Competition, day 1...

---

---

First day of competition. Rehearsed at the hotel, then wandered to a park where we spent part of the morning first at a welcome ceremony (most notable because we got to meet someone who actually follows the blog of one of our choir members - but sadly the said choir member is not on tour with us due to academic commitments). We got to check out some of the other choirs, and also filmed a sort of promo video, I guess. We then were ushered to a school to rehearse some more, and sweltered our way through a rehearsal of the folk song set, which we performed tonight. I honestly don't think we've had a day of less than 35 degrees yet, and yesterday was a record breaker, apparently (there are pictures of pharmacies with the temp outside showing 42 degrees floating around out there...).

A few of us wandered to a restaurant near our hotel for lunch, and tried to ask our non-English speaking waiter some questions. Which isn't so bad when you have a couple of words of Italian in most places, but the rudeness of the reply was legendary - the first truly bad service I've had in Italy. When we couldn't decide what we wanted, or wanted to know more about the dishes, rather than trying to help, he'd simply walk away. We finally flagged down another waiter who _did_ speak English, and from then on the meal was lovely... The food was really good when it arrived, he made some recommendations for sights to see if we have time (namely the castle in town - I'm hopeful, but we'll see).

Spent a bit of time relaxing at the hotel, then got changed and ready to head out. We competed in the Folk Song class at about 4:20. It's really hard to tell how we're doing here, since we really don't have anything to compare it to. Sida Rudaia went fairly well, Shule Agra did, too, although there were some pitch issues, and we ended up a bit flat, V'La Le Bon Vent and O Yo Yo went well also, although we were all, apparently, obviously tense (to our director anyway). I'm hopeful that once we relax into things, we'll start to do better.

Found a place to have dinner while the small group rehearsed, and then it was off to bed - early start tomorrow for the small group with the Renaissance Class!

---

Comments

[misssable]

so sad I couldn't be there :( But it sounds like you guys did fine without me!