The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it*

My fledgelings have flown the nest; they've dared to spread their wings and fly (damn, now I'll have Summertime knocking around my head for the foreseeable...) and I wish them all the very best in the world.

The mother, mind, I had to boot off the balcony. I'm very sorry, pigeon, but you've raised one lot successfully, and I need to keep the Hausmeister's wife sweet.

A very definite change of season, here; I spent yesterday cycling and walking around the woods, and whilst the heat has not yet quite gone from the sun, I felt a tang in the air, the occasional whiff of smoke, and in the breathless silence ripe nuts were falling from the trees. Leaves are starting to change colour, the world turns...

There's even talk of starting rehearsals for the Offenbach this week! Hooray! (Although I am - curious? - to see what the staging will be - the make-up artist I talked to while she was painting and powdering and primping me for my photo shoot grinned and whispered - verrückt. This basically means totally insane, and considering how many German stagings are bonkers, you'd have thought they'd got used to it by now, so for her to grin like that... hmm! Let's hope that (a) it's crazy enough to be funny and (b) I get to hang on to enough clothing not to scare the audience to death...)

* Marcus Aurelius. What??? I binge-read the thrillers in English I fished out from the library, so the Meditations it is.

Ups and downs

In the middle of today's morning practice, I was interrupted by a knock on the door. Luckily I was vaguely decent, so I answered it. There stood the Hausmeister's wife; straight off, she asked me how much German I understood, because she wanted to talk about my singing. My knees started to knock, I pasted a pleasant smile on my face, and tasted my apologetic, carefully-prepared German phrases turn to ashes in my mouth.

Well, you could have knocked me down with a feather (cunning tie-in, there, to the pigeon photo...) - it turns out she wanted to pass on compliments from a couple further down the building (or, erm, it could have been further up, who knows?) who thought my voice was gorgeous, and wanted to know where they could hear me sing in public!! And now that she mentioned it, she loved my singing too (thank goodess; they live right on top of me), and if I needed to practise during the Mittagspause (sacrosanct German quiet lunch period), no worries... Anyway this is not what one expects of people knocking on the door to talk about one's singing - especially if one has been bashing violent bits of Strauss to death (mind you, I have been tempering that with Brahms' Vier ernste Gesänge), so it was a real boost!

As to the downs in the title, well I spent the evening at the première of an opera in which I was not involved - the one whose final rehearsals I'd so assiduously attended over the last week or so. I was in the top of the theatre - by the time I requested a ticket, there weren't any left downstairs (and it was quite a performance in itself getting the ticket; first fill in a slip in the artists' management office in the theatre, trying to pretend that you know what the very nice lady is actually talking about; then go back the next day to collect the signed slip, only to (eventually) understand that it's now at the Kasse (ticket office); then to traipse to the Kasse and have what appeared to be a pleasant and understandable conversation, until it transpired that the lady had assumed from my looks that I was actually singing Carmen in this production, and the computer had seized up because its information sources clashed...). Now of course the thing about being at the top of the theatre is, you don't get to mingle with the great and good of the theatre staff, who naturally have excellent seats. So, there was no-one I knew around me before the opera and in the interval. Premières are something which by choice one would not attend alone, so pretty much everyone else was talking to their friends, leaving me trying to look cool and unconcerned (yes, and probably failing!).

I think I can safely say it was not my finest hour, socially speaking. My sole interaction was with a gentleman who asked me something in which I understood the words "have" and "tempo". I replied with a cheerful opinion about the tempi being nicely energetic - at which point an extremely puzzled expression crossed his face. Turns out he was asking for tissues for his nose...

bugger! Have made a mental note that the leading brand over here is Tempo, not Kleenex...

On the bright side, I noted that it was not only possible, but actually desirable, in terms of damage to one's feet, to cycle to and from the première in four-inch heels.

And, my baby pigeons have just about flown. The picture is of the smaller one a couple of days ago; the (crumbs - I have no idea what you call the yellow, pre-feather plumage still visible; if anyone knows, please tell me), whilst still extant in the photo, no longer exists - and the babies are, sadly, becoming untrusting adults. Still, I'm happy they have grown to maturity on my balcony... and I shall very soon be able to reclaim their nest/plant pot and stick something beautiful in there which will satisfy the Hausmeister's desire for fewer pigeons, whilst not actually murdering any!

Money, money, money

One of the things about which I was (understandably) most curious when considering a Fest contract in Germany was, just how much of the promised salary do I actually end up with, clutched in my sticky little paws? For some reason this information proved extremely elusive to pin down, but it's an important aspect of living here.

German taxes are notoriously pretty high. Fair enough, don't mind paying them. Then there's the Krankenversicherung (great word to wrestle with when you're unsure of your German and new to the country; it means health insurance, and it's compulsory. You are forced to enrol in the state health insurance scheme if you earn under a certain amount (I would say this covers most opera singers!), and the comparison sites are a bit of a nightmare, frankly. It took me an exchange of information with a friendly English-speaking insurance agent before I realised that actually, as of fairly recently, they're all much of a muchness...). I'm not religious, so when I was doing all the state paperwork, I chose the option "none" under religion - otherwise, a certain percentage of your salary goes straight to the church/synagogue/mosque (I'm curious to know whether they include covens, Jedi gatherings etc, as with the British census. However given the state of my German and the sense of humour of your average official, I (for once) kept my trap shut instead of asking!). That's the state stuff taken care of. There's then the percentage that is paid to your agent. Some gets paid by you, some by the theatre, but don't worry, the nice personnel people sort everything out, it's great!

The answer to my original question, upon perusing the bit of paper handed to me at the end of the month, appears to be, you get to keep roughly half of your dosh. Of course, this will vary depending upon circumstances, but as a ready reckoner, I think it's fairly sound. I hope the information is of use to someone!

I've even worked out a bank account to put my half of my wages in! I thought it was going to be simple, as in England - choose a bank because there's a branch near where you work, or you like the colour of their signs or whatever, then sign up and bob's your uncle. Mmmm. Doesn't pan out quite like that over here. I could of course have all this utterly the wrong way up, but it would appear that (a) not every current account is free of charge, and (b) not every bank is a nationwide concern! As far as (b) is concerned, I'd nearly signed up with the Sparkasse down the road, when the lady said, oh yes, you can use the card at over one hundred cashpoints! Wow! I thought, over one hundr.... hang on, what if I need to use it in Berlin or something, if I'm there for an audition? In reply I got one of those why-on-earth-would-you-want-to-go-anywhere-else looks (well I think it was that; perfectly possible I said something unutterably rude by accident...). In the end I signed up with Commerzbank; they're a nationwide endeavour and their current accounts are free provided you put in a certain amount each month. I have a card, and have even used it to successfully extract some cash from a cashpoint (hooray! I was holding my breath...). I have even paid my rent etc online - this involves a procedure known as PIN/TAN, which is different to what I'm used to. Basically you use the PIN as normal to log in, and then to validate the transaction, you're asked to find a certain number on a letter they've sent you with a list of TANs; then if it's OK, they give you another number and provided that's OK you're sorted. Clear as mud, huh? Vaguely annoying to someone like me, who generally just memorises all the numbers needed for various transactions, meaning I can do my banking when I'm away from home, but I'm sure I'll get used to it.

Hmm, sorry, this was probably a little boring! However I would have given my eye teeth for some of this before I came here, and hopefully I'm just passing the karma along.

For anyone interested in my squabs, they're growing daily, starting to shift around a bit (I thought the smaller one had been shoved over the edge of the balcony the other day and was hugely relieved later to discover it had simply been hiding behind the edge of the tablecloth). Full plumage is starting to appear, apart from fluffy little yellow bits all around the heads, and they are learning (obviously, thanks to listening to me practise...) to make one heck of a racket when a parent appears to feed them!

Well, that's one mystery solved...

(Nope, not the pigeons - although, aren't they growing at a rate of knots? The slightly smaller one always seems to be completely on the ball and looking at me. A touch disconcerting - have to keep reminding myself it's just a pigeon, and not even a full-grown one at that!)

I had been feeling just slightly paranoid about the Hausmeister (caretaker) of the block of flats I'm living in. I have a couple of questions regarding the flat, and I'd been told that he lived, with his wife, in the flat directly above mine. This information having been imparted to me on my first day here, I was not 100% certain that I had understood it correctly, so I approached their door with trepidation.

As a professional opera singer, and an unavoidably loud one at that, I have a little speech ready for such occasions (not asking about the plumbing, per se, but pacifying neighbours before I deafen them).* With the help of the invaluable LEO online dictionary, I'd translated this and had it shakily memorised. I could hear movement in the flat above, so, girding my loins, I trotted up and rang their bell.

