ub-SESSED: infatuations in the age of attention deficiency: His Latest Flame

The first city on our tour is Landau, which was actually the first German stop that I visited back in 2010. We arrived rather late in the evening to meet our host families but luckily had the entire next day without any rehearsals to A. recover from two full days of continuous travel and B. take in the local sights. I was mostly just excited to stretch my legs after sitting for so long, and it was nice to be back in such familiar territory.

One of the places that I had not been shown previously was the former residence of Anne Frank’s great-grandfather, which, if I understand correctly, is one of the greater remnants of a formerly large Jewish population in the aria. I’m not exactly sure which of these rooms was his, so we’re just going to say that he’s up there in apartment 3F.

While the orchestra and choir had a tour organized to the town hall and meeting with the mayor during the afternoon, Zach and I opted out, seeing as how we were old hats at the local government from before. Just for fun, though, here’s me acting a fool in the city council room in 2010.

Signing a declaration of war… that’s what they do here, right?

While all of our Haydn performances are taking place in cities across Germany, the individual choir concert was lucky enough to be able to hop the border to France for their first program. This seemed like as good an excuse as any to take a quick, thirty minute drive into Alsace to enjoy a dinner of Flammkuchen (or tarte flambee depending on your language preference) and sample a myriad of white wines famous from the region. My first experience of this delectable specialty was also back in 2010 when we toured in Obernai, so needless to say I was excited to chow down and drink up.

This was our first of three. And by that I mean both Flammkuchen and glasses of wine, of course

A pretty good representation of all of the liquids I imbibed over the course of dinner, minus a glass or two of white wine for redundancy. (Pinot noir, pear schnapps, gewürztraminer, espresso and water [gotta keep hydrated!])

After the dinner we headed to a local church for the choir program, which was done in conjunction with a girls choir from the region. On the way we passed by the town’s old salt depository, the roof of which had some funky window lines going on.