and then

I haven't felt as compelled to blog here in Warsaw as I thought I would. First of all because nothing particularly hilarious has happened to me after the first day I was here. I don't know whether I am just more accustomed to being in a foreign country so I'm not making as many dumb mistakes as I have in previous trips, or whether it's something about Warsaw that doesn't seem as "foreign" as other places. One of my polish colleagues told me that Poles definitely like "american stuffs" so maybe it's easy for me to get around because of that. Also, I now have 6 words of Polish in my vocabulary, which isn't enough to even try to communicate past the most basic requirements, so I'm not suggesting that "there are too many condoms in the food" the way I did once in an error filled conversation in italian. Regardless, I'm enjoying myself, and enjoying this opera immensely. The singers are all excellent and we've had the luxury of having a week of purely musical rehearsals, which really gives you the opportunity to figure out what you're doing vocally before throwing in all that running around. I've been trying to avoid spending my entire fee just on eating out, but it gets difficult when you're in a hotel room with no kitchen for a month. Some of my tricks have included taking as much fruit as I can carry from the free breakfast in the hotel and eating it for lunch, and buying pre-made sandwiches from a place called coffee heaven that was highly recommended to me by my friend Georgia who has worked in Warsaw often. I've already had quite a bit of time to explore the main parts of the city, and the weather has actually been gorgeous and springy. I've learned that the signs for the bathrooms here are an upside down triangle for the men's room and a circle for the ladies room, so I haven't had any more accidental encounters with in-use urinals. I've only gotten lost in the theater about 3 or 4 times since the first day, but I've always been able to find my way back to wherever my rehearsal was, and I was even able to show one of the polish singers where the bathrooms were on the floor where we were rehearsing that she didn't know about! Maybe I'm actually getting used to this traveling to foreign countries and singing thing.