Palo Alto Adventures: HS Exchanges, Standford, and Gig #1 - oh my!

Greetings followers! 

It's Nicole Laborte checking in again - hopefully you will be also hearing from some of my fellow orchestra members with possibly faster wifi access at their home stay location.

Once again, our day began at the crack of dawn - this time it felt even more early due to lack of sleep from our previous day's travel. Breakfast was at the California chain equivalent of Denny's, where I demolished their Sunrise Skillet.

Sadly, there was no iced tea around - I always forget how caffeine addicted I am until I'm forced to function without it. Not pretty.

We departed from our hotel to go to our first high school exchange at Irvington High School. It took us a bit longer than we had originally anticipated, due to the famous California morning commute traffic. Upon arrival I was surprised to find most of the campus was connected by a central courtyard. (I got a really strange High School Musical vibe and had to suppress the urge to sing "Stick to the Status Quo", but I thought - better not.)

The Irvington HS Orchestra was lovely! Their program is in it's second year and doing really well - great ensemble blend considering the mild number imbalance (I only saw two violas and a single cello holding down the bass end - good for them!)

We then performed our exchange set - a little bit of the Debussy, Sousa, and Wade. Unfortunately we didn't have much time to stay and chat, as we had to hurry off to our second high school gig.

The second high school we ventured to was Mission San Jose High School - once again another beautiful campus with large courtyards (these ones had cute little birds twittering away).

The sheer size of this high school orchestra was amazing. It was comprised of 9th-12th graders all in one class period - easily the size of our usual symphonic orchestra if not bigger!

After loading back on the bus, we headed to Standford University for lunch and free time. I finally was able to aquire the aforementioned caffeine I desperately needed while walking around the grounds.

The sheer size of the campus was overwhelmingly large - I'm so used to two options - upper or lower campus (let's be honest, most of my life is spent in the music building anyways). The architecture was absolutely magnificent!

We wandered around, stopping for quiche and hand-rolled made to order sushi. Yum!

We quickly ran to check our the church on campus after hearing about the insanely beautiful interior and organ. 

Definitely was not disappointed.

We boarded the bus once more for our first "official" concert at Grace Lutheran Church. It took a little while to get used to the acoustics (let's just say they're less orchestra friendly than choir friendly), but we were able to adjust articulations to suit the space.

The church fed us Chipotle for dinner. It was a big hit for us starving college kids - so delicious.

Our performance itself was definitely the best we've played so far (the Mahler really sang tonight) - looking forward to experiencing it evolve over the next week from repeat performance and different venues all over California.

We departed from the church for our first home stay experience. It's time for bed so I'll write more about that tomorrow.

Until then, I leave you with this new random fact I learned on the way to our home stay - did you Nokia (the phone company) is not Japanese but actually Finnish company?

-Nicole Laborte