A Chilean Adventure

Danielle and I decided that joining the university choir would not only be really fun, but also allow us to meet some other students and community members. The music conservatory is downtown instead of on campus, but that’s no big deal.

So today we went to the conservatory to see what we had to do to sign up for the choir. We were pleased to find that they were more than happy to have us! They took us in right away to speak with the maestro and he wasted no time putting us through a rigorous vocal exam to determine our voice range, tone, and musical abilities.

I must admit that I was quite timid when I began the exam. There were some vocal exercises that Danielle and I did together and some that we had to do separately. When it came time to do the individual ones, it took me a little bit to feel comfortable singing by myself. After an hour of exercises, he declared we are both sopranos and we are the very first members of the choir. (The actual sign-up begins in a couple of weeks.) We start with practices on March 19!

We decided that since we warmed our voices up, Marcelo thought only made sense that we should go out to the local karaoke bar. First, we had to get all prettied up. We were lamenting over how we really wanted to fix our hair. When I tried to use the voltage converters that I brought to Chile, both of them stopped working after a few seconds. I think they blew the fuses, but I’m not really sure why or what to do about it.

As we were getting ready, Danielle let out a shriek and said that her hair straightener showed that it had the range of voltage necessary to work with the Chilean outlets. I looked at the tiny little engraving on my hair dryer and curling iron and discovered that both of them worked with the electricity. Yay!

So we got to do our hair for the first time in a month. When Marcelo came to pick us up, he was amazed at how different we looked.

The karaoke bar was a lot of fun. We were amazed at how many people just sit at their tables when they sing their song, so we decided to show them how they do karaoke in the U.S. We did an amazing Spice Girls performance to the song “Wannabe,” complete with dancing around the club and getting a lot of cheers from everyone else. It was fun and everyone seemed to like it, but I’m still glad that I did it in a foreign country where no one knows me! We’ll probably be coming back to the karaoke bar