1 concert down, 4 to go.

So we had our last orchestra concert today in Amsterdam, and next week the Enescu concerts begin. We've been offered a spot in a festival in Romania in September to perform our Enescu project, but the hang-up is that they don't want to give us any money towards travel or anything. So Simona's going to try and bully them, and then the next step is to apply for funding from organizations. But we have our 'official' invitation to the festival, so hopefully we can come up with the money and go to Bucharest! This past week was pretty crazy - 6 hours of orchestra every day plus rehearsals for Enescu and some valiant attempts at practicing. Big time fun. Friday was our run-out concert to Eindhoven, and the trip was kind of a disaster. They had two big tour busses for us, and we left the school at around 2:45 pm. We made it through the city traffic OK and got onto the ring road expressway. And that's when the fun started. Apparently there was a really bad accident outside of Utrecht that caused the traffic to just stop. And so we slowly inched our way down the highway around Amsterdam. One and a half hours after leaving the school, we were only in Amsterdam Zuid-Oost. We ended up missing our soundcheck altogether, and we barely even made it to Eindhoven in time for the concert! What should have taken about 90 minutes took us 5 hours!!!! It was completely insane. With the amount of time we spent on the bus we could have been in Germany! Or Belgium!
Yesterday was a free day, and I ended up going on an adventure to Kinderdijk with Aida and a friend of hers from the Conservatory in Enschede. Kinderdijk is a small village outside of Rotterdam that is a Unesco protected world heritage site, due to the 19 windmills it has dating from the 1500s. My favourite part about Kinderdijk (apart from the windmills) was that it was in the Gemeente Nieuw-Lekkerland. Which translates as like the township of New Yummyland. Loves it. Anyways, the windmills were very nice, but I must say that it took much longer to get to Kinderdijk then you could ever spend looking at those windmills. But it's one of those things you have to see in Holland, so now that's crossed off the list. Our concert today went quite well, and we had a pretty good turnout for the audience. Now all my classes and stuff are over, and I'm just rehearsing and practicing until my exam in June. Well, except for the 6 days I'm going to London.
Ah yes, I almost forgot my trip last weekend, to the Keukenhof. A big group of Couchsurfers got together and biked from Leiden through the flower field to the Keukenhof itself. It was pretty cool, though there is a limit to how many flowers you can look at in one day. But it was fun, and very pretty.