Settled in?

Hi everyone!
It's hard to believe that I've only been here a few days as I am already in something resembling a routine. My quartet has been rehearsing every day. I am the only girl in the quartet - Ondrej (pronounced something like Andre...since he's so tall I mentally call him Andre the Giant) is our cellist, Ben (who most of you know or know of, since he's my boyfriend!) is our violist, and Alex is our first violinist. Alex is actually from my hometown so we bonded over our mutual love for the "George Bush Center for Intelligence" sign. We're playing Dvorak's American Quartet which is slowly taking shape. We need to contact our second coach to schedule coachings...:-/ Things are very much a do-it-yourself organization here. There is a bulletin board with a lot of information and you are responsible for checking it and making sure you are where you need to be on time as well as deciphering the teachers' handwriting and codes. For example "D96" means my quartet since we're playing Dvorak's Op. 96. It's pretty confusing.

I've gotten really used to taking the tram downtown. The tram stops right outside our dorm and it is a 15-30 min ride into town, depending on how long it takes to get around the construction. It's generally around 20 mins and not too bad. If I lean out my window (carefully) I can see downtown and it's pretty cool. I also found some great sandwich places near the Konzervatory ( I cannot for the life of me bear to call it "the Con") where I can get lunch for only 49 Kc. The currency here is the corona, or the crown, abbreviated Kc. One United States dollar is equivalent to approximately 20 Kc. There are coins for 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, and 50 Kc and paper money for units of 100, 200, 500, and 1000 Kc (at least as far as I have seen.) Now that I'm more or less adjusted to the time difference the conversion is much easier for me to make. Things are pretty cheap here if you know where to look...my sandwich, therefore, was about $2.50. And the dorm, well...it was built during the communist era but I'm more used to it now so that's all good.

The Konzervatory is also pretty basic in structure. The paint tends to rub off the walls which I didn't realize until after I leaned my violin case on it and got it covered in dry paint. Gag. I hope it comes off. I've had two more violin lessons since I last wrote...one with Michal Sedlacek who is an assistant teacher and who took me to task on my Beethoven sonata. The other one was just an hour or so ago, with Frantisek Soucek, the first violinist of the Zemlinsky quartet. He is amazing. He found all my bad habits in the course of the lesson. I suppose I'm happy that I've gotten to a point in my playing where I'm hearing the same things from just about every teacher I go to - my intonation needs a lot more careful attention, my bow tends to speed up before I make bow changes, I take bow pressure off when I shift and when I change strings, both hands tend to be far too tight and grab too much...I've had these problems for so long and I really wish I'd had the self-discipline or one of my home teachers had the insistence to force me to fix them. We'll see how far I get in my four weeks here. I learn fast. One thing that has not changed is that I am a good student - show me the right way to learn something and I'll fix it quickly and apply it to other similar passages.

Tonight is the first concert of the festival - starting next week we will have four concerts a week as students get things up to scratch. I think faculty are playing tonight.

One thing is for certain though - I have never been around so many absolutely fantastic players in my life. I'm not even sure I belong here and I definitely understand why I have been called unpolished and behind for so many years.

So that's the news from Plzen today. I am off to make a sandwich and practice (of course!).