Big news

It looks like The Travelling Piano is finally nearing its end.

I have been offered an amazing teaching job back in Melbourne and decided to accept it and settle back at home. I have cancelled my contract to work on the Elation with Carnival cruise lines in January and will be heading home in mid-January after a month in Italy and another month in Dresden. I am still deciding whether to do a little bit more travelling in early January.

I will be teaching at Melbourne High School which is an all-boys government school with an incredible music department, starting at the end of January. It will only be a part time position (between 3 and 4 days a week) so that I can work on some other things as well as teaching. My teaching load is still being determined, but it should include some VCE classes and some music technology classes as well as taking the unauditioned choir (with about 70 boys!)

It feels like a really good decision and I am really looking forward to coming home again after 2 years on the road!

An Adventure to Zurich

On Monday 22nd October I got up extremely early to start my journey to Zurich for the night. It has been below 0 degrees in Laengenfeld all week, so I knew it would be very cold and I really wasn't looking forward to the 3km bike ride at 7am to get to the bus stop. Especially not when I stepped outside into this:

But I was all rugged up and survived the ride. It really is very pretty, but also very very cold!

I arrived in Zurich around lunch time and immediately booked myself into a bus tour around the city. Zurich is a surprisingly small city, so a 2 hour bus tour covered most of the sights including the lake and a trip up the nearby hill to see some good views of the city.

Like all European cities, it has some quite remarkable churches. My favourite was the Fraumunster which has stained glass windows designed by Marc Chagall.

The other significant churches are Grossmunster where Zwingli headed up his part of the Reformation (I need to find out exactly what that was though... he doesn't get as much press as Martin Luther) and St Peters which has the biggest clock on a church tower in Europe!

The rest of the afternoon I spent wandering through the streets of the old city and looking at the shops. Bahnhofstrasse is apparently some of the most expensive real estate in Europe and boasts a lot of designer stores. The whole city is meant to be great for shopping, but to be honest, I found it has most of the same stores as the other European cities and is hideously expensive. Food and drink is especially expensive - a Big Mac meal cost more than 10 Swiss Francs (and a Swiss Franc is about equivalent to an Australian Dollar!). The other thing Zurich is famous for is its banks - but would you believe I found it really difficult to find an ATM!

For me, the main reason to go to Zurich that day was because Cecilia Bartoli (a very famous Italian opera singer) was giving a concert that night. It had been sold out for weeks and my original plan was to stand in the foyer in the hope that someone would be selling a spare ticket. The day before I left, though, I checked the internet one last time to find that they had added a small number of seats that day and so I was able to buy a ticket and was very very excited.

Outside the concert hall, there was even a mobile museum that the Cecilia Bartoli foundation sets up outside all of her concerts. Her latest CD and the concert tour is a tribute to the singer Maria Malibran, who was apparently the first international opera superstar.

I collected my tickets and headed towards my seat to find it was actually on the stage. I was sitting in the orchestra, basically, directly behind the 1st bassoon player and 1st clarinet player, right in the middle of the music. It was so amazing. Of course, it meant I was only able to watch Ms Bartoli from behind, but it was still an incredible concert. She even turned and sang to us during the encores which I thought was incredibly gracious. I am sure this night will be one of my favourite concerts for a very long time. I did notice that they were videoing it, though I kinda hope that is not the concert they will use as a DVD - I'm not sure I want to be that visible during it! Interestingly, being right in the middle of the orchestra really heightened my enjoyment of the orchestral pieces in the concert. It was really great feeling the music move around the orchestra! As far as her singing, I really can not say enough. Her voice is so rich and flexible and I am so lucky to have heard her live! And coincidentally, I was sitting next to a couple from Melbourne and when the 1st trumpeter heard our accents he turned to introduce himself - Simon Lilly, who was at the WA Conservatorium a few years ahead of me!

The only thing that tainted my trip was the hotel I stayed in. It was directly over a nightclub which I could hear all night and then the breakfast delivery knocked on my door before 7am - mistaking my room for the one across the corridor. Then they forgot my breakfast altogether. Not very impressive.

