Saturday, December 17, 2005

crazy travel bug strikes again. aish.. wish me luck over the holidays, take care and see you all in the next year. =D

Wednesday, December 14, 2005

a picture's worth a thousand words

i wanted to post some pictures, but 1) i'm lazy and 2) i just don't have time, so i'm just going to post them here for now, but i'll properly update my photo page eventually...

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bep free concert sponsored by honda civic.. as if you couldn't tell by the background~

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u2 concert! picture stolen from brian's site, who apparently stole it from pearl's site.

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grx christmas banquet with my small group buddy! (aka joanna) gotta love food pictures~

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still at the grx banquet, the kids put on a really cute skit! notice the empty chair next to mary? what's up with the deadbeat joseph???

Saturday, December 3, 2005

it really is christmas =)

i just got home after a long and cold, albeit happy, evening. matthew and i went to the 'sing-it-yourself' messiah event given by the sf conservatory. basically it's about 3,000 people who may or may not know how to sing taking a stab at handel's messiah. matthew had a chorale background from high school so he actually had an idea of how to sing some of it but i had no clue.

it was amazing.

i didn't expect it to actually sound good, but when you have so many people sing (or try to sing) the same thing at once, there's just something magical about it. when we got to the part in the middle where we were singing the hallelujah chorus, it was just awesome. the entire auditorium was filled with voices raised and singing, and when we got to the final hallelujah, the crowd broke into cheers and applause. after the performance, we continued to clap, and got a final curtain call and a treat from the conductor when he lead the orchestra in an encore performance of the hallelujah chorus. the first time was good and this time it was even better.

it's hard to describe in words how it felt.. but it was just so uplifting and awesome. i wish i were a better writer so i could describe it better.

as we were leaving the auditorium, i could hear some people softly singing 'oh come, all ye faithful' and i sang along. we paused at the exit as we could hear the strains of the carol growing and growing, and peoples' conversations stopping, until all the people who had been pushing towards the exit stopped and all you could hear were the sounds of people singing. that spontaneous connection through music suddenly made these 3,000 strangers into a community.

and now here's the funny part. after this wonderful, uplifting evening, i almost stranded myself at the castro valley bart station. i missed my transfer at bayfair, and ended up one stop over. i went downstairs to ask the station attendent if there were any more trains to sf (because i thought i needed to take a sf train to head back to the bayfair station) and he replied no. after the requisite freak out moment, i called les and was just about to have her pick me up from castro valley. i need to ask the attendent for directions to the station, and he asked me where from. when i replied fremont, he was like, "why didn't you say fremont in the first place??" turns out, the last train of the evening goes only to bayfair and over there i could hop on my train to fremont. i had to wait about a half hour on the freezing cold platform of the station, but when i got on the train around 1 am, i was just relieved to be heading home without any major consequences.

regardless, i'm still really happy and i feel really fortunate to have had such an awesome experience. tonight's been wonderful. merry christmas, merry christmas...