Körhelgen!

My choir weekend retreat was amazing! I had such a good time and it was a really nice way to get to know everyone in my choir so that now I actually feel welcome to sit and talk with anyone during rehearsal rather than just the few people I normally sit by. This weekend was also an excellent opportunity to practice Swedish. I spoke it the entire time (save for a few instances where I’d trip over my words, but after a sentence in English, it’d be back to Swedish) and I feel more confident in my skills now, woohoo!

So onto what actually happened.

I thankfully scored a ride with two newcomer altos like me - Jannie and Maja - and they came and picked me up ‘round 9am on Saturday. Way to early but we had to be out there by 10. We went into town really quick and picked up Jessicka (who’s also on the magazine with me) and we headed out into the country. We passed a moose sign, but instead saw some deer, and then we got lost. It took us a little bit to realize we had passed the actual place we were staying (a community house type thing?), but once we figured it out, we got there fairly soon.

We spent the majority of the day singing, of course. We got a ton of new Christmas songs, although most are Swedish and you wouldn’t recognize them…I’ll post a video of one of the songs after I post this so you can at least hear one of them. Thankfully the altos have the melody in this song. I think we spent a good 6 hours singing, actually. If we were singing, we were eating lunch or fika. As a side note, it was freezing out here and I’ve made a mental note to purchase thicker socks and more cardigans if I plan to survive the winter.

We all had to have nametags because there would be a contest later that night to see which group (sopranos, altos, tenors, or basses) could name the most choir members the fastest or something. Someone thought my name was French for some reason and then no one could pronounce mine, even after I explained it. Typical. I should just go by Christina from now on. For dinner we had to all help in some way and I didn’t understand until some of the better choices were already dealt out so I had to be in the group to serve the food. This was unfortunate because everytime I finished serving, my food would be cold…blah.

When we were done singing for the night, we all got into our costumes for the magic themed party and because I didn’t bring my Hermione costume from home, I didn’t have much to work with. I ended up just wearing gold leggings and a black dress and saying I was “black magic” haha. Dinner was good and we had asparagus soup for starters, then salmon, potato salad, and salad for dinner, and ice cream for dessert. Oh! And we all had to draw a piece of paper to say where we would sit according to the Hogwarts Houses. However, I got one that said Professor McGonagall so I sat at the teacher’s table.

Dinner went on until midnight or maybe 1am (there were a lot of random contests intermixed), I’m not sure, but then we all danced for awhile and I think we went to bed at 2:30…I was really tired and I didn’t bring a mattress pad to sleep on so it was the hardwood floor for me, ew.

The next day we did some more singing and cleaned up…nothing too exciting. But overall it was a lot of fun and I’m looking forward to the next one!