January 26, 2005

A Flurry of Activity

On Saturday, Gamelan Burat Wangi participated in a memorial concert to honor Nicholas M. England, the founding director of the institute's World Music Program. In addition to our group, the concert featured other CalArts-based world music ensembles including a Javanese gamelan group, two African percussion groups and a classical Indian chamber ensemble. Many thanks to Katrina for taking some pictures with my camera while we were playing! Click on the image above to see more photos.

Last week we drove directly from a gamelan rehearsal at CalArts to Ciao Bella in the Santa Cruz Mountains for Simanti's Birthday party. Ciao Bella's brand of off-the-wall, hyperactive dance entertainment never disappoints and Friday night was no exception. It was so nice to see everybody! Click here to see Michelle's photos of the evening.

The next day we flew from SFO to Eugene, Oregon to visit Steve's sister, Pamela. (Many thanks to Michelle for all of her the hospitality and willingness to schlep us to and from the airport.) Pamela lives in Cottage Grove, which is a very small town about 30 minutes south of Eugene. We had a great visit and apparently had excellent luck with the weather. Among other things, we took a soak in the Belknap hot springs, visited a covered bridge, learned the correct way to pronounce Willemette and got to know Pamela's very cute (and intense) 2 year old pit bull named Polly. It was especially entertaining to watch Polly tear open a package(722kb).

After Oregon, we came back to Michelle's place in Sunnyvale and she threw together a mean udon noodle soup for us. The next day it was back to Santa Cruz where we visited our storage unit and spent the night at Guillermo's after one of his famous pizza parties. Friday morning Cyril and Charlene treated us to breakfast at the newly reopened Cafe Brazil, one of our favorites in Santa Cruz.

Now we are back home and very happy to have retrieved our bikes out of storage. I also managed to rescue my desk and another 1/3 of my wardrobe out of the lonely confines of the storage unit.

Posted by Industrious Bird at January 26, 2005 10:11 AM
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