“If you make a mistake … who cares?!?
NOBODY cares! Mistakes are interesting.”
– Rhiannon

(Here is part 2 of my “report” on my recent trip to Amsterdam. ~sg)

On Sunday (7/1), my week of classes began. We met for our daily singing sessions in a lovely space called De Roos (The Rose).

My roommate Sarah and I walked to the park the first day and only got a little bit lost because it turns out De Roos is located in the Vondelpark. (The Vondelpark is a 120-acre park within the city).

De Roos has several rooms (we had our assigned space for the week), as well as a cafe, gift shop and lovely outdoor patio. (I ate lunch on the patio almost every day. *smile*)

…

The staff were very kind to us (even when we were boisterous), from my front desk buddy Ruben to the lovely and efficient young woman (whose name I never learned *frown*) who worked in the cafe and told me on the day of our concert, “Good luck! You look beautiful.”

…

We spent the first day getting musically reacquainted by working in duets, trios and quartets. Here’s a short excerpt from a quartet I created with Rahel, Juerg and Paula.

[audio:http://songtaneous.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/2011-08-01-quartet.mp3|titles=2011-08-01-quartet]

…

Afterwords, we went into the Vondelpark for an impromptu (dare I say improvised? *grin*) picnic of take-out Thai food — Holland is geographically close to a lot of Indonesian countries so they have a lot of Asian food there — and afterwords headed to Vertigo Cafe (also in the park) for a nightcap. It stays light until after 10pm so it was easy to be out quite late without really knowing it. *smile*)

Lucky for us, Vertigo was situated conveniently between De Roos and the Vondelkerk, our performance venue. (Especially since the two days it rained during the week were the days of our public community singing event and our showcase performance.)

If there were only one truth, you couldn’t paint a hundred canvases on the same theme.
– Pablo Picasso

“If you can’t feed a hundred people, then feed just one.”
– Mother Teresa

“The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.”
– William Faulkner

“When angry count to ten before you speak.
If very angry, count to one hundred.”
– Thomas Jefferson

“Ten minutes in the music scene was the equal of one hundred years outside of it.”
– Robert Plant

…

(Admit it, for a minute there, you thought there would be 100 quotes. *smile*)