Music and More

This week started with a return to the church of St. Stephan for a choral concert. We also returned to Frankfurt for an orchestral concert, some excellent Mexican food, and some not-so-excellent comedy.
We started with an evening in two parts. Part 1: dinner with our neighbors from Mexico. Emmanuel’s coworker had recommended a restaurant in Mainz for tacos. We had attempted to go there a couple weeks ago, but it was closed when we arrived, so we wanted to try again. We met Emmanuel and Susi, looking forward to some tasty food. Ummm…disappointed is an understatement. It wasn’t even a decent attempt and it was expensive, to boot. We bade them farewell and walked to the St. Stephan church for another concert. This one was a fundraiser for the war effort in Ukraine. A choir consisting of Ukrainian men and boys sang traditional songs under the blue light of the Chagall stained glass windows. It was a moving program, with the choral music sounding absolutely perfect in that vaulted room and the standing-room audience in full support of every note. We didn’t even have seats (we sat on a step at the back of the nave), but it was worth it!
We traveled into Frankfurt the next night for a concert at the Alte Oper. First, though, since our Mexican food experience the night before was disappointing, we tried for something better. Success! We had some truly chicken tacos and a yummy barbacoa quesadilla. 10/10. Then, to the concert. The opera haus was built at the end of the 19th century, destroyed in the war, and then rebuilt. It no longer hosts the opera company (they perform in another venue), but it has concerts and performances almost every day of the year. We attended a performance of Schönberg’s Ein Überlebender aus Warschau op. 46 and Verdi’s Requiem. It was such a cool concert! It felt like the condcutor wasn’t just in control of the orchestra, soloists, and choir, but the audience, too. Everyone in the hall was so invested in the music and it was really amazing.
We returned to the city a few nights later. We wanted to check out the Fressgass Festival, a street festival that was going on for a couple weeks. We though that maybe we would grab a bite to eat there. However, it turned out to be just like pretty much every other street festival we had seen in Germany: lots of drinking and typical fast food fare, so we bailed. Then we We had tried the English-language comedy before, but it got rained out, so we were in for another try. We found a little Indian restaurant and had some yummy curry. Since we had gone into the city with the thought that we would be hanging out at the festival, we had time to kill. However, it was also very rainy, so we went in search of something to drink and a place to sit down for a bit. Did I mention that it was (another) holiday? Well, it was, and that meant that lots of things were closed. The best bet for a holiday is the train station, so that’s where we went. It wasn’t the most amazing place, but it certainly had a lot of activity and people-watching. Then we walked down to the venue for the comedy. It was in a back room at a brewery, packed wall to wall with folding chairs. Once the room was full of people, it really started to heat up. Then, the comedy was (how do I put it delicately?) just bad. We paid for tickets thinking it would be decent, but it felt like an open-mic night. We left after the first half and we weren’t sad to get home a bit early.
That’s it for this week! Tomorrow morning we are bound for Portugal. We are so excited to spend time with friends and to have a bit of beach time. Enjoy your week, wherever it takes you!

I’m trying to catch up on our travel videos. Here’s the video from Leipzig for January and February.