Saturday May 19th and Sunday May 20th: Concerts, concerts, concerts....

Saturday May 19th On Saturday the group didn't have to leave Wengen until 12:37, so most people chose to sleep in and grab a bit of breakfast before it closed at 10. After that there was some last minute shopping and hanging out around the town of Wengen. As web traveled down in the train we caught our last glimpse of the picturesque Riverdell landscape and got our last pictures. We loaded the bus a d traveled to Wattenwill where we we met by a cold church to rehearse in and an eager and friendly Johannes, who went through a lot of work in getting us places to stay. Then we traveled to our host homes, some spoke English, some didn't. After a couple of hours at the homes we went back to the church for our concert and the place was packed! We found out that they did a lot of advertising for the concert and it shed. We had a fun concert and for to sing all of our pieces since we finally had a piano. The we went back to the host families for some interesting communication and sleep. On the way back, some saw that the beacons of Ammon Den were lit, Gondor was calling for aid and Rohan. Would answer. It was a good day. On Sunday we went to church at 9 am and sang four songs there. It was really neat that the pastor included our chorale theme, Meditations and Illuminations in his sermon. He spoke about those two things in English and another guy was translating into Deutsch for the rest of the congregation. Then we went back to our hosts and they had an afternoon of activities for us before our concert at Blumenstein, 15 minutes away. At Blumenstein we got to sing in a very old church that was simply beautiful. There was also a nice waterfall nearby that unfortunately, was being made into a controlled stream because of flooding so the landscape was ruined a bit with construction equipment. The concert in Blumenstein also had a big attendance, including a father and son from Pennsylvania who were touring Switzerland. That concert included 3 encores, Let Me Fly, Praise God from Whom (606), and Bonse Aba. We didn't have a piano so we had to improvise a bit, but it was a lot of fun the. We went back to our host families for a night of relaxing, eating, talking, and sleeping. -Tyler Yoder, Bay Port, MI