Blueberries!!!!!!

Since we have a long weekend and the weather was really nice and we felt we deserved a reward for surviving the first week of school :-), and one of my friends came in from out of town, a group of us decided to go to the Marshall County Blueberry Festival. Who would have guessed that this is the second largest gestival in Indiana! And only half an hours drive from South Bend in Plymouth. There were thousands of people, lots of fried food, rides, stands and of course, blueberries everywhere. And in the evening there was a great firework show.

Blueberry doughnuts!

There were also several Country bands playing. This one in particular had an amazing Fiddler. (Daddy, you would have liked that!)


It was very nice to spend some time with my friends that I hadn´t seen in a while.

Somehow this does not look as good in the picture as it did live. This is a huge Blueberry muffin, with ice-cream and Blueberry sauce over it!

Getting ready for the fireworks.

They even had Gebrannte Mandeln!!

Moving In

At the end of an eventful summer I finally moved into my new place. I now live with a young family from my church. It is a really nice situation and I´m happy it all worked out the way it did. These are just a few pictures of my room.

Mr. V has his spot.

One more picture from MasterWorks :)

I really liked this one :) Our photographer took this at one of the concerts and I thought it looked pretty impressive...

The End to a Wonderful Month!

It´s strange how fast the past four weeks went by. Here are some final images from MasterWorks. bove my three wonderful roommates and I. It was a pleasure to get to know them and play in orchestra with some of them.

I was also very happy to be able to have some lessons with Gert Kumi. He was very encouraging and helpful. And the teacher assigned to me was Ellen-Maria Willis, who also was very kind and taught me a lot in that short time.

And finally my bible study group. They, too, are all wonderful people and it was nice to have those times during the day to just share and talk about the things we all face and deal with.

Over all this month was such a wonderful experience! Now I have a week at the Varners to process and readjust. Thank you again for supporting me!

Master Works Festival 2011!!

Hi everyone! I cannot believe that the third week of Masterworks is already over! Time has definitely flown by! Here are just a few pictures. It is hard to capture all the emotions of being here, but I wanted to share some of the things that have been happening here in Winona Lake. Some of you were able to come to some concerts and it was great to see you. Now I only have one more left to prepare for.

This man, Daniel Meyer is one of our fabulous conductors. He was here the first week and was a very inspiring and encouraging person. He helped us prepare La Mer and definitely set a great tone for the rest of the Festival! He also spoke fluent German and had recently been to Stuttgart to conduct his European debut. I had the pleasure of getting to know him a little because of this.
I thought you would enjoy this picture of the oboe section for the Rite of Spring that we performed just yesterday. They felt they could get into carachter better if they dressed the part :) (those oboists!!)
On a random side note I also supported the German women in the World Cup and was disappointed when they lost!

So here it is, the very difficult and complex Rite of Spring! I must say it is the most challenging piece I have ever learned and in such a short time! But the performance went very well and I was very excited that two of my friends from school as well as Erika, Freya and Max were able to be at the concert. That is definitely a memory I will have for a long time :)

The next several pictures are from an incredible collection of old books called the Remnant Trust of which the owner lives right here in Winona Lake. We were all invited to go see the books and documents in the vault. Amazingly enough we were allowed to touch everything and hold the books! I didn´t break anything for those who may be doubting :) It really is an impressive collection and supposedly one of the largest private collection in the US.

This one is a page from a Gutenberg Bible.

Dr. Kavanaugh was very excited about the whole thing and enjoyed showing all of us the cool things.

This scroll is made of animal skins that were sewn together and the seams are visible.

Check out the date on this one!

This one also very interesting. Zach I thought you would like to have a look at this one :)

Maybe some of you can read this one. It might be upside down.

Papyrus and leather.

Some interesting pages. Can you tell what this one is?

And there were so many more books on the shelves that we could just take down and look at and I wish I could have spent an entire day in there!

This one was especially interesting. This is a Foxe´s Book of Martyrs, which I had just been reading. The first page folded out and had pictures of different torture methods of the time.

And back to rehearsals there´s me in the back :)

And our conductor for the Rite of Spring did a phenomenal job with leading the rehearsals and getting us through this difficult program.

Along with learning so much musically I have made some wonderful friends. It is so encouraging to meet so many wonderful musicians who also love the Lord. Also check out the new haircut! I have bangs :)

In addition to the wonderful faculty they bring in different people to give Masterclasses. This was one helped me a lot. It was with Stephen Clapp, who was the long time Dean of Juilliard. He was very encouraging and nice. I´m sorry I didn´t get a better picture with him.

Today in our church service we heard a wonderful story a very inspiring man! Franz Mohr came to speak. He is a German and was the head technician for Steinway for 35 years. He tuned pianos for Horowitz, Gould and many other big names. He is also a man of God with a heart for people. He shared with us (in a very heavy German accent :)), how he became a believer after having survived the bombing of his German city in 1944 and also how he was able to share the Gospel with Horowitz and how he had the opportunity of leading Horowitz´s wife to the Lord. He was so inspiring and an extremely faithful man! I was touched deeply by his story. I got to talk to him a little afterwards and it was a pleasure to have met such a great man!

Now I am looking forward to the last week here. I am excited to learn a lot more and get to know some more wonderful people. I just want to say that I am so greatful I get to be here and I want to thank all of you who made this possible for me. I am being challenged and stretched in so many different ways and I am looking forward to applying some of the thisng I have learned here when I get back to South Bend. For now I am excited about the last concert in which we are playing Brahms second symphony along with Rachmaninoff piano concerto no. 2. I hope I was able to convey some of what has been happening.