05.01.2020 - 01.02.2020

Over the course of 26 days our class visited five cities in three countries, saw many excellent performances, and got to go through a few museums with artworks of unparalleled mastery. I was once asked to describe what I hoped to get out of the trip. I replied that I wanted an experience that could not be adequately summed up in two sentences. With this j term class I certainly got that. Even with my vaguest run on sentences and a whole bunch of commas I could not express the entirety of my experience. Not in two sentences, and not even in one blog post.

At my vaguest, I could say that on our class trip we saw many musical performances, toured cities and museums and palaces and churches, and ate at culturally relevant restaurants, all of which were excellent. But this would not describe the feelings and opinions I experienced. It would not convey how I got hooked on ballet and fell in love with opera. It would not describe how awkward sitting through an Austrian catholic mass made me feel. It would not impart how sickening walking through Terezin was. The sentence would not express what it was like to listen to students and professors of music analyze pieces and talk about technicalities that sound made as a person who knows nothing but the basics. And it would not illustrate all the little details of experience like what it was like to sit on a bench in the Tiergarten of Berlin with a cup of warm punch and listen to the indistinct chatter of a language I half know and just absorb the knowledge that I was and ocean away from where I spent 19 years of my life.

So instead I will list some of the things I learned. After all, this was a class. I learned that I like watching ballet, that watching an opera is a lot of multitasking and that being able to listen to the music without having to also read the translation after seeing the opera makes one appreciate the music even more.  I have learned that much of Mozarts sounds like it is all part of the same excellent song and that if I am not careful it could send me to sleep. I learned that the Hapsburgs had lots of seemingly opulent palaces and items. Ive learned it is important to reference the correct ticket when trying to find ones seat and that sometimes the the ushers will let you in even with the wrong ticket. I learned that the chinese discovered gun powder on accident when they were trying to find how to turn lead into gold and that upon retrieving the Nike that topped the Brandenburger Tur from the french, the statue  was altered so that it would look down upon the French embassy. The list could go on for ages.

The class was a joy to take and was an experience that will be remembered for a long time.