The next morning I did a little more sightseeing and then got back on the train back to Laengenfeld. It was 4 and a half hours of travel altogether, but the concert alone made it worth it. On the way home I had a very brief stop in Liechtenstein and got to ride on this very cute train back to Austria.

No Kangaroos in Austria

There may not be kangaroos here, but there are plenty of t-shirts that say that!

So, this is my 3rd time working at the Aqua-Dome in the Tyrol region of Austria. The alps are still beautiful and it's still located in a really small village without much to do. And that is exactly what I have been doing... a whole lot of not-much... which is why I haven't updated this blog in nearly 3 weeks. There were 2 weeks of not drinking after Oktoberfest. I have been riding my bike back and forth to work from the apartments again (twice through the snow, even!). I have been reading a lot, watching lots of DVDs (Love My Way and Grey's Anatomy Season 2), learning new songs to add to my repertoire and working on my German and starting on Italian (though the only textbook I could buy is in German, so it is a slow process!). It is starting to get cold now. Tomorrow's forecast is for a maximum of 0 degrees and a minimum of -5. It is snowing a little bit in the valley and seemingly quite a lot on the mountains.

Last time I was here, I started writing this blog (happy birthday travelling piano!) and I think my most popular post was about the Milk-o-mat. I have really enjoyed using it again! But now there is an added pleasure. Right next to the Milk-o-mat is the village noticeboard, pictured below. These guys never fail to make me giggle a little bit. Tyrol is a very special place... (such a shame I missed both events!)

On Monday, I am going to Zurich overnight. I am sure I will have something more interesting to write about after that!

Oktoberfest 2007

On Monday 1st October I left Travemuende after a month there and started travelling towards my next gig back in the Austrian Alps. Conveniently, it was a Monday which is my day off and I had to travel through Munich, so of course I had the night free to check out Oktoberfest! I checked into my hotel (which I had to book months in advance) at about 4pm and headed straight to the Wies'n where it is held.

Basically Oktoberfest is a lot of beer and a lot of Germans (or, more specifically Bavarians) dressed in traditional costumes and drinking said beer. Of course, there are lots of tourists too especially Australians, Americans and English. All of the major Munich breweries have a tent (some have 2!) and they serve the beer in 1L glasses... To get a seat inside the tents, you generally have to reserve a place, but there was room in the beer gardens and it was much easier to find somewhere to sit since I was on my own. The beer makes everyone pretty friendly, so it wasn't long before I had made a whole lot of new friends.

The first thing I was amazed by (and this was even in the train station well before I arrived at Oktoberfest) was the number of men and women actually wearing traditional outfits. Apparently most German men own Lederhosen and bring them out on special occasions like this! At first, this made me laugh a lot, because they really do look pretty funny, but after a while in the beer tents (and a few beers) it seemed perfectly logical to wear knee high socks and leather trousers with braces over a coloured check shirt and a colourful handkerchief tied around your neck. I opted for a tacky tourist t-shirt instead.

Secondly, the tents themselves are amazing. They are on such a huge scale and are packed full of people enjoying their beer and traditional food (lots of pig, of course). Here are some photos of the outside of some of the tents (take special note of the lederhosen in the last pic!)

The lion on the Lowenbrau tent even moved and roared!

The insides of the tents were just as incredible. These are the Paulaner tent, the Hofbrauhaus tent and the other Paulaner tent (again note the number of traditional costumes, especially in the first photo!):

Some sadistic fool decided it was a good idea to have carnival rides at Oktoberfest. I didn't go on any of them, but just watching them was enough to make you feel quite ill after all that beer!

Needless to say, I sampled the beers in a few of the tents. The initial plan was to take a photo of me with each of the beers, but that got a little hazy after the 4th or 5th...

(Paulaner)


(Lowenbrau)


(the other Paulaner tent)

(the Fischer something tent with some of my new friends wearing lederhosen! haha)

It was a really fun night, but let's just say that travelling to Laengenfeld on the train the next day wasn't quite as fun.

It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience to be able to be in Munich for Oktoberfest and I am certainly glad I did it. I am amazed by the tourists that go for a week and are in the tents every night... hard core!

I have now sworn off drinking for a couple of weeks just to let my liver recover.