The final countdown!

Hello everyone! Hard to believe that there is only one Monday left while we are here (and we won’t even be in school that day). This past week was pretty busy. This week is the last week of students’ arts rotation, so the M1-M3 students were working on finishing up their final performance projects, and they are putting them on this week. The M1 students created a song as a class, entitled “It’s us, only us.” They came up with all the lyrics and the melody. Kerry helped them come up with a chord progression for the instruments, but the song was entirely performed by them, and now they are working on recording it.

The M2 students are performing their polyphonic compositions today (Tuesday). As part of their research and preparation, they had to research different kinds of quartets- barbershop and string to give them a better idea of polyphonic performances. There are four groups that will be performing today, so we will see how they do!

The M3 students are performing their Stomp inspired pieces on Thursday. They are finishing a unit on rhythm, and studying Stomp and Blue Man Group and the kind of performances those groups put on. For their performance piece, they have worked in groups and created rhythms for each part, a context, and used different objects to perform them on, so hopefully their performances will all go well!

Other than that, we have been preparing the choir for our mini-tour next week. We are considering trying to have an all day rehearsal next Wednesday, because there is just not enough time to learn all the music otherwise. It is really hard to prepare an 8 song set when there are only 2 rehearsals a week for four weeks! I am leading rehearsals every day this week during lunch to do sectionals and really get Carol of the Bells down, but they still have many more songs to learn. I am confident that we can get it all ready in time though.

Aside from school work, I went to London this past weekend. Laura and I (another girl who is student teaching from Gustavus) went and stayed with my friend Kate, who goes to Queen Mary's University London. The only difficulty we had was in getting through passport control. The lady who worked there was rude to us and didn't like that we didn't have an address for our stay, and made me call Kate and get it from her. She also had us show her our boarding passes to prove that we were only staying in London for the weekend. Not a very happy welcome.

Aside from the lady at customs, the trip was great. Kate and her friends were very welcoming and hospitable and showed us around all day on Saturday. We started the day at Starbucks, went to a marketplace, then we saw the Globe, the London Eye, Big Ben, Westmister Abbey, Buckingham Palace, Trafalgar Square, London Bridge and I did get to see some of the West End on the bus ride to the train station. We left very early Sunday morning, so almost all of what we did happened on Saturday. We also went to this place called Hotel Chocolat, where I had the best hot chocolate of my life and I bought some to take home with me. I had a great time in London and I can't wait to go back soon!

Our college supervisor arrived yesterday and will be here for the duration of our stay. She is staying with us in our apartment, to save money, so we're more than likely going to Sevilla this weekend with her spending money from the college. I was going to try to go to Italy, but flight prices increased drastically in a matter of hours ($200 to $600 in seriously a matter of hours). However, a free trip to Sevilla sounds great to me!

That's all from me for now. Have a great day!