Okay, so my choir concert was both the most hilarious and most traumatic thing I have EVER done. First off, it started an HOUR LATE, and it was held in the cafeteria during dinner hour. That’s one way to draw a crowd I guess, but it was very loud. However, there was a wooden, impromptu stage-ish thing (VERY unstable, I think it cracked at the end), and we set up audience style seating, so it was legit. So, most traumatically, I was FRONT and CENTER of the choir. Like, my terrible dancing right in the middle. Then the director starts the opening remarks and is all like “you can see we have some NEW people”… and points to the token white girl standing front and center. Yeah, I was all like “hello audience type nod”. Yeah, there is another international girl in the choir (her name is Martha!) but she stands in the back off to the side. So yeah, that bit of awkwardness. Then we sang our songs and I did my best to not look TOO much like a fool doing the step dancing thing. (I even sang a solo-ish thing in a group of eight!) but then… we were done with the songs we had rehearsed… and then kept on singing songs. ONES I HAD NEVER HEARD BEFORE. So I got to learn songs IN SETSWANA on stage! D: And one of them, the conductor was all like “hey, if you don’t know the dance, please move to the back” but no one behind me would switch with me! ;_; so I spent the whole song desperately trying to mouth the words and watching a girl out of the corner of my eye trying to copy the dance moves… IT WAS SO HARD AND I DEFINITELY MADE A FOOL OUT OF MYSELF! But… surprisingly it was somehow really fun. One of the songs I didn’t know was like a mad choir jam session where this guy would call out words and we’d sing after him and copy crazy dance moves. I was having a tough time singing because I was laughing so hard! It was one of those WEIRD moments where I lost all self-consciousness and just HAD FUN with it. LOL!
The other thing that was weird was the amount of SCREAMING coming from the girls in the audience. Half the time, you could barely hear the choir apparently.
OTHER COOL THING THAT HAPPENED RECENTLY! I went to a circus! There was a South African circus that came to Gaborone for the VERY first time. If I am not mistaken, this is the first South African circus in Bots ever. It was… surprisingly normal, and since it was pretty small ALL the seats were good ones. There was really NORMAL circus stuff. For example, there were jugglers, clowns, trapeze artists, horse and miniature pony tricks, tigers, ELEPHANTS, etc. The clowns were actually REALLY funny. In one of their “in-between acts” acts, they got four audience members to stand in a square and strung caution tape stuff around them until they were a make-shift boxing ring and then proceeded to have a slow-motion boxing match to Chariots of Fire (think Olympics theme song, I think). The acts were all small scale, but VERY impressive. One thing I appreciated was whenever the other acts were doing something high up; they wore safety wires just in case. This seems like it would make it less daring, but I USUALLY spend circuses stressed about the performer’s safety, so it helped. (My GOD I really am a mother hen/ Sam Eagle from the Muppets type) My only complaint was that the tigers… didn’t look so good. They were OBVIOUSLY afraid of their handlers and really over-weight which implies lack of proper exercise. Also, the handler was using this stick with a freakin NAIL in it to get the tigers to do simple tricks. It was very sad. The other animals weren’t as bad, but what are they doing with FIVE tigers when they OBVIOUSLY can’t afford to care for them properly? Sheesh! But I had TONS of fun and hey! It’s a freakin CIRCUS in AFRICA! What!?
Next week I’m off to the Delta! Wish me luck and await the next post with anticipation!
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