Happy Birthday to the Ground!

To start celebrating my birthday we went to Hunger Games at 6:00 on the 22nd which was awesome. They have assigned seating in theaters which is uber nice and we had really nice seats, because we got our tickets awhile ago and it started off with some german commercials and people were still coming in and like America I was of course expecting a good 20 minutes of previews, but instead the movie just flat out started....totally caught us off guard, but was awesome. The movie was well worth the wait, it was so good at making you love the characters and have you really moved by the whole plot line. Afterwards we got some gelato.

For my actual birthday I had to go deregister from the city....saddest moment of my life! I also went to the Haus der Musik and to tell the truth I was not very impressed and would rather have spent the 9 Euro on watching Hunger Games again, but I did get to virtually conduct the Vienna Philharmonic so I can scratch that one off the bucket list. It was sad though, because they just stopped partway and one of the violinists got up and yelled how bad I was and I was just dancing up there and he could do a better job than me. I guess I shouldn't plan on that being my future job. It was funny though, because my cello teacher here was totally in the orchestra that I was conducting. They also had a big screen that was playing two concerts of the Vienna Philharmonic so I just sat through both of them. They played the song from Sleeping Beauty which is my favorite Disney movie and song that I like to break out and sing and apparently it's some Tchaikovsky piece, so that was cool.

I then spent the rest of the day practicing and we had a house concert at 8:00. Six girls from our study abroad came and two of them also performed. It was fantastic. I played the Prokofiev Sonata and Nearer My God to Thee with Aly and also the Bach cello suite 3 Prelude. It was a ton of fun and reminded me how much I love to perform. We had a delicious dinner of raw salmon which I never have had and this beef that was wrapped with bread and some apple pie and chocolate cake that was all delicious and I had way to much of the chocolate cake...if that's possible. I feel like I have grown so much in every aspect on this trip and I think it totally fits that I am going back home a new age too.

Today I went to see the Vienna Philharmonic for the last time and my favorite piece they played was the New World Symphony. Right afterwards I walked over to the Ballet (Anna Karenina) which was a very worthy last performance I'll attend at the Staats Oper. It started off with a very familiar piece by Tchaikovsky and I had to look it up, but it's called serenade for strings and all I remember about it is that I totally played it for months a long time ago. On Sunday at 20:40 we leave on a night train to Venice and then Milan and Florence and back to Venice and then Salzburg and then I come back for one night and then onward to PARIS! So the next three weeks will be one busy adventure, but my now nineteen year old self is very excited to see everything!