Ohh.  I'd honestly forgotten how much Paris plays tricks with time.  I don't think there's another city in the world in which one can lose track in such a delightful way.

I was there for a couple of days this week for an audition.  Unsuccessful, as it turned out, but not for lack of trying.  It's a part I would love to sing, so learning excerpts was something that should pay off one day.  I know it suits my voice.  And the surreal experience of waiting to audition, surrounded by at least six other hopefuls, all looking very much like me but on a 4/5ths reduced scale in all dimensions... priceless!!  I know the French are very body-conscious, but this was ridiculous.  A whole room full of "mini-me"s...

Still, having the entire day to myself yesterday was an utter pleasure.  I had vaguely thought of bringing my return train journey forwards, since I woke early and was scheduled to leave just after 7 p.m. - but in the end I simply gave in and wandered around fairly aimlessly despite grey skies and rain.

I delighted in a crêpe with crème de marrons (sweet chestnut purée), much to the amusement of the stallholder.  I had to explain that whilst the Germans do produce crêpes, they never have that particular filling, and so for me it has become somehow a peculiarly French pleasure.  

The bookshops around the Sorbonne, with their tempting displays of cheap treasure, appear not to have lost any of their appeal.  Somehow my small rucksack (I pride myself on travelling light) became filled with bargains (blasted places also have rooms full of second-hand CDs.  Shouldn't be allowed.)

And lunch.... ohhhhh, lunch!  I was craving proper French onion soup.  After tearing myself away from the bookshops  (my feet had started to hurt from carrying so much and marching around), I found a little restaurant in the Latin Quarter which had this on the fixed-price lunch menu and ordered entrecôte to follow.  And naturally a small pichet of red wine, despite the waiter trying to entice me into ordering a large one (damn - I used to order those without thinking - this time I didn't even finish the entire jug!), and some sparkling water (bejewelled San Pellegrino - same as I had in Berlin recently.  Evidently not made its way to the provinces yet!).  It was simply amazing how long I lingered over that meal.  Didn't even mean to - my plan for the afternoon was to visit the Rodin museum - but it felt too pleasant, sipping wine redolent of cherries and savouring exquisite food, flicking idly through a novel in French I'd picked up at the bookshop...

I made my train by the skin of my teeth.  I'd even managed to make the Rodin museum, interestingly by way of an authentic Parisian street demo (only place on earth where asking for directions gets you the full and flirtatious attention of SIX riot police in full gear, I reckon...).

Photo taken in the rain near Odéon, just as night began to fall.  What a beautiful city!!!

Thanks firstly to all those who were worried about me after the last post!  I think it's going to be OK now, but it's great to know that people occasionally read my ramblings...  

The costume designer turns out to be very pleasant, and I think we'll be able to come to a decent compromise.  So far, I have agreed to an elegant trouser suit (those who know me well will gasp at the idea of me wearing trousers; I think this is a fairly important concession from my side); boots are under negotiation, and I don't think she knows what I am capable of when fighting over the issue of blouses.  Smiling, we shall conquer... (I hope!).

And however intense and stress-inducing the opera itself is, and however much I am panicking about entire scenes where I currently can't remember more than two pages of the blasted music at one time, hope is not lost so long as you can laugh.  And that we did, in spades:  hard not to, when the serious and passionate clinch between you and your stage husband gets spectacularly derailed by an undignified three-foot slide down a steep rake, landing with a pained "ooof!!!" on her part and extremely unprofessional giggles on ours, on a previously "dead" mezzo lying unsuspecting on the floor.  I do so love rehearsals!!!

Spring is here.  There is a definite headiness in the damp green air, and unexpected small carpets of flowers keep bursting out around me as I cycle through the city - here bright blue speedwell, there small, intensely yellow crocuses - wonderful!  However, as with all seasonal changes, it is a perilous time for singers.  Half the theatre seems to have been ill with one thing or another over the last couple of weeks.  Occasionally this leads to glorious opportunities - I simply couldn't resist sneaking into the back of the auditorium for the beginning of a performance last week, half made-up and unnoticed, to catch our tiny but ferociously competent assistant director playing a police officer, instead of the normal six-foot-something bass (she then slipped into a sexy secretary's dress to execute pretty damn complicated dance steps because the mezzo singing that part was also ill); however most of the time it simply means frustrating lacunae in rehearsals and stress due to unfamiliarity in performances.

I reckon I've got away with it lightly so far (she said, fingers crossed).  I have had a cold for the last few days (I *knew* there had to be an explanation for feeling so other-worldly and forgetful last week!), but am grateful that my last performance and the one coming up tonight are in my capacity as an actress rather than a singer - you can get away with a heck of a lot, vocally, if you're just speaking.  Especially if you're miked up and can ask the nice sound guys to pump up the volume a bit as you've unaccountably lost the entire top half of your voice... 

