After leaving Vienna, we drove to Munich, but before we arrived, we had a pit stop to make. You see, when you tour Europe with more than 50 music-loving college men, you get used to some strange things. One such thing is the bus’s tendency to spontaneously break into song. …
A Musical Paradise
“When will you realize, Vienna waits for you?” -Billy Joel, Vienna. As our bus inched closer and closer to our destination, these lyrics from Billy Joel’s iconic tribute to Austria’s capital sounded again and again in my mind. It was fitting, I suppose. In the song, he paints Vienna as a …
Budapest: A Tale of Two Cities…
… divided for centuries by the Danube river into Buda (the city of the west) and Pest (the city of the east). As a brother who shared a room for fourteen years of his life, I can only imagine the amount of medieval carnage exchanged between those two cities. Eventually, …
Ljubljana…Where is that, exactly?
For those of you reading this who have never heard of Ljubljana or its parent nation, Slovenia, we should probably start off with a few facts about the two: Ljubljana (lyoo-BLYAH-nah) is the capital city of Slovenia. Ljubljana’s population is only a little less than 283,000; meaning it is approximately …
An Italian Immersion
My first visit to Bologna occurred during the fall semester of my junior year—a semester I spent studying abroad in Rome. It was a gloomy, overcast Sunday in October, and almost all of the famous Bolognese eateries were closed for the day of rest. I left the provincial capital of …
A Grand Homecoming
It’s our fourth day on tour. Rome seems like that dream that you can’t quite remember—its food, its tourists…not to mention the ageless cobblestoned streets, where our craned necks, strained from basking in art, arches, and a bygone era, found refuge. The hills of Tuscany, which I call home, now …
Veni, Vidi, Cecini!
‘We came, We Saw, We Sang!’ Where better to begin a tour of Europe than at the beginning? As we met the Tuesday morning sunshine on our bus ride from Rome’s Leonardo da Vinci International Airport to the hotel, I was greeted with the faces of familiar friends. The buildings, monuments, …
The Spain Experience
By the end of my sophomore year, I had begun to feel like I had figured out the entire Glee Club experience. I had hundreds of rehearsals, four tours, dozens of concerts, and scores of smaller performances under my belt, as well as a bevy of dinners, hay rides, beach …