Well, calling this week "Fiddle Frenzy" is right! (Jet lag + 6 tunes/day + foreign bowing patterns) x 7 = NOT sustainable!
I have an excellent "tutor", as they call them here, named Jim Leask. But they litterally have us going for 16 hours a day! I am more than getting my bang for my buck. Nightly concert tickets are included in our tuition, as well as three dances, and nightly sessions that go until 1AM.
Last night we heard Bryan Gear play, followed by Ali Bain and Phil Cunningham. I now understand why they call them Shetland Legends. Wow. And they were hilarious to top it off.
And the dance was way more fun than any of the barn dances I've been to in Whitehorse. Except apparently all the locals already know the dances, so there's no caller. Nothin' like being pulled out on the dance floor and not knowing the steps. LOL. "Just spin when someone grabs you" was the advice I was given. And I've got the steps down pat for the Bernard's Waltz, though casual conversation at the same time is still a little stunted.
And I highly recommend the Isleburgh Hostel. It's apparently the only 5 star hostel in Europe? It's clean, well set up, super secure, and includes free wireless (sorry Green Party, but this is one of the highlights). And it's a seriously easy way to make friends. The hostel is right next door to the community centre where the classes take place, so there are a lot of fellow Fiddle Frenziers, but there are also three francophone ladies in my dorm who I get to speak French with (apparently I don't have an anglophone accent - just Quebecois).
It's a little bit of an emotional roller-coaster. I usually feel like I'm on speed in the morning, but by mid afternoon I'm frustrated and capped out. I REALLY don't want to walk away from this and not have any tunes. So I'm trying to go back over my recordings in what little free time we have, but I usually feel like I'm learning them from scratch.
They'll give us a copy of the music at the end of the week, but I wish I had it now so that I could write in notes about double stops and bow directions while I remember. "Down, up, down down, up, down, up, down, up up up, down, up up and repeat". Yeah, OK.
Oh, and THEN I had to point out to him that he was actually doing "down, UP UP, DOWN" when he started adding notes. After we'd been practicing open string bowing patterns for 10 minutes *arched eyebrow*. My fellow classmates apparently aren't even bothering with bow direction.
Anyway, I know some of you are anxious for pictures. Tomorrow we're going to a different part of the island, and I'm skipping out of the afternoon fiddle class and going on the optional trip. I'll take my camera. Pray that it's sunny!
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