And when you're even the slightest bit ill, of course, there's the question of comfort food.  My first choice would always be Heinz Tomato Soup with thickly-buttered white bread... and I just can't get those over here; the alternatives are not quite right (and who would have thought that you can't get Heinz soup in Germany??). One small sad niggling downside to the ongoing adventure of being an expat.

Still, fortified with my witch's brew of a cold-killing soup (involves more garlic than you'd think possible, chicken bones, ginger and chili), and half-drowned in herbal teas and freshly-squeezed blood-orange juice, onwards and upwards!

Deep, DEEP in rehearsal hell at present.  The opposite side of the coin to those aimless days and weeks of wandering around smiling vaguely and practising what and when you feel like.  10 a.m. most days, three floors under in one of the rehearsal stages, work until 2 p.m., then maybe 6-10 p.m. Four hours in the middle might seem like a lot, but add in costume fittings, having to eat, cycling to and from home in what at present is extremely unpredictable weather ("Spring" - in one week we went from snow to gales to pouring rain to sunshine so warm I dried a washload of clothes on the balcony to freezing fog...), not to mention the normal routines of housework and shopping; well frankly you're left with not an awful lot of free time.  And that which you do have, does tend to be spent lying prone in a darkened room, knowing that the list of unanswered emails has now crept to over forty but feeling utterly unable to even approach the blasted computer.

The air down there is not the freshest at the best of times.  This is the deepest location in the city.  Normal rehearsals involve about ten soloists, either on stage or lolling around at the sides, and a line of people along the "audience" side of the room including director, conductor, rehearsal pianist, prompter, director's assistant, costume designer, set designer, couple of people from props, at least one costume assistant, and usually one bod whom nobody is really sure about but who kind of looks like they belong.  Once you add in extras (including mothers etc when the extras are children), the air starts feeling a little recycled.  And when you add to the mix an entire opera chorus... well, let's just say we're all looking forward to the start of rehearsals on the actual stage.

In such conditions it is tempting to grumble occasionally.  I spent over three quarters of an hour on Friday splatted on the floor, waiting recumbent whilst details of a duet down the other end of the stage were being hammered out.  I was tired and it did occur to me to think, ah for goodness' sake, couldn't we just nip to the canteen for a coffee while you get all that sorted out?  Then I thought, well hey, how many jobs are there where you get to lie on the floor for nearly an hour pretending to be asleep and they actually PAY you for it?  I giggled to myself, adjusted the leg of the oversized soft toy under my head and relaxed.

(And when I related that particular incident to a dear German friend, she started earnestly telling me about a friend of hers who had been running sleep experiments in a lab and paying the insomniac volunteers... Beautifully German - I had a bash at explaining rhetorical questions, but ran aground rather.)

Aha, and concerning language and deficiencies of learning thereof, I was recently describing to a (much younger) friend and colleague the delicacies that I had snaffled on a recent lightning raid into Alsace.  These included for example Boursin with figs and three types of nuts, about twenty other sorts of French cheese, rillettes, quail with figs and Bergerac sauce, guinea fowl with chestnuts and sauce Forestière... dear me, my mouth is watering even now.  I could hardly carry all my treasure back on the train; loading the bike and steering it back home was something of a delicate operation.

Anyway, I was doing OK on the descriptions until I got to the wilder shores of gamefowl in German.  Attempting to elicit a few possibilities for quail, I tried "Um, like chicken, only smaller."

"Chicken nuggets?" suggested my friend helpfully...

After a very pleasant catch-up this morning, it does occur to me that there is yet another advantage of being on a Fest contract. You might not get nearly as much money as a guest appearance, but the theatre does all your bloody taxes for you!! Silver linings, say I...

Frankfurt was a lot more pleasant than I had thought (hazy memories of an audition a few years ago; don't think I really looked around the place, seeing as all that's actually stuck in my memory is a heart-shaped red cushion - I make no apologies; I'm a singer and we tend to stay in cheap hotels - and not the slightest recollection of who or what I was singing for). After a good old meander around, I ended up in the most pleasant Chinese garden in a park in the north-east of the city. Lovely place to sit and read.

I dragged a lump of dead sheep back for my delectation (note to self: great Turkish butchers on the road from the station to the opera), sang through a coaching, took in about half an hour of Angela Merkel at a political rally here (first thoughts: goodness, she's so LITTLE; and lord, someone would have definitely shot Gordon Brown by now...) and am now looking forward to my first ensemble rehearsal of the Offenbach tomorrow!

