Strumming Lithuania: Playing in the Park

Whew another week done of teaching! It's been a great week, fraught with all kinds of experiences, one of them being gaining a bunch of weight. Or at least, I probably did. This week my diet consisted of two things: Milka bars and Klasika Ice Cream. If you tasted them, that's all you would eat too. Milka Bars are just the most addicting chocolate bars ever. It's kind of frustrating because I don't even eat that much chocolate but I've had one almost every day this week. Klasika Ice Cream is made of sweetened condensed milk. You know it's a winner right there. Not only that but it has poppyseeds in it!!! SCORE! Really. They are so good. I just can't tell you how in love I am with both of these. I came to Lithuania hoping to lose weight. But alas, Milka and Klasika have crushed that dream of mine. And with that, here is the song of the day! My G chord sucks. Sorry. I just started learning barre chords like 2 days ago when I began learning this tune!

In other news, it's been quite the music filled week! On Wednesday, I began taking voice lessons with Janese from a graduate of the university here in Vilnius. Just so we're clear, Janese is a vocal performance major who likes to sing opera. I've never sang opera, like in a serious way, and was totally out of my element. We walked into the building and the whole place echoed with musical prodigies. The lessons went pretty well though. Our teacher is great even though there is a bit of a language barrier sometimes. It can also be a little frustrating. Here I am being told I need to correct my dynamics, my breathing, my posture, my soft palette while doing all of these movements and a million other things when then she tells me to just stop thinking and I'm like WTF, mate?! And by that I mean, What the forte?!

Then Saturday, we went into down where something was definitely going down. First off, a major street was closed down and replaced by all these make shift basketball courts in the middle of the street. I don't know if there's a basketball game coming up or if that's just what happens when they decide to party because either way, Lithuanians love basketball. More importantly though, musicians were playing everywhere! It was awesome. Seriously, there was a jam fest going on every 20 feet or so. Elise and I came prepared with her guitar and my uke. Mostly, we just walked around looking cool with our instruments. Yeah, I do feel cool wearing my uke on my shoulder. I'll admit it. Eventually though, we found a quieter spot in the park and played, which was fine with me because I'm still just learning so I can only play so many songs and it was nice just to relax after a lot of walking around. It was cool though. Some pedestrians took pictures with us and there was this one cute little girl in particular who wanted to look at the ukulele. You don't get many of those around here. I don't have a lot of pictures or anything from that day so I just randomly played a song tonight and recorded it. Fair warning though, it's not very good. And that's not me being modest. My palms were really sweaty and I didn't bother warming up or getting into it. But here it goes: