a quiet day

Yesterday it rained, really a lot, but only briefly. It started when I left school and walked to the tram, and ended after my nine minute wait, once I had boarded the tram. I was wearing my wool jacket and smelled like a wet dog. The guy next to me on the tram was blinded by his completely fogged-up glasses. People stood around me in a wide range of wet-rat poses; the tram was full, and kind of stinky. As I walked home, the sun was out, though it was still sprinkling lightly, and as I felt a chill against the back of my neck, I thought about how it wasn't until recently that I considered going out in the rain to be a precursor to illness. It had been more of an exciting pleasure to get soaked by the weather, then come inside and dry off. Then, recently, someone admonished me for allowing myself to get wet, and ever since I've gotten sick after a good drenching. Damn my suggestive mind. True to form, I had a sore throat by bedtime (despite the bath and tall pot of vegetable soup I made), and it was still there when I woke up this morning. So I canceled everything and stayed at home, drinking tea, lots of tea, and this gross mix of store-bought carrot and apple juices. Also I did laundry. And I lay in the sun for about an hour -- the skies were clear all day. I took some pictures of the planter boxes my downstairs neighbors are cleaning out. The real evidence of my quiet day, though, was this little net I crocheted for an avocado pit, since we don't have any toothpicks.

 

The alternate title for this post could be, "I am a dork." Here are a few of the mossy planter shots I took, too:

view from above

peering in

edge-of-world

perfect little plants

Staying home and having an excuse to avoid responsibility is nice. I also took some pictures of a piece of furniture I bought this weekend. I've been looking for something for a long time, I thought it was a bookshelf that I was looking for, but I was wrong. It was a mini-wardrobe! Ein kleiner Schrank. It came with old wallpaper covering both front doors, but that came off easily with water. I really like it. Here are a few views:

(I still need to use some furniture polish. Oh yeah, and I got that nice chair, too, at a different thrift store [aka Brockenstube, aka Brocki], it's got a little brand on the bottom: Made in Sweden.)

stuff

I feel quite pleased with the general blue-purple-pink feel of this arrangement

my other little favorite furniture piece got moved by the bed

and, finally, computer table, and evening light on the door.

Speaking of Made in Sweden, last night I found Lukas in the kitchen stirring his food with two spatulas and making little "borg de borg" sounds. MY ROOMMATE IS THE SWEDISH CHEF. He wasn't entirely pleased with the comparison.

the second half of that tour

Sometimes traveling puts me in a talky mood. A result of the thinking you do when you're away from home. Or, you stop thinking so much, and just keep moving forward, which is a little closer to what happened to me the last two weeks. New, new. Brain can't keep up. Or, can, but isn't compelled to.

After that day in Basel, I caught the 7:06 (AM) train to Zurich, and from there the plane to Vienna. I'd never been there before, which seems crazy, but there you have it; Willkommen in Österreich! We only had a few hours before the rehearsal and concert, and left early the next morning, so I had to be serious about my sightseeing.

I walked from our very nice hotel past this building, on my way to find something to eat. I ended up, somehow, at a place called the Imperial Hotel, where I had a huge plate of gnocchi and winter vegetables; then I set off to find the music instrument museum, where I'd heard the oldest bass in Austria was located.

Here it is. 1672. ("Earliest surviving Austrian Bass. Note the special detailing on the F-holes.")

This is the building in which the music instrument museum was located. Right behind me as I took this picture was a "dude" in armor on a "horse" wearing those fancy horse-clothes. You know what I mean.

This is the hall in which we played, the Konzerthaus. Certainly one of the great halls of the world.

 

This concert was really a pleasure to play. The orchestra had a little more room, so I didn't have the percussion right behind me, and could play the whole concert without earplugs. The sound was great, the backstage fantastic, the hall beautiful. Really nice. After the show a bunch of us went to a good schnitzel restaurant that one of the bass players knew about (those bass players! we ate a lot of good food together) and I had some cheesy noodles. JB would be proud, when we were on tour together in Germany she always looked forward to the restaurants with cheesy noodles. Also there was a lot of beer, and some apricot spirits.

The next day was a travel day, and after 8 hours of bus, plane, and more bus, we ended up in Amiens, France. It's in the Somme region, north and on its way west. Not so far from the coast, and close to some of the major battlefields of WWII. A lot of the town had to be rebuilt after the war, so much of it had a consistent brick-and-mortar look, but a few parts of the town were original, including the incredible Gothic church. 2.5 of the Paris Notre Dames could fit inside the Amiens version:

 Can you tell how big this is?

The church is quite close to these little canals, flanked by houses and stone walls. Super charming.

I made sure to take advantage of my time in France by visiting one of the little markets you can find around town with local food items. I got a beautiful little round of goat cheese, some basil-olive tapenade, and incredibly sweet strawberries, and then went across the street for my hot baguette. Yes, France, your food is better. (Have I written this before somewhere? I think so.) The best thing I ate on tour, though, by far, was this pastry I got in the next town we went to, Dijon. I didn't take any pictures but let me tell you about this pastry. It was called Millefeuille praliné, and it looked a little like this:

and I simply cannot express how much I enjoyed the flaky pastry, filled with squishy-yet-firm nut cream. Mein Gott. I make it sound so commonplace. That photo is from the website of the actual boulangerie/patisserie. Put it on your to-do in Dijon list. Or even your to-do in Europe list. Dijon is only 3 hours from Basel. 100% worth the trip.

So. Just another week or so, and I'm off on a second tour with this group. I feel fortunate to be playing with the orchestra, and look forward to the next set, which is on gut strings, and includes a concert in Istanbul.

I keep looking at the picture of that pastry. It's completely irresistible. Maybe I've never enjoyed any pastry as much as I enjoyed that one. Hell, maybe I've never enjoyed any other food on the whole planet as much as that pastry. Hmm. I don't want to sound melodramatic but look at it. Try to tear your eyes away. I know. You can't. Neither can I.

I went to Hong Kong!

What an unexpected thing. I got the call while I was in California, about three weeks ago, I guess someone realized at the last minute they couldn't go on the tour, and the orchestra needed one more bass player. Luck! Fit perfectly in my free dates in between things. So last Wednesday we boarded a plane in Basel and flew over to Hong Kong, through London Heathrow. Around 13 hours to HK from LHR. Had the good fortune (mostly) to sit next to a Swedish man living in HK, working for "a company called H&M" ("Hmm, I haven't heard of that company." "Yeah, most people haven't.") and figuring out good restaurants and bars and hikes in the area. He wrote me a neat itinerary in between the printed engagements on the orchestra schedule, and all of his suggestions were right on the money. The only bad part about sitting next to this guy was the time he spilled his red wine on my coat. It mostly came out, he gave me money to get it dry cleaned. As someone in a lavender cashmere Izod sweater, he felt really bad about it. Oh well. The first night I got the other bass players to come with me to the Sichuan restaurant he recommended, and it was great. The menu had no English (unlike most things in HK, which was an English colony for ca.150 years) and so we told our waiter what we wanted: fish, beef, and "no meat or fish" and then we got beautiful, big plates of food. Delicious, good atmosphere.

It can be funny at first to walk around the city, since all the streets have very British-sounding names; our hotel, the Luk Kwok, was on Gloucester Street. Walking around feels a bit like being in a tropical NYC. Between the tall buildings and busy, noisy streets, there are flowering trees, parks with fountains and carefully manicured topiary, and of course in early March the weather was warm and humid. The Chinatown areas I've been to in SF & NY really aren't so far from the feeling in the "real thing" -- restaurants and markets are everywhere, lots of the residential towers had clotheslines in the windows, and neon signs line the streets in Wan Chai, the district where our hotel was located. There's a good subway system, lots of double-decker buses, and a fleet of vintage, colonial-era double-decker trams. To ride a tram costs $2HK, two Hong Kong dollars, which is roughly the equivalent of 30 cents in USD. $10HK is equal to €1, and everything is really inexpensive. Our huge dinner, plus three giant Tsing Tao beers, cost $330HK. Taxis are absurdly cheap. On our last day, a few people and I went to the south part of Hong Kong island, a 30 minute ride away. Cab fare? $80HK. I got a sunburn. Hey, beach! We were able to really packed in activities, for having two full days and two partial days; with only one rehearsal and one concert, there was plenty of time to wander around, eat things, look at stuff.

One highlight was the ferry ride we took on Friday night at 8, the right time to see the laser show put on by all the buildings lining the waterfront. There's a lot of waterfront. Someone (Lukas?) asked me today if it was like Star Wars. Kind of like that. Another highlight was another recommendation from my seat-mate on the plane: Café Gray Deluxe, on the 49th floor of the Upperhouse hotel, with harbor views. Pretty spectacular. Most of the time the weather was what you might imagine if you tried in your head to mix SF fog with LA smog.

The orchestra played as part of the Hong Kong International Arts Festival, and everyone we met was really nice. Organizers, stage managers, bus drivers. Related/unrelated, there's this interesting and cool phenomenon you can see everywhere in the after-work hours: all the pedestrian bridges, which are covered, are lined along the walls by women, presumably just come from work, who lay out pieces of cardboard, then sit on them in groups of maybe 3 - 10 people, eating food someone has prepared, playing cards, giving each other massages, painting each others nails. Generations of women, from the really old to teenagers and babies. A few men, but really, mostly women. Shoes were all left outside the cardboard-picnic-blanket; in some cases, rather than settling for just a flat surface, the groups had created a little wall from the cardboard, held together with string at the corners. There was something really great about the whole thing, and it was clear that people were having a great time, relaxing and unwinding after a long day.

I'm back in Basel at the moment. Second part of the trip starts tomorrow, heading to Vienna for the first time. I feel lucky to be part of these things. There's some amount of loneliness and alienation that comes with playing with a new group, in a foreign place, halfway across the world from anyone you know. It was weird to stand in the HK airport and see flights to SF & LA getting in sooner than my flight back to Europe. Tempted? Heck yes. Still glad to be here, though. Obviously.

TV brand: "ComeMon"

Imagine you're my Transylvanian friend Maria when you say it: "Oh, come-mOn."

"Which one is your bass?" "The little cute one."

sunrise over Heathrow