A Date With My Host Brother, A Performance, And The Harry Potter Elevator

Today, I got up at 8 30am. On a Saturday! Of course, I also got up at like 6 30 and then 7 45 and then 8 00 because I was for some reason really worried about getting up this morning. I had a good reason for it though. Today, I had to be at the Academy at 9 30am to be ready to leave for Brussels for my second special performance with the blue fabric tube. And I successfully made it on time. I got there and there were already a few others in the building, but we had to wait another fifteen or twenty minutes for all of the other kids that were participating in the "spectacle". The adults talked amongst themselves and figured out who was taking who and who the most room in their cars. Eventually, we were all in cars and ready to go. I went with the director of the Academy, my ballet teacher, and one of the other girls who was dancing with us. It only took us about forty minutes to get to Brussels, which I was really surprised at, considering my host mom always says how it takes a good hour and a half to get there...

Anyways, the GPS led us and we parked in a parking garage and walked about five minutes to get to the theater. Once we got there, we put our things in a back room and went into the theater to watch a performance before our performance. It was a woman from... Somewhere... And she played a piece on the piano. A very interesting, contemporary, and lovely piece. But it was also very long, and I obviously didn't sleep very well last night, and let's just say I was much better rested afterwards. I tried, I really did, to stay awake through the whole thing, because I really liked it. But it was very very long, and I just could not keep my eyes open after a while. But really, it was beautiful.

After that performance, we went to get our things and then we went back into the theater and walked up onto the stage and through the curtains to the dressing room. The way the theater was set up, there was a regular stage, with a red curtain and everything, but then there was another mini stage on the floor right below it. And then the chairs ascended up from there and on the sides too. It wasn't a very big theater; it probably sat about two hundred. And call me crazy, but the minute I walked into that theater, I felt so much better than have in a really really long time. The second I was on the stage, I was home. It had been four months since I had been on a legit stage with curtains and lights and ropes and I just walked behind that curtain and saw the empty stage before me and all the breath came wooshing out of me at once because it was so wonderful to back in a theater. Seriously, sometimes I wonder what will become of me if I can't perform for a living...

We went back to our dressing room and put our things down and got dressed, but didn't worry about hair and makeup yet. Then we went out on the stage with our fabric friends and went through the dance once. It worked out very well. And then it was food time. Me and the other two girls who were dancing and the teacher all decided to try the elevator. However, we weren't sure which floor we were starting on, so we just decided to try 0. That took us to somewhere we did not recognize, though we had seen the elevator on the floor we needed, so we knew that wasn't right. So then we pressed -1. But that didn't even make the elevator move. So we tried 1. Again, we didn't recognize it. We tried 2, expecting to maybe be back where we started, but it opened to a completely dark and eerie hallway so we pressed 3, and we were back where we started. By this time, we were in hysterics, saying that we were lost in the Harry Potter elevator. And we took the stairs down to that back room where there was a sort of soup that I didn't try, a pasta salad, and hot dogs. But there was no mustard for the hot dogs. Just ketchup and mayonnaise. Ew. Mayonnaise on a hot dog. Crazy Belgians... So I had mine sans condiments. And it was ok. But of course, it didn't have all the artificial things that you find in American hot dogs, so the meat wasn't packed together well and the texture was funky. But I ate it anyways. Then I had a pear and we all stood around a garbage can talking and eating mandarin oranges as we threw away the peels and the white stuff.

After lunch, we went back up to the dressing rooms, not trying the elevator this time, and went to work on hair and makeup. The teacher did all of our hair in a French twist, which they call a banana, but it's a French twist. And she dug those pins so far into my scalp, I'm surprised her hand didn't come away with my blood on it. I did my own makeup, as usual, and I remembered why I never bothered with mascara and just always went with falsies. The amount of mascara it takes to get your eyelashes up to stage level is ridiculous. But of course, I had to wear my glasses because I'm allergic to my contacts.

Oh yah side note: I don't know if I mentioned this, but I've developed an allergy to my contacts due to the silicone in them. Way to go, body!

Anyways, we then sat in the room for the next hour ish just talking, waiting to go on stage. I was definitely sleepy, and I even dozed off in my chair once, but I was all ready to go when it came time to go to the stage. I took off my glasses, was blind, and followed closely behind my teacher, wrapped up tight in the fabric tube and it was freezing.

Before I knew it, we were on and off the stage, and we did great! No traffic problems, no major screw ups. The only disappointment was that the audience was pretty empty. We were all kind of upset with the lack of crowd, but it was fun either way. Afterwards, we gathered up our stuff and I went back to Hannut with the people that I had come with. My host mom picked me up at the Academy and I went home, my head aching from the pins, one digging in particularly hard. So after a few quick pictures of the updo, I took it down and combed it out and then laughed at my 80s hair. I found it so amusing that I actually did a little photo shoot with myself on the PhotoBooth application on my Mac.

Then Damien came upstairs and asked me what I wanted for dinner, as my host parents and Benoit were all out for the night. He made a Hawaiian pizza and an oven lasagna and we sat down to eat together. The places were even set and we shared our food and talked as we ate. It was actually quite enjoyable, spending the time with only Damien. He still messed with me, but we also had some real conversation and it wasn't awkward at all. We laughed and had a good time. Then after we finished eating, he gave me a quick geography lesson, as he was looking through the atlas to find out where Cleveland is, and he tried to explain Belgian politics to me. But it was fruitless, because the government here is so complicated, it's not even worth it. Then we watched a little bit of tv and then his friends came over and I vacated the situation, as I was sure that they were going to drink, and they are much older and I just decided that was a bad idea. Plus I wanted to take a nice long shower and get to bed decently early.

So now I'm here, after my shower, my feet all lotioned and my hair all nice after I treated myself to a moisturizing mask treatment, sleepy and ready for bed. Bonne nuit!