Hooooooooooo boy, this one's gonna be a real brick of an update brought to you by Procrastination, "Putting things off since the dawn of time." Well, first thing's first.
So, on the second of May, I went to Wailibi, one of if not the biggest amusement park in Belgium. It had four roller coasters, but one of them was the mine cart coaster, and that one is alwaays like the beginner coaster, the introductory one. Besides that, there was the Vampire, the Werewolf, and the...the...I forget the name. The vampire was a "Batman"-type coasater, where you get in and your legs hang down. That one was good. IT had a lot of good twists and turns that wer ea bit unexpected, and that type of coasater really thrives not on the drops, but on the twists. The Werewolf was a twister, or near enough; I don't know if it was really compact enough to be considered a twister, but it was that type, lots of sharp twists in a proportionally small space. Think "Screaming Eagle," it was kind of like that. It was like Ceader Point's Evel Kineval coaster, leaning towards the "Screaming Eagle." The other notable thing about that one was that it was a genuinly old, wooden coaster. You could feel the clacking, you could tell that it wasn't new; it was really built along the older design models. The Werewolf was good too. The third one was a Mr. Freeze-type coaster, where you go through once forward, come to a stop, and then do it backwards. That one was good to, I guess, but it got old fast. I came up with the "rap-coaster challenge;" ride a roller coaster while rapping from the time it goes over the first drop to the time it comes to a stop. I can do this while reciting, but my freestyling isn't good enough to stick through a while one-and-a-half, two-minute ride. There actually was a fourth coaster, but it was closed for the season so I didn't get to ride it. It was a two-spire type, where they shoot you up to one end, then you fall back and you go up the other end, and you keep pinging back and forth for a while. But, like I said, I didn't get to ride that one. The weather was kind of bad, it rained on and off throughout the day, but I didn't mind so much, and that just meant that the lines were practically non-existant. So, having ridden every coaster three or four times, I ended up checking out the other atractions, like the interactive laser game. It was kind of interesting to see a real-life rail shooter; before, all I'd ever seen was "Time Crisis." On this one, you were in a little car with a laser pistol, and the little car litteraly rode a rail, and you had to shoot the little targets with your laser pistol in order to earn points. That was a pleasant distraction. I rode a log flume and a river raft, and that was fine. There was also a funhouse that had a gimmick like someone had let a Genie losse or something, and the real gimmick was that you went into a room with some benches that rotated, like those boat rides where the boat sins around, only it was in a closed room, and the really interesting thing is that the room rotated, too. So you had the bench and the room rotating at odd angles, and this allowed the illusion of being upside down without actually being upside down. The benches were rotated so that they weren't flat, and the room was rotated so that the plane of the room's floor was parallel to the plane the benches were attatched to. It was really wierd to have the floor there aboe you and the gravity vector neither up nor down, and it took my brain a while afterwards to decide which direction was down again. That one was really well done. Aside from that, I don't remember anyhting particularly interesting there. I wish ther ehad been more roller coasters. I just remembered the day that I rode all 16 of Ceader Point's coasters. That was a good day. Wailibi wasn't too bad, either.
On the tenth, I discovered that almost all the museums in Belgium are closed on Mondays. The tenth was a monday, and I skipped school to go to Brussels to see some museums. Monday, I have practically nothing at school. I have three out of eight hours. It's rather useless. But, unfortunately, nothing was open. I went to the Royal Library, which wasn't too intersting because it's a reference library and not a real library, but it wasn't too bad to see. They had a lot of old books there. Then, I just ambled along the town. There are these tretches that are just stores, right after one another, and I just walked down the street and looked into them. Every store is a different world. It was really interesting to see the types of ambiences that these stores tried to create, all right next to each other, yes, so close and yet so far away. That was interesting. I still would have liked to go the museums better.
Two days later, the 12th, I succeded in seeing a museum, but not for lack of trying. I went there with another american exchange student, a Floridian named Shanon. We met up at the train station, a little thing on the outskirts of Brussels, and proceeded to walk around for like an hour before coming back to where we had started and reqlized thqt we'd previously walked right past the place without knowing it. The place was the Atelier 340 muzeum. It's an independant contemporary art museum, so they had a just some weird stuff there. They didn't have terribly much stuff, though; the place had a kind of warehouse vibe. The thing is, it's really kind of an improvized museum; it's actually a few houses that got holes punched through the walls to string them together. They don't have that much space for permanent exhibitions, so they turn the stuff on display over pretty frequently. That was cool, but I would have liked something that felt a bit more, let's say professional. Still, this is Rebel Art, and they deal very routinely with budget crises, so I can't begrudge them that and I support them wholeheartedly.
