiting Beethoven's grave in Vienna
visiting a museum in Vienna that used to be a palace and has a large Klimpt exhibit
visiting a gigantic public park in Munich
visiting the "beer gardens" in Munich
going to the huge national part in Estonia
taking the ferry to Helsinki
staying in a boat hostel in Stockholm
and there's so much more but I haven't read NEARLY enough to know what I'm doing everywhere yet. I bought myself a Europe guidebook today and I'm going to be spending a LOT of time reading that from now until I leave (March 24!!). It's incredibly stressful but SO exciting. I can't believe I'm doing this. I think I might get addicted to travel....
So, all in all, things are going well. :)
Hopefully I'll write again soon,
Helen