Expedition Oppenau: Day 1

Day 1!!!!

Spoiler alert: it was all travel.

Hello and welcome to something new I'm trying in addition to my assignments for class. This past September, I traveled to Baden-Württemberg (a.k.a. Black Forest area) in Germany to perform with my college's school of music and the Oppenau Bach choir at the 23rd Classical Music Festival in Oppenau! It was an amazing experience, but I haven't had a chance to really write down all my experiences or even upload all my picture to Facebook (oops). So since I had to create this blog for my Diverse Cultures and their Music class (for those posts, check out my Cool Stuff and Exploration sections. Quite interesting stuff), I thought this would be a perfect place to distill all of this information in a single place. And for some reason make that place public to the world....

Oh well! Too late now! So without further ado... let's take off!

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September 20, 2019

Flying to Atlanta!

Layover in Atlanta

Right before take off

Flying into Germany!!!!

Guten Morgen!!!

So as previously spoiled by myself, this day was mostly travel. And because of the time difference (6 hours ahead) we landed in Stuttgart at 9am the next day so I'm sorry, but it's all a little muddled. The jet lag didn't help either BUT ANYWAYS....

Our group of about 30 students and faculty from my music school took a little puddle hopper to Atlanta, since our local airport doesn't fly internationally. To be honest, that was the worst flight for me personally. It was very jerky and turbulent and didn't help my anxiety much. You could feel every movement and made me a bit sick. But thankfully, that flight was a short one and we had some downtime in Atlanta before crossing the pond.

I think it's also worth mentioning that at this point, I was really, REALLY anxious about this flight in particular. It wasn't my first flight ever, but it was my first across a whole ocean. Once I was on, I was fine, but I was very nervous at this point. But it helped that I was sitting by one of my best friends and roommate for this trip, for all the flights. And I had my essential oils. Those helped too. And prayer. Lots of prayer.

So we left Atlanta about 6:00 EST (GMT -5) and embarked on a 9 hour flight to Stuttgart, Germany. Twas at this point where I watched all the movies!!!!! I mean, it's 9 hours and you've got to do something. I tried to do homework, but it was close quarters on the plane and not very conducive of reading the entirety of The Taming of the Shrew, so I quickly gave up on that. This is also the week my music theory class started modulation and I was not giving myself a headache trying to figure out modulation on my own. So Guardians of the Galaxy, Captain Marvel, and Shazam were my movies of choice for this particular flight. I also couldn't sleep on the flight over, so I basically pulled an all-nighter which made the next day very difficult. Go me!

Despite that, it was a pretty good flight.

In terms of food, I decided to try a few different things on this trip for my own personal research: 1) ditch my usual vegetarianism for a week to experience the full German cuisine in all it's glory and 2) see what plane food was like for people with dietary restrictions, specifically vegetarians. I was able to specify which dietary restrictions I had on the Delta airline website and decided to try the two vegetarian options they had available: vegetarian with dairy and vegetarian without dairy (this seemed to be the closest I could find to a plant-based/vegan option, but I might be wrong). For the flight over I chose the vegetarian w/o dairy, which on the whole was not bad.

Here are my very unscientific findings: dinner was a root veg chili with rice, salad with balsamic vinaigrette, and a roll with margarine. Nothing too special or out of the ordinary. Breakfast however, was the slightest bit different: rice cracker, sunflower seed butter, and fruit. Not bad either but the biggest thing for me with this specific dietary option was the fact that it resulted special treatment. I got a special label for my seat and every snack & meal came before everyone else's with a flight attendant happily declaring "Here's your special meal". I appreciated the accommodations that followed the dietary option I had chosen for this trip, but personally, it made me slightly uncomfortable to have this type of special attention. My guess as to why I felt this way is mostly down to the fact that I don't normally eat this way and had received all this special attention just because I was conducting an experiment for fun. I'm sure if I did follow this specific type of diet, I wouldn't feel as strange about it, but that was my personal experience.

And now that we're off that tangent, we landed in Stuttgart around 9am, with jet lag and sleep deprivation a-raging and you'll have to wait until next time to hear the rest!!!!!!

Thanks for reading and make sure to come back for my day two blog which will be coming out...soon??? We'll see!!!