Wicked

Where good deeds don't go unpunished.

Here I am, atop my chair. My legs are sprawled across the black coffee table in front of me, my back is slouched. The view from my window is dark, but suffers from the permeating glow of an ever-living city. Ptfffffwhoooush. Then silence.

The last night in London for many of us has arrived. Classes are finished, though homework is still due. The packing not quite done, bottles of empty alcohol containers litter every available surface. Mostly, there is quiet now as I look across the room at my fellow classmates that I have spent the last five weeks with. Where has the time gone? I haven't quite moved in, yet I was just getting settled. Maybe you know the feeling. I need a hair cut, but I'm just about to leave, so it's not quite worth getting one. There are loads of places I haven't visited yet - both tourist destinations and just roaming the city. I never purchased an oven mitt because a shirt or towel would always suffice for the limited number of times I'd use the oven. I know where things are in the city and how to get to many of them. When I walk around I don't have trouble finding my way because the lay of the land has ingrained itself in to me. I've just finally gotten to London, and now this five week trip feels just as short as my three week stint in Tokyo. The impending light and birdsong will bring a new adventure. However long, or however brief, my time here is coming to an end and I am ready to embrace it.

I went to see "Wicked" tonight. Last night I went to see "Warhorses". It is with one heck of a bang that I'm heading out of town. You see, I've also made dinner the last two nights - dinner for a number of people. I've made stew both nights, trying to use up my remaining food stores. I'm happy to say it was well enjoyed!

Wicked was wonderful. The set was beautiful and astonishing in it's complexity. Whoever planned and designed the transitions and set pieces was quite brilliant.

And that is all I had written before I was distracted on the morning of the 14th. Since then, I have traveled to Italy, but I figure I should finish my post.

Yeah, so Wicked was great. I'm not a big fan of musicals in general, and I hadn't ever actually seen "The Wizard of Oz" before, but it was a good experience. I feel like I should watch the movie at some point now. But really, Warhorses was better. Not because I'm biased against musicals - but Warhorses was unquestionably better.

So what is Warhorses. Yeah, it's a story about a horse in WWI. The horse is a wooden puppet in the show. Not biased against musical, really. Okay, Warhorses has a fantasmic storyline. It's interesting, boisterous, moving, deep, comical, profound. The story is highly developed, sincere, and the characters have solid progress through life. There is a lot less singing, and the musicians are composed of full, or half size accordions, accompanied by stomping - but the music is honestly better. It's more aptly used, more powerful, more refined, more defined. The songs carried a sense of urgency, a sense of weight, a substance that was tangible.

I've heard that the Wicked performance I went to was much more refined than many, and that I was lucky to see what I did. But the music was too loud and the implementation of amplification was untactful. The musicians were often playing as a separate group from the singer - so it was like a group of instrumentalists and a singer both performing at the same time, not a unified body of musicians creating music. Don't get me wrong, it wasn't bad - it just wasn't what it could have been either. Warhorses was often just up to one or two people singing and/or playing an instrument, so the complexity was less, but the simplicity was also striking. The choreography in Warhorses as also quite a bit superior. Both were stellar in the performance of the main character, or main point of focus - but Warhorses was truly remarkable. In Wicked, if there were 30 people on the stage... at least 25 would be performing "support dancing". The dancing is nice, it looks good, it fills the stage, but it's all about the main character(s). Warhorses on the other hand felt like it would immerse me in a crowd of 30 people, each with their own lives, each with their own goals, each with their own needs, wants and desires. The main characters were never hard to find - but the support cast didn't just feel like bodies on a stage where three would do almost equally well as ten.

I seem to have gotten carried away - but you can tell, Wicked was awesome, but Warhorses was wicked awesome.

Packing up to leave London was interesting. I said good bye to all the guys in the flat. They were nice to get to know, and all things considered, a pretty decent group to live with for five weeks. I kept thinking of interesting differences about London and the states. Mostly little things, like... people in the UK use an odd combination of metric and non-metric units. Driving is in MPH, but units for measuring food are in grams (how much flour to mix with yeast - the packet said to use 750 grams of flour), or liters. These certainly aren't the most interesting facts in the world, but it's those little differences that add up. Oh, talking to locals I found something interesting: while little/short words will often be used different, or have entirely different meanings in the UK vs. the states, big words are pretty much all the same. Maybe this was just my experience, but I'd be really interested to look at a study examining the correlation between the changing meaning of a word through time and its size.

I think I was ready to move on from London. While it was interesting the flat was getting old, people were getting worn out - I either needed to plan on moving in long term, or plan on moving out. Italy has been amazing though! My hosts are amazing, amusing, and entirely willing to plot against Michael Meeks with me (for his own benefit). I'm staying with two of Michael's friends whom he met at church while going to Georgia Tech. I am in walking distance of France, although I would need to climb the alps in the process. Needless to say, the alps are pretty much in the backyard. So, good company, good scenery, really weird food... it's great!

Actually, the food has been weird. McDonald's. Pasta and salad (ok, that was normal). Fried and (sometimes) battered cantaloupe with cheese (admittedly that had nothing to do with Italy and everything to do with the fact that there was sliced cantaloupe and I was curious how cantaloupe and cheese went together, which lead to fried cantaloupe.) For dinner we had.... waffles and fried potatoes :-) (apparently we need to go shopping for food). It's been great. I really look forward to Michael showing up on Saturday.

I saw my first firefly today. Then I saw hundreds more shortly after that as we were walking home in the dark back from the river. Mmm, that was a beautiful walk.

More later. Hopefully pictures sometime?
-Samuel