Sunday, March 16, 2008

The Weekend.

What A weekend! Of the last 5 days I have spent 4 away from home & now I'm just exhausted. Band & choir are a given but Saturday I took Liddy into town for her first game of the season. Not only did we miss the boat we should have come home on, the next one broke down & was running 20 minutes late. Bad enough but we got home to find Ditz still awake, too excited about getting her choir uniform & first performance to sleep properly. Knowing we had an early start & a big day I was less than impressed!

We were up by 6am Sunday for an 8am boat. I drove us into town from where we were going to catch a train into the city. Train terminated 1/2way & we changed to buses. I hate buses. They make me sick. So we weren't put out where we were expected to be & had no idea where we were. I took pot luck on remembering vaguely where we needed to be & we set off. Mall found without trouble, a small mirical in itself. We then began looking for the Chiefly. Naturally it was way down the other end. We read the notice informing us which level we needed to be on, hopped in the lift & Ditz, who had read only the first part of the notice, shot us up to the 21st floor. At this point we discovered the floor we actually wanted wasn't listed. Ditz shot us back down, laughing hysterically at the look on my face as I left my stomach bedind! We clambered out, found the right lot of lifts & eventually ended up where we were meant to be.


The rehearsal went for an hour, mostly practising walking Ditz complained, then lunch & a uniform handout all for 10 minutes of suspect glory. Ditz was mightily put out! We left halfway through the presentations as as I knew the trains still weren't up & running so we would be travelling for hours ~ & so we were. More than 12 hours after we began we walked back in our own front door. I headed straight for bed.
The older I get the less I like big cities. I am used to a fair amount of personal space & having to sit for an hour squeezed between two strangers nearly had me ready to commit violence. I missed my trees, the smell of fresh, clean air, being able to gaze peacably into the distance without seeing interminable concrete. I hate the sound of traffic. The best sound all day was the willy~wagtail chirruping happily around the marina.
As for Ditz's performance ~ this is a pretty professional choir. They looked & sounded great, & manage an almost unearthly other~world sound when they sing their older pieces. The audience was made up of music buffs: more than 500 of them, but as the opening bars of Christas Natas Est began an electrified ripple ran through the audience. Yep, they did good.

4 comments:

molytail said...

Oh I despise cities as well - even though I technically live in one (it's not really one, but what they did was amalgamate with outlying areas to bump the population and call themselves a city..it's rather stupid. The size didn't change. It's a largish town.)... every so often I have to go to Halifax (capital city of Nova Scotia) and I hate it...it's so... gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah. Noisy and crowded and everybody's in a big rush... and it's filthy. Blech.

(I suspect I would love your little island)

Hey wait a sec..your MALL has 21 floors??? Wowsers.

heh, if you want an elevator that will really make your stomach do flips...

http://www.cntower.ca/portal/

The elevator in that puppy travels 22km/hour. And it's glass walled. (There's also a glass floor that you can stomp around on, somewhere around 1200 feet up)....

(i've been up it twice, once as a kid and once at 21)

How'd I get off talking about elevators? Oh yeah, your very tall mall.

I bet Ditz will do wonderfully in this cho---- wait... ensemble. ;-)

Ganeida said...

OK, whoa there, Nelly! Seems we have a vocab problem happening here. A mall is NOT a building ~ not out here it ain't! Think town square & you might be getting close. It is a closed off section of street with shops all around. The building we were in had 21 floors! Yikes! You speekee the English? =D

molytail said...

oh!! Okay, yeah..a bit of conflict with Aussie versus Canadian terms there LOL

A mall here is a building full of stores - like the one just up the street from me...it has a grocery store at one end and a zellers (cheap department store like walmart) on the other, and the long hallway from one to the other is filled with little shops...clothing, jewelry, books, etc....this one just has one floor...I've been to bigger malls in other places that were a couple of stories and had escalators and elevators....so I was picturing this HUGE mall with 21 floors!

I get ya now though! :-)

Anonymous said...

Yeesh - I can agree with you on going into cities. I had to pick our eldest daughter up from Sheffield last week, and she gave me a guided walk to stretch my legs after the long drive. Houses I can cope with, but the older I get, the less I can do heights. Even just looking up at the modern tall buildings made me dizzy. Help - I am turning into my mother! She had vertigo and couldn't even walk over a road bridge . . .

I was SO glad to get back to our hamlet of 5 houses, where cows outnumber the people by a factor of about 80 to one . . .