A trip across the border

I have just returned from visiting dear friends in Alsace, whom I'd been threatening to drop in on since I moved here. It's only a matter of about two and a half hours by car, so I thought it would be reasonably simple to figure out some affordable way of tootling down and bothering them.

It's not quite as simple as that! For a start, I had to ask the man in charge of organising all the music rehearsals if it would be OK to disappear for a few days (as we only know the schedule for any given day at half past one the previous day, this can't be taken for granted). Permission gracefully granted, I had to fill in an absence slip, because I was going further than 50 kilometres from the theatre; this to be signed and double-countersigned...

Relieved I'd got the bureacratic bit over with, I settled down to browse the internet for cunning ways to get from A to B for as little money as possible. I pride myself on being a bit of an internet devil, and certainly, travelling within England and flying from England to various destinations, I've always been able to sniff out the best prices. I wasn't particularly in a hurry this time, and was indifferent to the means of transport.

It totally foxed me! Going by train was pretty blasted expensive, and the Deutsche Bahn (German railway) site had kittens every time I shyly suggested I might want to cross over into France - wouldn't give me timetables, refused to give ticket costs, etc etc. Sure, I could get to Strasbourg, for a hefty fee, but I didn't want to go quite as far as that, and Deutsche Bahn did not wish to help me get anywhere else. Fine, thought I, I'll see about coaches. Nope. Now it's quite possible I'm simply unable to navigate these sites properly as yet, but it would appear that the national coach network is (a) not set up to go the way I really wanted to, and (b) nearly as expensive as the train. They don't appear to have a cheap alternative, as we do in Britain. The expat forums suggest that the only way to travel without shelling out too much is to carshare, and I couldn't find a female driver going anywhere near on the dates I wanted to travel. Much frustration ensued! Eventually I chose the least-worst option and started to book a return to Saarbrücken, being the nearest border town to my friends, they having kindly offered to pick me up.

Well, firstly, the cheaper options available turned out not to be quite as available as I thought, not being available to print out online - they had to be posted and required quite a few days' notice. Hmm. Never mind. I chose the bog-standard return fare and pressed "pay now". It then wanted me to sign up; well, fine, I thought, I'll be making more trips throughout the year - no harm in storing my details. So I did. These included the number of my bank card and my German address, and I tried to proceed to payment. It wasn't playing ball. Despite having taken my debit card details, it also required a credit card for payment. (What?? Why?)

Of course I don't have a credit card in Germany, and if I had put in the details of one of my English ones, gathering dust at the bottom of my handbag and only used for emergencies, the computer would doubtless have jibbed at the mismatching addresses and probably arrested me on the spot. I banged my head hard on the desk and took myself off to the station. The ticket machine there eventually dispensed what I needed, but I resented having to make the unnecessary trip. I did ask one of the helpful ladies at the travel centre why, if the machines at the station would take my money happily from my debit card, the online site would not. If there was a coherent explanation, however, I'm afraid I didn't understand it!!

After all that, of course, I had a lovely time at my friends' place, throwing myself into family life and bottles of light, fresh Gewürtztraminer with a vengeance. I cleaned out rabbit hutches, helped with French homework, was fed royally, reciprocated with a rabbit dish with spätzle (egg noodles) with a tomato sauce thickened with dark chocolate (not the same rabbit, I hasten to add, and I had some nifty lying to do to the younger girls at the last minute...), and generally had a ball. We even managed to fit in a supermarket trip, where I stocked up rather desperately on everything I find lacking in German shops. I returned bent almost double under the weight of my purchases, but it was worth it!

An interesting occurrence in the supermarket - evidently the German is worming its way into my consciousness, but it was jolly embarrassing! We'd bumped into an extremely voluble French friend and her daughter, and had joined them for coffee in the supermarket coffee shop (I was impressed to note the variety of alcohol on offer!). I was happily nattering away in French, and at some point the conversation moved to cross-border travel. I was explaining the above complications, but as soon as I hit the word "Saarbrücken", my tongue flipped immediately into German. I started to apologise - aargh, it was still in German!! I took a deep breath, started again in French - and the same thing happened - TWICE!- when I hit the German place name. I was mortified; the others, naturally, were in stitches...

A last, slightly surreal note. Returning, I realised I could get a train from their village to Saarbrücken (this had not been at all obvious from my internet searches, due to the dratted border being in between). This was an unmanned station, so I went to the ticket machine to buy my ticket. It wouldn't let me buy a ticket to my destination!! I wondered about getting on anyway and buying a ticket from the inspector, but thought it prudent to at least get a ticket for the last station on the French side. French ticket inspectors are notoriously strict about such matters; you have to definitely get their attention before they try to get yours, otherwise you're fined within an inch of your life for trying to travel ticketless.

