Barcelona Day 4: New Year's Eve

A relatively early day began with rehearsal with the other American choirs from around the country that we'd be performing whole repertoires with later in the week. The conductor was Craig Hella Johnson, a famous modern composer and conductor of choral music, and he's absolutely brilliant. The space we were in was another church, this one in Barcelona, and it was even colder than the last one, but it was much bigger, and the sound was even more resonant. This proved to be a problem when the organist was so overpowering that the choir couldn't hear itself at all, and got completely lost for a couple pieces because our eardrums were being blasted out. When the conductor asked him to turn it down, he barely did, and then turned it up again in the middle of the song. Craig decided at that point to just not do those pieces that day, which was kind of annoying, because they were the ones that needed the most work anyway. Instead, we did the regular piano-accompanied pieces. Craig Hella Johnson's conducting style is something we took a little while to get used to. He gestures so fluidly and circularly all the time that it's hard to tell when he's cuing us. However, he explains what he wants in really interesting and effective ways, like making actually useful analogies. He also does a lot of exercises to help us be musical and be one with the space rather than just singing in it, like mixing sections and walking around the church singing the same line in unison.

After the rehearsal, we had free time for lunch, during which Bobby and I went to the place we saw making pasta few days ago. You choose your sauce, toppings, and pasta type and they made it right there for you. It was really good. Funny that some of the best food we had in Spain was Italian food. It's also funny that I studied Spanish for several weeks before coming here only to discover they all speak a weird dialect that's like a mixture of Spanish, French, and Italian, called Catalan. The pasta bar was one of those places where they ask your name and call you up when it's done. I did the whole ordering with the cashier in Spanish (which they also speak, usually, in addition to Catalan, if they realize you're not Catalonian), and when the cook put the food up and called my name, we had a whole conversation in Italian. I mean, it makes sense, because Barcelona is right across the Mediterranean Sea from Italy, but still...I study Spanish because I'm going to Spain, find that they speak something else in this region, and have a conversation with a local in Italian. Europe is just such a small place relative to how many different languages are there. It's kind of impossible to get by if you don't know at least three of them, one of which has to be English, but still, I wasn't expecting something like that.

After lunch we went on a bus tour of the Montjuic Hill area, where the 1992 Olympics were held. There were also a bunch of botanical gardens and some castle-type things and an awesome fountain. We got some pictures, but we didn't have time to get off the bus to get good ones of a lot of the things up on that hill. It was kind of a bummer. The sunset from the top of the hill overlooking the city was pretty nice, though. After the tour we had time at the hotel to clean up, nap, and get ready for our New Year's Eve celebration.

We went to a restaurant with a really funny name, "El Glop", for a full-course dinner and midnight celebration. The food was weird, but some of it was good. The salad was good, and they made a tuna and potatoe ball to go on this toasted bread with mushed tomatoes on it, which was also good. They also had a sausage slice platter. Some of them were ok, but a lot of them I really didn't like. Then they served uncooked salted cod, which looked really gross, and would have actually been alright if they didn't marinate the whole thing in peppers. Finally, the main course came, which was seafood paella. It was actually pretty good, but I was so full from all the other food that I couldn't eat most of the massive amount of rice. We had flan for dessert, and then someone brought in a keyboard, and several members of the choruses took turns coming up to it to play and lead the group in impromptu singing. Then, close to midnight, they passed out bags of 12 grapes. When the clock struck midnight, we put one grape in our mouth, when the bell tolled the second time, we added the second grape and chewed, still holding them all in our mouths. We continued like this with all 12 grapes, each on one toll of the bell, and on the twelfth dong, we swallowed, and as the Spanish tradition goes, we should now get good luck in the new year. Well, I couldn't fit all 12 in my mouth at once, the seeds took me by surprise, and in trying to keep up with the dongs of the bell, I nearly choked on a half-chewed grape, and so I wound up finishing about halfway through the first minute of 2014. I hope that failing in this tradition doesn't mean I get bad luck this year, because if it did, I'm pretty screwed. Good thing I'm not very superstitious. Anyway, after the grapes and a champagne toast, we promptly exited the restaurant and went back to the hotel to sleep.