people are nice

some examples:

Ella (friend, horn player, Icelandic) and I arrived in Kilchberg to find pouring rain and the wrong bus.  She thought she might ask the bus driver how close he would stop to the church, and it turned out the drivers were just about to have a shift change, and the one who was just going off-duty actually DROVE US IN HIS CAR to where we were going.

Earlier, on the train, I realized that I had left the endpin for my bass at home (it's a long story why it wasn't with my bass, involving having a lesson on a different bass and leaving mine at the church, etc etc) and was not planning on returning home for two nights.  This would mean six rehearsals/concerts with no endpin.  What to do?!?  Ella made a few calls, got the number of this Latvian guy (Raitas is his name) who lives not too far from me, but whom I had never spoken to, and who would be arriving only for the second rehearsal since he was one of the vocal soloists.  Before he left, he went over to Efringerstrasse, my roommate let him in, and he picked up the endpin for me.  So Great.

(Also, she gave me some Icelandic money, in exchange for one of the new pennies, which she quickly proclaimed to be "just shit.")

And, she told me all about this really stunning version of "If you're going to San Francisco" and even sang it for me, truly enlivening my train ride home.  And now I will share the video with you.  Because I'm nice, too.




Bass wheel saga... I should have just replaced the wheel by now.  But instead, I've tried to just fix the old one, spending nearly the same amount of money and roughly 7x as much time as I would have otherwise.  There have been some helpful people along the way.  I should mention them.  Marcel, of course, at Druckwerk, has done a lot of drilling, fixing, finding parts, tightening, re-tightening, finding new parts, etc.  Also some guy at this random machine shop I went to near Voltaplatz (how's that for the name of a neighborhood?) drilled, fitted parts, and assembled, all out of the goodness of his heart.  (Unfortunately, his fix didn't work, and as I was wheeling my bass through the Zurich main station I heard some little "ping" noises behind me just before the wheel completely fell apart.  I went the next day to the Home Depot equivalent [OBI] and found some parts that worked well enough to keep me going until the next fix.  Why have I not just replaced the whole wheel?  My stubborn nature, I can only assume.)

Oh, my roommate, of course, who allows me to not give her my rent until I get paid.  Wow.  So nice.

Also nice are plants.  I finally replaced the ones that died over the summer with a couple for the indoors, an orchid and a succulent.  I was so busy admiring them this evening that I accidentally turned my roasting potatoes (thinly sliced) into incredibly delicious potato chips.  What a delightful mistake.