Music. Music has been all around us the past week and a half. On the long bus ride to Paris and the train to Budapest, I listened to my iPod for the first time in a while, developing a taste for New Order’s Blue Monday. After dreadful plane rides and motion sickness, it was comforting to hear some of what I personally like as I drifted towards sleep.
There’s nothing like some good old Oasis while traveling.
I’ve noticed that as we pass through various metro stations, we also encounter music, from busking teenagers to brass trios or quartets. These people do something I don’t think I could ever do: put their talent out there to earn some money, and maybe cheer up (or further annoy) the passengers and passers-by. Some of the music actually sounds good–I particularly liked a scruffy duo in Austria playing acoustic and electric guitar.
Grungy (and talented) busker in the metro.
The first musical moment that brought our whole group together was our trip to the opera. I don’t know a person among us who wasn’t excited at the prospect of seeing a Mozart opera for 3€! I think the excitement was heightened by not knowing whether we were even going to get tickets. That experience is worth another journal entry in itself, but to think we got to see a musical performance that was significant a few hundred years ago, and is still significant today! Amazing. I think it can be considered one of our bigger immersions into a city’s culture.
Listening to the opera!
I’d nearly forgotten, but we also heard some wonderful singing and chanting at Mont St. Michel. The more I look at it, the more it seems that music has increasingly crept into our lives this trip–culminating in karaoke and live music at Lost in Budapest, which we all participated in, in one way or another! The musician there played Learning to Fly, which is a song that I thought really spoke to my own experience on this trip. It’s amazing that wherever I go, I can indulge in something that will always be a part of me.
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