Not the ones I met!! The first one strolled along, grinned, and said he hoped I didn't have any ticket problems as his mate with the machine thought I was too good-looking to talk to and had skedaddled to the other half of the train. I started to say I hadn't a ticket to my actual destination; he laughed and whistled for the other guard, and I had to explain about the errant ticket machine to a background of toothless flirting on the one side and crimson-faced and silent embarrassment on the other. They had a look at my ticket, then explained that, as they were employed by the Alsace railways, they couldn't issue a ticket for the German bit either. Perplexed, I asked what I needed to do. Oh, said the voluble one, and winked, don't worry love, you're fine. Which I was, thankfully, saving eight euros; but I have to say, I reckon that's a slightly atypical brush with French bureaucracy!!

Goodness, a birthday party... (gulp!)

Amazingly generously, I was invited to a birthday party over the weekend by a member of the theatre staff I'd never even met. I do appreciate my dear mezzo friend for engineering the invitation; any chance to get to know my colleagues better (and to have a bash at conversational German) is gratefully pounced on. I suspect that when things get busier for me in terms of rehearsals and performances, there will as always be more opportunities to socialise, but just for the moment I'm wandering around slightly like a lost soul. Very strange! As I've always sung freelance before, I'm used to leaping into high-intensity encounters, working with colleagues virtually around the clock, from the start - so this is slightly disorientating. I've been having a few thoughts about the difference between this Fest contract and my freelance life, which I dare say will get aired once they've been properly digested!

However back to the main event. I was invited for 3 p.m. and arranged to meet my friend by the theatre at 2.30 so we could get lost en route together. I had to resort to a rather pathetic text to her asking what was normal to bring to birthday parties - wine? chocolate? flowers? We plumped for a gorgeous orchid and a box of chocolates which amused us because the name, Pralinés des Dames, translates as Ladies' Pralines, and we thought a ladies-only box of chocs was an eminently suitable birthday present!

Well I had a lovely time! Utterly different from my usual experience of birthday parties in England, which tend more towards the bacchanal, with everyone dressed up and sparkling, drink flowing freely and strangers engaging in heated discussion (although I will admit that this could just be the circles I move in...). Nope, this was a hugely civilised affair; there were only a few guests, we were offered a choice of guest slippers upon entering (luckily there was an orange pair to match the flower in my hair; despite bike-friendly dressing (more on which at some point!) a diva has her limits). We sat around the table, and the birthday girl served lovely cakes (if there's one area where the Germans rule supreme, cooking-wise, it's cakes), whipped cream and coffee. Lovely contributions were made by the hostess's children (I now know the German for that twirly stick thing majorettes chuck around - ein Majorettenstab - pity I've no idea what they're called in English!). Conversation flowed happily - I appear to have some very simpatico colleagues, who listened gently to my mangled contributions and rescued me when I got stuck down a vocabulary dead-end (note to self: stick to simpler anecdotes in the near future - save the one about Daddy getting caught by the police scraping roadkill into a plastic bag at 3 a.m. for a more confidently German-speaking future). The only slightly surreal moment was turning around at one point to find the hostess in full Harry Potter get-up - floor-length cloak and wand. (Checked my coffee - definitely alcohol-free; eh, how nice that people have such enthusiasms! I also learned the word for wand, being der Stab - no majorettes this time, but connections definitely starting to be made!).

I came away very much appreciating the time I'd had and thinking, yes, I could definitely get into this German lark. One advantage of German parties to remember - you don't need to eat a thing for the rest of the day!!

A week in Tuscany - a week out of time to enjoy the glorious Italian food and wine, and to be with family, and to celebrate my mother's 70th birthday in a lovely Tuscan villa. Highlights included a fabulous party with Cinta Sinese (a roast-pork speciality of the Sienese hills where we were staying); the rather surprising frescoes in the Collegiata in San Gimignano (I don't think I've ever seen breastfeeding portrayed in religious frescoes before, or such, er, blatant male nudity... my particular favourite was a dragon who was evidently having to apologise for a bit of mischief); the Etruscan museum in Volterra, where the most famous statue, an elegantly elongated bronze nude called by D'Annunzio l'ombra della sera or evening shadow, had served usefully as a fire poker for ages after being dug up before being identified as an Etruscan masterpiece (why that amuses me so much I can't tell); a bottle of lightly pétillant Vernacchia, the fresh white wine local to San Gimignano; and taking all the younger members of the family horde to explore an Etruscan tumulus at dusk, with candles...

I'm now lightly toasted and relaxed, and ready to start work!