Slavs in NYC!

Last Week, Slavs spent our first week of spring break singing in NYC!

To begin, we bought A LOT of food:

Slavs get very hungry--and there were 10 of us...

We rode the subway often and at length--it is a tiring way to get around, if you ask me, though convenient.

There's lots of cool art in the subway, which is refreshing, including many mosaics and bronze sculptures.

We sang in a diverse array of places, including the Ukrainian Institute of America, several schools and nursing homes, a synagogue, and a Serbian restaurant called Kafana. The space was tiny and the food (a lot of meat) was really good.

Kafana Menu

Somehow, we ended up with 6 altos, 3 seconds, and only 1 soprano for most of the tour. What can I say? The alto section had unusually good attendance, all the time! Here we all are:

We were also blessed with really nice weather for most of our tour. I hardly wore a coat at all! It was really lovely.

We did mostly fun touristy things, sitting in cute cafes, strolling through fun neighborhoods, shopping...

Cafe Select

One of the coolest things we happened upon was an accordion shop. It was run by a middle aged German man, who was also the conductor of a 15-piece all-female accordion orchestra in NYC. "We will have to do a collaboration," he said, after we sang him a few songs.

After our Thursday night gig singing for the Russian Club at Columbia University, we were given a very beautiful but unfortunately heavy flower arrangement. Luckily, Sarah's spent a lot of time in Africa, and has carried many things on her head... Getting it through the Subway was another matter entirely, however...

Now I am back at home. I am always glad to be back. It snowed more than 6 inches last night! It was warm and sunny today, though, and most of it has melted. Graham and I are going to go cross-country skiing tomorrow, his new favorite pastime, and something I have never done before... Whee!