Greetings from England

Hi everyone. I’m trying to get a blog going and the first entry will be long since so much has happened in my first couple of weeks in England. If you’re not interested, please do not feel obligated to read it! I arrived safely, but not without hassle. The flight I originally booked was cancelled along with everything coming out of Atlanta due to heavy thunderstorms and a tornado warning. Needless to say, Hartsfield was even more of a zoo than usual. The flight they switched me to was in another terminal and was already boarding by the time they told me where to go, so I ran to the gate only to find out that the plane was having electrical problems and would be delayed anyway. When I got to London, I stood in the passport clearance line for 2 hours. My bags weren’t there and the man who was supposed to pick me up was expecting me in another terminal. I went to the other terminal, and he went to the terminal where I was before so we missed each other again. I converted some money to pounds, bought a phone card and called my teacher who then called the man picking me up and I eventually found him and Lindsay. When we got to the car, I made my first dumb American mistake and tried to get in on the driver’s side. My bags arrived 6 days after I did and had tags on them from their brief journey to Geneva...what?!
The village is beautiful. Because it has been officially recognized as a place of outstanding natural beauty, it is against the law to widen the roads or to do anything to disturb the way it is and has been for centuries. I live in Elmsted and the studio is in Hastingleigh. It’s takes about 30 minutes to walk between the two and the hills seem to last forever because the road winds and we can’t see the top as we go. We don’t mind though, because the view is magnificent. We walk by cows, sheep, horses, chickens, cats, dogs, badgers, mice, pheasants, deer, and every now and then, a person. We walk every night with Trevor, who carries pockets full of dog and cat biscuits to feed to the animals. Stopping at “thinking gates” every night, we enjoy the uninterrupted view of the stars in the sky and the fresh breeze in complete silence. We have also explored the Hastingleigh and Elmsted churches. Both were built ca. 1100 and are still in use today. The iron bowl they use for baptizing babies is original to the church and they keep a record on the wall of every baby to ever be baptized in it. There are names carved in stone of people who were leaving to fight in the Crusades and did not expect to return. I find it absolutely fascinating to explore these buildings. The flute studio will give a Christmas concert for the village in the church on December 15.
All the students are very nice people and I’m enjoying getting to know them. Lindsay is from VA, Mime and Ritsuko are from Japan, and Marta is from Croatia. We range in age from 19 to 25. I live with Lindsay and Mime. Mime didn’t speak English when she got here, but she learns fast and we now communicate pretty well as she is learning more words and we are learning which words she knows and which she doesn’t. We are eating food of every nationality except English. Trevor made Shabu Shabu for us one night. That’s very thinly sliced raw beef that you dip in sort of a fondue pot of beef stock. You pick up one slice with chopsticks, cook it in the pot, dip it in sauce, and eat it. After the meat is finished, we put noodles, leeks and chives into the leftover beef stock to make soup on the table. For dessert there was a big bowl of mango and persimmon with cream to pour on top. Complete with fancy chocolates and plenty of wine, we could barely move afterwards, but Trevor still insisted that we go for our walk!
We went to London to visit Buckingham Palace the other day. They let people walk right through it! It is exquisitely over the top in its decorations. Famous paintings hang on the walls, silk curtains, harpsichords and pianos, a table formerly owned by Napoleon, hidden doors. There is a room that displays everything from Princess Elizabeth’s royal wedding. The ornate dresses and suits are on display and jewelry with diamonds that look to be an inch in diameter. After that, we went to the National Gallery and saw original paintings by Monet, Manet, Van Gogh, da Vinci, and Rembrandt to name a few. It’s a good thing that there are signs on the sidewalks reminding pedestrians which way to look before crossing the street in London, or I would have been hit by a bus in no time! We will return to London tomorrow evening to attend flute class at the Royal Academy which we are always invited to do. It will be a guest lecturer performing on Indian bansuri and explaining the structure of a Raga to us.
I’m learning so much here. Our days are saturated with flute-practicing the flute, listening to flute recordings, reading books about the flute, attending classes about the flute, and talking about the flute. I have so much to practice that after five hours, I feel like there’s still hours of material left that I haven’t worked on yet. It’s exciting though to finally be putting in really consistent concentrated work into practicing without it all being directed toward preparing for a recital, a jury or an audition. This year will go by very quickly and I feel pressure to get as much as I can out of each day. Well, if you’ve made it this far, you must be either a true friend, or you are really bored! I am interested in knowing what’s happening back home too, so email me your updates!