Day 5 - British Museum and La Bohème

Hello from London!  I am Jonathon Boyle, a sophomore music major at Luther College, singing with Cathedral Choir as a tenor.  Outside choir I spend a healthy amount of time trying to learn to play the piano, and engaging in general shenanigans.  These first few days in London have been especially exciting, though I don't expect the following weeks to be any less so!

Today, we started class bright and early at 9am, taking in a little history of operatic music, as today's performance was the wildly popular opera, La Bohème.  For those of you familiar with the musical Rent, La Bohème, while set more than a hundred years earlier, is the inspiration for the plot of Rent. La bohème is set in the 1840's in the Latin Quarter of Paris, following the lives of 4 friends, 2 of whom become involved in passionate, romantic relationships.  In tragic literary and musical tradition however, one of the couples is torn asunder by death, at the very end of the opera.

However, I seem to have started with the end of the day.  Long before we dressed up to take the tube to Covent Garden, where the Royal Opera house is located, the entirety of our group took an excursion to the British museum for an awe-inspiring lesson in history.  I'd just like to point out, first of all, the enormity of the British museum.  I spent almost 3 hours wandering the museum, both alone and with friends, and saw barely a fraction of the vast collection of history that the museum had to offer.  The bulk of my time was spent lost in Ancient Greece, wandering around pieces taken from the Parthenon, rebuilding the massive structure around me as best I could in my mind.  While the depth and flavor of ancient Greek culture never fails to fascinate me, I was greatly impressed by the craftsmanship of the carvings which adorned the sides and halls of the Athenian Parthenon.

As we had become largely scattered over the course of the afternoon, a few of us met back up again around mid afternoon, and, driven by hunger, slaked our thirst and appeased our rumbling stomachs with the finest soda, fish, and chips the nearest pub had to offer.  A jaunt though London's underground brought us back to 270 Earl's Court in time for tea, where each of us shared what we were most fascinated by at the British Museum.  As much time as I spent lost in ancient Greece, others had spent time in the company of the egyptians, learning from the artifacts of enlightenment scholars, and among pieces of Japanese history.

Tomorrow begins with class, once again bright and early at 3am, or rather, 9 for us and 3 for those of you reading in the States, followed closely by the Nutcracker and a musical workshop.