Choir YouTubes and more

Between work-work-working nonstop at 100mph, not sleeping enough and the weather changing (it's crazy how it so suddenly goes from summer heat to oooh-it's-chilly here) I unsurprisingly got sick. Along with quite a few kiddos at school too, so I guess flu season has officially begun. Luckily it hasn't been a horrible illness, but I've been totally exhausted.

I also got really lucky that my being sick coincided with Eid al-Adha, which is "the sheep Eid" I posted about last year. We have Monday-Wednesday off this week which seems like it'll be enough time for me to recover, so yay for that! I was too sick on Sunday to celebrate the Eid with Othman's family, which was a bit of a bummer not to be with everyone, but at the same time it's not my favorite holiday seeing as its focal point is the family meal where we eat sheep insides— liver, kidney, heart etc. Not really my thing.

In other news I've started up with my choir again, and we're diving in headfirst with some lovely songs. Many of the songs we did at our concert last year are up online now, and I wanted to share some with you!

This is an extract of "Te Deum" by Karl Jenkins. This is all we did last year but this year we've already begun working on the other two parts in order to preform the entire song this year. (Forgive my silly faces throughout these videos please— rare is the person who looks nice while singing in a choir!)

It was during the choir's performance of this song in 2013 that I realized I absolutely had to join! It's a mixture of languages and religions— Aramaic, Greek, Syriac, Arabic, even Latin. It is a prayer for peace for Jerusalem, and is an incredibly moving piece.

I'll leave you with another I loved— Les Djinns by Gabriel Fauré. It's a poem of Victor Hugo's which Fauré set to music, and it's very haunting and beautiful. I think we had sung it much better in rehersals than we did in this performance, but a big factor is the place where we practice has beautiful acoustics— a theatre stage with microphones just can't compare. Also the way the speakers were set up made it so that we heard ourselves very differently from usual, so it created a bit of weirdness. But anyway, here's the song:

If you want to check out more of what the choir has done, both this past year and in years previous, type our director's name, Marie Claire Agoumi, into YouTube and you'll find all the videos she has put up. She doesn't put all the songs from each year up, but a nice selection.