Sing sing sing

As I mentioned, I took a little trip this weekend to see a friend who is also an au pair in France.  We've known each other for oh, maybe...19 or 20 years by now and it happens that we sang together in our school choirs throughout middle and high school.  She moved here in February and joined a choir with the mother of the family she works for - it's not a professional choir but they're decent.  It's mostly older people.  She thought I could help out the soprano section so invited me to join them for their concert this weekend.

Anyway, they live in a very small town outside of Nancy, one of the smallest cities in France.  Their province, Lorraine, borders Germany.  It's an hour and a half from Paris on the high speed train.

So I got out there Friday evening and met the mother at the train station, we drove through the first thunderstorm of the year, and then we got home and I met her two little girls.  They're six and nine, and just starting out learning English so they know much less than the kids I work with.  The whole family is musical and we had a lot of fun singing and playing piano with the girls while practicing the choir music.

The strange thing about the program for the concert on Saturday was that there were 22 choir pieces, so, not counting our duet or my friend's solo.  Normally choirs will do 6-8 pieces for a concert, depending on the length.  So this concert was VERY long and there was a LOT of singing I had to do Saturday - I had to practice super fast to learn all of it and then sing it at the concert.  I ended up with no voice whatsoever! 

The people in the choir were very nice and friendly, they were all very impressed both with the singing and my French.  They were so pleased, in fact, that they're paying for my train ticket to come out there again in a couple of weeks and sing.  We're going to have to pick out another duet, but at least this time around I won't have to learn all the music the day of the concert.  I'm pretty excited that they liked it so much, since I haven't done much performing in a while.

The town where they live is really pretty, and the countryside around it is absolutely gorgeous!

This is their street:

On the walk down their street:

Their street ends with a big field on one hill of a shallow valley - this is a view across to the other side of the valley. 

The field, and looking farther on

 

My friend didn't know who owns the field, she doesn't really think anyone does, although it's mowed sometimes.  Apparently not recently since the grass and such came up to my upper calf!  The trees in this picture look like they're sinking into the grass.

 Oh look, it's me in a field!

There are lots of cows and horses around

Speaking of cows!  These did not appreciate us being next to their field.  They look pretty menacing, no?

The area where we were walking was full of these pretty little flowers.

 After taking a quick tour of the town and some rehearsing it was time to go perform.  The church was small and pretty generic, so no pictures.  However I had to take a picture of the outfits they gave us:

They were so awful!  The color was terrible and they looked awful on everyone.  The top part of mine and the skirt were the same color but for some reason everyone else had a shiny light gold skirt instead.  Notice the distinctly old-person looking shoes: one of the old ladies brought them for me because they were worried I wouldn't have appropriate (ie, non-black, flat) ones.  I had brought some neutral colored flat sandals but apparently these were much better!

After the concert there was a little wine/digestif gathering with the choir and everyone.  They were all sweet, but they demanded we sing another duet on the spot!  So we had to come up with something really quickly and do it, but they liked it.

So, when I go out there in another two weekends I'm going to spend some more time in Nancy before the concert.  I got a few pictures from there this trip but I figured I'd wait to post them until I have a bunch from the city.  It was very cute and interesting, though, so I'm excited to go back.