…but the last one in a while. Matt Sullivan, an old friend from Grinnell, is coming to visit next weekend, then the next one I'm in London with Julia, and the following weekend is the beginning of Spring Break and a trip to Italy! It's going to be so awesome.
Despite the relatively boring times, things have still been going great. The one low point this week was my first midterm, in Graph Theory, which I kinda screwed up because I ran out of time. However, it's not a huge deal, I'll be able to make up the points, and in any case HMC has made me less scared of bad grades :-/
The fad of the month: breakdancing! Tom already knows a few moves, and he and Jim recently decided it would be fun to work up some more skills. The feeling is contagious, especially when you watch videos on the web of people doing some amazing breakdancing stunts (perhaps the most inspiring is this guy: http://www.devilducky.com/media/25708/ note the arms-only pushups at the end). So I've been doing a whole ton of pushup games (yes, they are fun) with Tom--we are going to get buff.
The Budapest Spring Music Festival is going on right now, and while I was too slow to get tickets for the most interesting concerts before they sold out, I do have plans to see a few concerts. In early April a group of us will help celebrate Bartók's 125th birthday with a "Triple Bartók" production of Bluebeard Castle (opera), The Miraculous Mountain (ballet), and The Wooden Prince (ballet) at the opera house. Also at the opera house, I'm going solo to hear some Goldmark, Chopin, and Tchaikovsky on Tuesday of this week (to celebrate the completion of my Number Theory midterm!)
Speaking of music, I'm appropriately in a Hungarian phase! In fact, I've been listening to primarily Bartók (including his Concerto for Orchestra, 6 string quartets, and Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta) and Liszt (various solo piano pieces), with the quartets of Shostakovich (go figure) and the late quartets of Beethoven thrown in. That's right…I can't handle more than 4 string instruments playing at a time. It's really fun to be in a place that reveres their music composers…in fact, sometimes it seems that every street in the country is named after either a revolutionary, a monarch, or a musician!
No pictures this week…but just you wait…
4 comments:
oooh... those Bartok String Quartets sure are magical! I got to see an absolutely top-tier quartet play the sixth live recently, and it was breathtaking.
Keep up the pushups.
Tim
Any chance you can combine the breakdancing moves with the Bartok music? A whole new art form could be born! Wish I could come along on the tri-musithon event. Surely sounds exciting.
You keep doing those push-ups, Nate. I'll stick with picking up May with my bare hands---a pretty commensurate work-out.
MOM
Hey Nate, it's sounds awesome over there reading all your posts. Also, it's cool to hear you'll be coming to Ames in the summer, I'll also be in Ames this summer so maybe we'll run into each other sometime. Have a good rest of the semester over there and I'll check out your break dancing skills when you get back.
Jeff Routier
my pictures can beat up your pictures
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