The next notable thing that's happened to me is the Talent Show. It's so important that it gets its own section.
The talent show was an event that lasted from the 13th to the 15th. I went to the train station at Verviers, and the Rotary was waiting for me there. I got carred over to the small hall where we were to rehearse and perform. I was one of the five or six people ther ebefore everybody else, so it was we thatset everything up, moved all the tables and chairs, moved the piano podium up to the stage, and all that jazz. I should that the Japanese schoolgirls were there, among the five or six people there before everybody else, and that they were very active in the performance. More on this later.
Here's the thing; it was a talent show, and I'd registered for it and all that, but I still didn't really know what I was going to do. I had my trumpet and my trumpet bag, but I didn't have any litterature. I and one of the organisers had spoken, beforehand, about doing something with a piano, and he'd said, "We'll get you a painist," but upon arriving, I found out that he meant, "There'll be some other kid that plays the piano there, you can figure something out with him of her." Not true. All the litterature I have for trumpet and piano takes more than two days to prepare. It is not reasonable to expect a student of my age to be able to sightread the Artunian Trumpet concerto or the Hindemuth Sonata. It takes pianists like a month to learn this part from scratch. It takes trumpetists a while, too, but already having played them, I had a good idea of what I was going into. And actually, my playing got a lot better during the two days that I was there. I think I just had some realyl good practice space, and I was able to let loose and blow. I don't have a very good practice space here chez PArietti, it absorbs all the sound and I can't here myself very well, so I end up forcing a lot. Well, I think I've figured something out that'll work, but we'll see. If I want to audition for university groups when I get back, I should be in at leats some semblance of shape when I get back. But that's a digression. The essential is that I was very worrid about my future during day one of the Talent Show rehersal because I didn't know if I was going to be able to do anything. I was recruited, though, by some girls to sing "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" with them. The deal is that they were all girls, and they needed a lower voice to tie everyhting together. I was walking by, and they said, "Hey, you'r a boy, Right? You can sing, right? Want to sing with us?" Well, yeah, I did. I think that at least one of them had heard me sing at Epidaurus, and rembered me from there. So that's how I ended up doing that. I was in the right place at the right time. At the end of Day One, I was taken to a host family to saty the night. I was accompanied by an Australian, another American, and two Indians. We chilled for a while. We ate dinner. The host poeple had acouple of friends who were really into India, so they got called over because of the Indians. Eventually, everybody got to talking, and I apparently made a very favorable impression. People were very impressed that I knew a word in French that they didn't, namely "phrenology." It's stupid to be impressed over knowing an "-ology" word in French, because all the "-ology" words are neither French nor English, but Greek. This allows all the "-ology" words to be the same in the two languages. All in all, people wer ereally impressed with me, and that annoyed me a whole lot. I can't help but feel that it was mastly due to the fact that I spoke French as well as I did, so I didn't sound as much like an idiot as exchange students typically do. I got the feeling that they were impressed by my ability to express myself, not really me, and I don't want them to be impressed by me, anyway, I want to be able to talk wit hthem like I'd be able to talk with anybody. When somebody's impressed by you, they don't talk to you like an equal. I don't like that. Let's be equals. Plus, flattery goes to my head way too easily, so I try to resist it actively. The other American and the two Indians got carted away to someplace else, I stayed at the place and went to sleep.
