Hallo everyone! I think Anh explained what happened yesterday. We finally got back to the hotel at about 11:30pm. The winners gala was a well needed dinner and dance party for 1000. It was heartwarming to watch the kids form a congo line with the other choirs from Australia, China, Hungary etc etc and just let loose. The Chinese choirs seemed fascinated with the younger CCOC members and kept taking pictures of them and giving them gifts of little doilies and red traditional ornaments. Of course this added to their new found "celebrity" status and they felt pretty good about themselves. K'naan, Sting, U2, Men at Work, and Adele were amoung the dance tunes that had the kids cutting a rug. A special note of recognition should go out to Leo M who displayed some unprecedented moves to his new Aussie pals. It was so great to see the kids let loose and meet their competitors on the dance floor. There was even a circle at one point and a bit of break dancin! You can imagine who was right in the middle as the chaperones cringed at the thought of uniforms being dragged along the floor and squashed tomatoes flying! I have to say I haven't laughed that hard in a long time. At 10:30pm (we closed the place)everyone dragged their tired selves back to the bus and sweaty and flushed they waved goodbye to their new friends, exchanged FaceBook and email addresses and headed back to the hotel......surprisingly...the nighttime duty had it pretty easy that night. Today the kids enjoyed an informal concert at Hayden Hall and listened to Haydn's 6th under the frescoes. Afterwards, we enjoyed a relaxing afternoon in Eisenstadt shopping and eating ice cream and sorbet. The sun was shining and the rain finally stayed away for a full 8 hours. A group stroll through Sobron Hungary was also very enjoyable and also interesting for the kids to see the stark contrast between Viennese opulence and the simplicity of an old Hungarian town. Iori Wanted to find chocolate, as did I, but we had no luck....Do Hungarians actually eat chocolate? we asked ourselves.....I said I am sure they do but we must have had a bit of bad luck. :)
Dinner was in a restaurant on the side of a hill in Graz and was one of the best yet...rice, bread, Turkey Kebobs and a delicious lime mousse with fruit for desert. The thing that caught the kids' eyes though was the small playground attached so again, there was much screeching, sliding and frolicking lol. Today was a well needed relaxation day...even though it sounds like we did a lot....Our hotel is clean, spacious and it smells like pine trees...real ones! Life could be worse :)
What fun - I hope Ken took video of that dancing!
ReplyDeleteHungarians do eat chocolate - there's a particular type that Celeste wanted to find, called a "turot", which is a kind of cheese danish filling surrounded by dark chocolate. Last tour there was a song on the repertoire about turot (hope my spelling is correct!) - brought the house down in Hungary...