The Clarinet BBoard

Re: Home!

Author: David Spiegelthal ★2017 Date:   2005-08-23 18:40 WELCOME BACK! Yes, we missed you. Eagerly awaiting Adventure Tales. p.s. Please contact me offline one of these days about clarinet choir...

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Re: Home!

Author: ron b  Date:   2005-08-23 21:25 Happy homecoming, CG! Eagerly anticipating post(s) about your experiences when you get re-settled - ron b -

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Re: Home!

Author: contragirl  Date:   2005-08-23 23:00 OK, the group I went with was a SDA college but it was also made of ringers (ie me), ppl from other SDA schools, graduates, and volunteers. I was asked to play bass clarinet for this oratorio that was composed by the director, and it had a bunch of solos that apprently other bass clarinetists could not play... and it wans't that hard! Anyway, we travelled through Southern Africa, mostly South Africa. But we also visited Lesotho, Botswana, and Zimbabwe. The first 3 days were in London, where they played in St. George's, Ely Cathedral, and Salisbury, but I didn't play cuz they didn't play the oratorio. Then in Afrika, we played in the THs of Peter-Meritzburg, Durban, and Jo-burg. We also played in the Voortrekker in Pretoria, and a few other places around. The last 2 weeks of the trip were mainly sight seeing. We went to Kruger park and saw fuzzies, but never got to see any lions. Elephants, buffalo, gazelles, impala and giraffes were just standin on the side of the road when we were near Kruger. You think that deer running out in the middle of the street is crazy? Try an elephant stopping 3 buses as it crosses the road. Everything was really far from each other, so we had many 6 hr, 12 hr, and 20 hr bus rides through endless fields of drastically changing scenery. One minute it looked like dead grass plains, the next it was green tree filled mountains, then deserty lookin land, then back to some rocky gray mountains. The living conditions changed a lot too. Some ppl further from the city lived in little round mud huts called rondobles (I can't spell it), in the city, the really poor ppl lived in shantytowns consisting of houses made from any scrap material they could find. It was really sad. :( There were also suburbs like we have in the US, apartments, etc. Everything had high walls and barbed wire. I am starting to get used to the idea of driving on the right side of the road again. Flight time: 7 hrs to Heathrow, 12 hrs to Joburg. Turbulance=unhappy me. Kaluha on plane ride=happier me. The people liked us and were always waving at us. Only trouble with the locals was when we drove through a city and someone threw a rock, breaking on the bus windows. Our bus broke down in the middle of nowhere one night. Then in the last week, we got a flat tire in the middle of nowhere in Zimbabwe. We took a walk while they were fixing it, and we found elephant tracks and poop, so I decided to go hide near the bus in case it came back. Gas prices in Zimbabwe (if you can find somewhere to get it) is $75 a gallon. So we only stayed for one night in a nice lodge (Safari Lodge) where the back yard was a park that open bush and full of animals. Most of the other lodging on the trip was horrible, except Kruger Park. Thas all for now. --CG

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