Ignore the title if you wish, but to appreciate the extremely obscure, late nineties cultural reference, I give you this clip from “A Bit of Fry and Laurie”.

Ok, now that is out of the way, I need to throw myself on the mercy of you good people. One of my projects for the semester requires me to head up a service project. As you can imagine, that might be a little tough as I’m in a foreign country where I barely speak the language. So, I’m thinking I can do it virtually, assuming that I can get some help from a few of you. If any of you would be willing to collect funds or food and donate your collection to your local food bank, we can collectively do some good for a few folks. I’ll post our group’s stats on a snappy little webpage and we can have a long-distance high-five. If that sounds like something you could do during the week of October 15th, leave a comment here on this page or just send me a text or email and I will contact you with further details. Thank you, a million times.

Ok, now that both of those things are out of the way, here is another installment of “This Week in Leipzig”. We did a lot of studying/practicing and enjoyed the early autumn weather with some nice walks in the parks around here. We also wandered around a couple of markets and enjoyed the energy of people out and about and enjoying good food and shopping at various stalls on the Marktplatz.

We finally got to enjoy some of the different music offerings here in Leipzig. We caught the final free organ concert of the season at the Michaeliskirche. This one included a soprano for some of the pieces, so that was a nice addition. Nathan tracked down an eatery that offers live music just about every night, so we went this week and saw a guitar duo and had a bite to eat. They played some DEEP cuts from the eighties and they only had one gear (lively), but it was fun to be part of the crowd. The restaurant is tucked into a courtyard-type area in the middle of the city, so it feels like it’s a bit of a secret, even though it’s not. The one thing we don’t especially enjoy about sitting outside at restaurants here (and all over Europe) is that people are often smoking. As we are not smokers, that is kind of a bummer.

We also attended an excellent chamber music concert at the Mendelssohn House Museum. We heard the Mendelssohn D-minor piano trio along with more Mendelssohn and some Brahms. It was so fun to be in the same room where Mendelssohn probably also played music with his family and friends. We also enjoyed the excellent museum offerings there. We are really getting a feel for just how much music is going on here in this area every day. It’s a lot of fun.

The biggest news of the week is that we moved into our more permanent apartment. We dragged all of our stuff a couple of blocks to our new place. We now have only 65ish steps to climb instead of 85, but we also have an elevator if we are just too tired to haul our carcasses up the stairs. We like our new place–non-squeaky floors, a sweet little balcony, and nice, new everything. The building is so new that they are still putting the final touches on the outside this week. But there is a nice little slice of green space just outside and the neighbors across the street have some lovely window boxes full of the flowers that we are enjoying while they last.

We had to go shopping for bedding and a few kitchen things, so that was another bit of business. Nathan was a rockstar for figuring out the rental contract and the banking system. Now that we have an address, we can tackle getting residence permits and having mail delivered. Sometimes the prospect of jumping through the bureaucratic hoops just seems too daunting, but then we remind ourselves that thousands of people do it too, and we continue on. We will definitely be here in Leipzig at least until the end of December. After that, it’s anyone’s guess.

Have a great week!