Nothing. The movement ceased, but the door remained firmly shut. Full of useless adrenalin from the courage I'd plucked up, I slunk back downstairs and worried. I tried again a couple of times, but the same thing happened. Paranoia quickly invaded. Had I already been singing without realising it, and they'd hated it so much they wouldn't open the door? Did I maybe have the wrong flat for the Hausmeister? Worryworryworry...

So upon my return from the party over the weekend, cycling slowly and cheerfully along the banks of the Rhine, I got to thinking, well if I invited people over to my place, how would I open the main door of the flats, being three floors up? In one of those laugh-out-loud lightbulb moments, I suddenly realised - the buttons outside each door are NOT doorbells. They're how you open the main door!

I am now haunted by the thought of the poor Hausmeister or his wife, frozen in their hoovering, thinking, I'm sure there's someone outside the door... while I trembled outside, thinking, god they're ignoring me again.... Surrealism is alive and well and flourishing in the gaps between cultures!!

* This oration has been honed to a point from necessity. In one flat, as soon as I opened my mouth, a broom hit the ceiling of the flat below me. In another, my neighbours came round to ask what the music was I was singing at the moment because it was so overwhelmingly beautiful. They were very observant orthodox Jewish; it was of course Wagner. However my favourite anecdote in this regard has to be the one where I went round an entire block of flats in Whetstone, north London, delivering this spiel. I ended with the lady on the other side of the party wall, who would be bearing the brunt of my practice yowlings. I'd barely finished the first sentence before she boomed: "You'll have to speak up, dear; I'm deaf"... a match made in heaven!

First day at school...

Well, actually the first day back after the summer hols for everyone else at the theatre - the Intendant had called everyone in for a cheery greeting in the smaller house at eleven, and the place was *exactly* like I remember the first day back at school; excited shrieks of "Helloooooo!!! How were the mountains?" "It's YOU!!!" "Darling you look WONderful..." all at top volume and occurring simultaneously. I am just so glad that I knew at least one friendly face - I remember the sheer terror of a new school (had quite a few for some reason) when everyone else knew each other and you were the oddball looking in from the outside...

However my lovely and generous colleague introduced me all round - I of course immediately forgot all the names and will have to work on German phrases apologising elegantly for the same for the next few weeks - and we listened to the rather nice speech. I reckon I understood the gist of most of it, even if rather a lot of the finer details were lost in the fog of translation. (I'm at the strange stage of language-learning where, given a halfway-normal accent, I can "see" the words in the air as they're spoken. I then have to read them and attempt to translate - by which time, naturally, the speaker has moved on to another topic - but it's better than the flat panic I was feeling a couple of weeks ago.) I even managed to stand up when my name was called out as one of the new bunch, without tripping over my skirts or blurting out anything embarrassing. I'm long enough in the tooth to know not to open my trap without giving it a bit of thought in new social situations, but it's kind of complicated when because of language limitations your options are circumscribed and sometimes things just sneak out unwittingly while you're still trying to think of a response! Notes to self on this subject abound.

I will admit that after the meeting I was exhausted. A combination of heat, nerves, wine and excitement, not to mention the interesting-sounding party being played out on one of the benches underneath my bedroom window, meant I had had pretty much no sleep. Having picked up a schedule for the day in the tray by the porters' office and discovered I wasn't down for anything else today, I therefore cycled home for a rest. Luckily I'd bumped into The Guy to Know as far as music rehearsals are concerned, and he was kind enough to help me borrow a score for my first opera - jolly useful, as my first coaching session is tomorrow... The score was however quickly abandoned in favour of a nap, after which, the heat not having abated, I took my words to the outdoor pool again and let swimming in the cool water work its wonders. With any luck I shall be fresh for my coaching tomorrow after a good night's sleep.

(If you're wondering about the wholly inappropriate picture, well I was going to labour some simile about leaving the nest, or learning to fly, or something cheesy like that, but frankly I'd only make myself laugh. At least it proves that (a) pigeons DO have baby pigeons, we just never see them in London, and (b) they hatched. Weird-looking little coves, like scrawny black-and-yellow ducklings with Wrong Beaks, but there is life in the corner of the balcony!)