Day Two. Day Two was rather like Day One. PEople were there, and people were going on stage periodically to try out their acts and get advice from the coach that had been hired. Also, I volunteered to do lights. The coach asked, "Can I have somebody to do lights?" and I raised my hand. So, for the second act, I was the guy in the back of the room who did the spotlight. There were other lights, too, but I wasn't responssable for those, just the spotlight. Just the colors. Over the course of the day, I saw one of the Japanese schoolgirls walk by in waht appeared to be a schoolgirl uniform. I was kind of skeptical that I'd actually seen this at first, but later on, my sighting was confirmed. This is something that my visual targeting system instantly latched onto. I jsut couldn't believe my eyes. As I said, the Japanese Schoolgirls were particularly active. They did three numbers together: a dance, a song, and a sing-along. There were also two of them that did individual dances, one modern and one tradidtional. Five acts in total, that's a lot. They must have really gotten together beforehand. And here's the kicker: they were all wearing schoolglirl uniforms. At one point, when I was watching the group dance actually, I expressed my amazement at this phenomenon, and a girl sitting next to me asked me, "Does the schoolgirl uniform turn you on, Kevin?" and the answer, acutally, is "no." It took me a while to figure out how to express my interest and astonishment at seeing real Japanese Schoolgirls dressed as such (and wait till you see the dance--it's off the chain), but I eventually found a good metaphore: it's like seeing a unicorn. You know, people talk about it, and it shows up on TV sometimes, but you never think you're actually gonna see it. When it finally shows up in front of you, you have a hard time beliving it, and you don't want to take your eyes off it. Now, as they say on the internet, "pics or it didn't happen." Rest assured, I was not going to let this once-in-a-lifetime occasion go undocumented. Here is the photographic evidence that I was in the same place at the same time as four authentic Japnese Schoolgirls in Schoolgirl regalia. These pictures still make me smile. I made sure to get these pictures; as I am currently cameraless, I had the Australian that had gotten carted off with me at the end of Day One take them and send them to me. Oh, I still can't beleive it. It's just, that made the trip worth it more than anyhting. It's simply fantastic to know that this actually does exist. Aaaaaaaaaaaaah. Also on Day Two, I got the oppourtunity to play the trumpet--with the Japanese Schoolgirls, as it happens. They already had one trumpet for their sing-along, and they were able to add me without much difficulty. I faked up a harmony part. All in all, I ended up in three acts: "The Lion Sleeps Tonight," a pitchy version of "Hallelujia" sung by a Canadian, and the Sing-Along. People sang along to "Les Champs Elysees," a well-known French-language pop song. The cast of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" was called out to back the Canadian up on "Hallelujia" because the act was a bit thin with only her. But also, on Day Two, I was feeliing really down because there was all this music going on that I couldn't be a part of. Guitars were popular, there were like four or five there, and there were about three playing at any given time. There wer emore people who knew some guitar stuff than there were guitars, so they got passed around a lot. And I so wanted to jam, but the musical idiom these guys were in and mine, namely JAzz, were incompatible. That was so sad. Eventually, some guy played the drums and I did some anti-Abersold stuff, and that was good and made me feel a lot better, but I was still aching. When I remember what I had at Central...Oh man, I miss it. Don't take music out of our schools, it's far too precious. Especailly when you have as good a thing going on as Central does right now, you can't just abandon that. It's far, far too precious. Day Three was kind of short. WE ran the thing through, and then we put the show on. The whole thing got recorded and put on Youtube, so I'll now direct you to what I thought were the best acts. I feel like it's kind of my responsibility to tell you what the best numbers were, so here they are.
In this segment, you need to jump ahead to 7:05 to get to the good stuff, but honsetly, it's worth it. I want everybody to watch this. While you're watching it, imagine that you're me. Now imagine that it's happening right in front of you, and you're not just watching it on Youtube, there's just a bit of air separating you from the stage. Maybe you'll see a unicorn, too. I also suggested that it was like seeing a dinosaur, but that one got turned down in favor of the unicorn, who is, I suppose, more elegant.
In this segment, the guy who sings and plays guitar up front is pretty good. At 6:15, one of the Indian girls does a traditional Indian dance, and she has rather remakeably solid technique. It doesn't come off as well in the video as in person, but oh well.
In this segment, the two Indians do a Bollywood dance at 4:40. It's not as good as the solo Indian Dance, but it's not bad.
In this segment, you see the "Hallelujia" I did up front, which was honestly not one of the best acts, but I was in it, and I know how much you want to see me. At 2:40 there's a Mexican who did a dance she designated as "arabic." Kind of monotonus, but well-done.
In this segment, you can see the Japanese schoolgirls doing their collective song. Okay, this one isn't one of the best either, really, but it has the Japanese schoolgirls in it. That's my spotlight, too, by the way.
In this segment, you can see Manami's traditional Japanese dance at 4:45. In all honesty, I wan't too into this dance or the Shinto chant that acocmpanied it, but again, it has a Japanese Schoolgirl in a Kimono. IT warrants citation.
In this segment, jump to 2:45 to see the solo modern Japanese Schoolgirl dance. This one put me a little ill-at-ease, honestly, by its suggestiveness. But it still has a Japanese Schoolgirls in it.
In this segment, we finally get to my main number, "The Lion Sleeps Tonight." I sing and play the chocolate tin.
In this segment, you can see the sing-along that the Japanese Schoolgirls put on. I played the trumpet.
In this segment, jump to 2:50 to see the number that ended the show and admire my wonderful lighting techniques.
And I think that this was possibly the best number there was. It was used as the first act closer. These two guys just had such a good time it was sonderful. It doesn't come off as well in the video, but these guys just created such a joyus ambience it was a delight to behold. In all confidentiality, they kind of flubbed their act and did one of their moves too early and so missed the chance to do another that was good, but oh well. It's still delightful to watch.
And I'm gonna stop there for now. See you next time.
