GERMANY
I've spent the last 4 hours with the guy who did the scary interview with me. He's part of a theatre group run by the school, apparently, and the other day he decided we should meet up today to "find music for some of the scenes" and "choreograph a couple of swordfights".
Neither of these ended up happening. Its been a long and surreal day.
To really get this into context, you need to know a little more about the guy himself. He's very enthusiastic, but with not a lot happening on the charisma front. 'Utterly monotone', you might say. Now, together, these combined aspects makes spending time with him a great strain, as he likes to elaborate on music and swordfight choreography and whatnot, but the delivery makes it a little tough to really focus on for more than 3 or 4 minutes. Consider that its in German as well.
We've spent the last 4 hours searching for a place in the school where my laptop could find the internet. We checked pretty much every room until we ran into Bernard, my epic teacher-flatmate guy, who said we could use the music room and look at some of the CD's to see if there was any music suitable for this fight scene. It was naturally a very musical music room, drumkits and music posters and a piano in the corner, y'know.
So I sat down in the room, the student begun his long, long search through the collection of CD's while I continued to sit and prayed for it all to be over soon. This was where the surreal section began.
Bernard came into the room with us, and asked me if I played instruments. Then he announced that he quite enjoyed playing piano, and, unprompted, sat down at the piano in the room, and suddenly played a perfect 10 minute long rendition of Chopin's 2nd concerto.
Words can't say how unexpected and mad it was. Yeah, he'd just said he enjoyed playing piano but that's such a limp, nothing sort of comment that I never really took it as seriously as that. Then the other bloke comes back with a stack of CD's to torture me with, plugs his headphones into the side of the laptop, gives me one of the earpieces, and we're away. And Bernard played on.
The first piece on the laptop CD was 'the circle of life', the Lion King opening theme. I never, ever thought I'd listen to it while a monotone German kid talks me, for reasons unknown, through the plot of the play Cats by Andrew Lloyd-Webber, while Flight of the Bumblebees is blasted out at 150 decibels in the background by a 50 year old German bloke on a piano. Seriously, imagine it. Actually try and envision this scene. The human brain isn't designed to deal with confusion of that magnitude.
We didn't do any swordfighting, thankfully. I managed to make my escape, after explaining in German every conceivable reason why the internet hadn't worked for us, and now I'm drinking Chocomel, and wishing I was doing this.
Courtesy of the wonderful Kellie Snowden. Lets buy a giant pumpkin.
Neither of these ended up happening. Its been a long and surreal day.
To really get this into context, you need to know a little more about the guy himself. He's very enthusiastic, but with not a lot happening on the charisma front. 'Utterly monotone', you might say. Now, together, these combined aspects makes spending time with him a great strain, as he likes to elaborate on music and swordfight choreography and whatnot, but the delivery makes it a little tough to really focus on for more than 3 or 4 minutes. Consider that its in German as well.
We've spent the last 4 hours searching for a place in the school where my laptop could find the internet. We checked pretty much every room until we ran into Bernard, my epic teacher-flatmate guy, who said we could use the music room and look at some of the CD's to see if there was any music suitable for this fight scene. It was naturally a very musical music room, drumkits and music posters and a piano in the corner, y'know.
So I sat down in the room, the student begun his long, long search through the collection of CD's while I continued to sit and prayed for it all to be over soon. This was where the surreal section began.
Bernard came into the room with us, and asked me if I played instruments. Then he announced that he quite enjoyed playing piano, and, unprompted, sat down at the piano in the room, and suddenly played a perfect 10 minute long rendition of Chopin's 2nd concerto.
Words can't say how unexpected and mad it was. Yeah, he'd just said he enjoyed playing piano but that's such a limp, nothing sort of comment that I never really took it as seriously as that. Then the other bloke comes back with a stack of CD's to torture me with, plugs his headphones into the side of the laptop, gives me one of the earpieces, and we're away. And Bernard played on.
The first piece on the laptop CD was 'the circle of life', the Lion King opening theme. I never, ever thought I'd listen to it while a monotone German kid talks me, for reasons unknown, through the plot of the play Cats by Andrew Lloyd-Webber, while Flight of the Bumblebees is blasted out at 150 decibels in the background by a 50 year old German bloke on a piano. Seriously, imagine it. Actually try and envision this scene. The human brain isn't designed to deal with confusion of that magnitude.
We didn't do any swordfighting, thankfully. I managed to make my escape, after explaining in German every conceivable reason why the internet hadn't worked for us, and now I'm drinking Chocomel, and wishing I was doing this.
Courtesy of the wonderful Kellie Snowden. Lets buy a giant pumpkin.
