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Drachenwald October Crown
This weekend was, in some ways, a return to my roots in the SCA. When I was young I was able to attend a weekend event by putting on a costume, putting a few things in a backpack, and heading out the door. It has been many, many years since I've approached an event like that! Even when I don't bring the pavilion, tourney chests, armour, many changes of costume, Ice Chest, and other food basket, bedding, ground cloths, song books, musical instruments, dance music, etc. I still tend to want to bring at least a decent sized sub-set of the above, even for an evening revel or afternoon picnic in a park. However, just now nearly all of the above list is still somewhere between Tasmania and here, and I have no car with which to transport it. Therefore I flew to Germany this weekend for Crown Tourney. Ryan Air. Carry-on luggage only. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this European Budget airline, know that they make their money by charging for each thing possible, separately. They like to advertise flights for only 3 Euros, and then add one tiny fee at a time on top of that till you've actually paid them a reasonable price for the flight. One of the ways they accomplish that goal is to permit their passengers a single carry-on item and charge huge fees for checked luggage. Since I brought only one costume with me when I left Tassie, it seemed like a reasonable time to save the money and not check luggage. To manage this I wore my costume (and ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
clovis_t's single tunic he'd brought with him) over my modern clothing on the plane--that way my food, water bottle, sewing project, and geologic literature (so I could still read my 1000 a day), toiletries, and change of under ware would all fit into one small bag.
There was a brief time on Thursday evening when I wondered if I should consider cancelling the trip. For the second time in a year I was showing some symptoms of having caught a cold (the last one prior to this year was on my way home from Estrella war back in 2005). Both times this year that I had a brush with something resembling an illness I'd been pushing myself too hard--one was soon after submitting my thesis and boarding the plane to leave Tassie, and this time was after too many days last week staying up till 04:00 and still trying to be at work during business hours. No wonder my body had to actually deal with a couple of symptoms. I'm not certain if I picked up whatever it was from Wednesday's dance practice (our host had been feeling a bit under the weather earlier in the week), or on public transit on the way there or back, but either way, late Thursday evening my nose was a bit drippy, so I made some Echinacea tea, took a long, hot shower, and went to sleep with my head on a handkerchief in case of drips. Woke up in the middle of the night (ok, 04:00), repeated the hot shower treatment, and went back to sleep. When I woke up a few hours later I felt much better, so decided to continue with plan A and packed my bag (such as it was).
I brewed up more Echinacea Tea and filled my water bottle with it, took one more hot shower (to help cook out any remaining nastiness) and set out for the 30-minute walk to the train station around 13:00. From there I caught the bus out to Bergamo, where the airport used by Ryan Air is located (1 hour trip) and then waited at the airport till time for my flight (did my 1000 at the airport). I arrived in Lubeck at 19:00 and was met by one of the local SCA folk, who drove me out to site (1.5 hr trip). Friday evening was spent in pleasant conversation with people I'd not met before (this being my first event since moving to this Kingdom). One of the first people I met was a kind countess, with whom I was sharing a cabin (the site is a scout camp), who had sent me an e-mail earlier in the week offering me the use of some feast gear when I'd posted to the Kingdom list saying that I'd need to borrow some for the weekend). I like it when it is that easy to find someone you need to track down but haven't met yet.
Saturday was a bit cold and rainy, so most of the people (~90 some odd total on site during the day, I think, with ~70 staying in the bunk houses) spent the morning in the breakfast hall, making it easy for me to work on embroidery and visit with people, or listen to old friends catch up with one another while I struggled to learn names and faces, and admired the pretty embroidery, lovely fabric, and cool garb that so many people were wearing. In the afternoon the company moved outside, where the gallery took refuge under a "sun shade" and the 8 combatants in the list conducted a round-robin tournament (fought to the best 2 out of 3 for each bout). At the end of the day two emerged from the fray to meet in a final round. As is tradition throughout the Known World, the members of the Order of the Chivalry were summoned to the field to bear witness. Then his Majesty announced that since so few of his Knights were at liberty to travel just now (there was one Knight in the finals, one marshalling, and another on the field to watch) he invited any Royal Peers present who were willing to brave the rain to watch to also join them on the field. I felt that there was only one possible response to that invitation, and promptly put my stitching in the bag and went onto the field, joined by a number of other ladies who have inspired their champions to victory, where we were privileged to witness the final bouts of the tournament and see the victor declared. (As it turns out, the above mentioned countess and her champion are the new Crown Prince and Princess).
After the list the Peerage meetings happened, during which I got to meet the other Laurels on site and obtain an introduction to some of the differences in standard operating procedures between this Kingdom and the others in which I have lived. After the meetings and a bit of a break everyone gathered in the Feast Hall for court, followed by a feast. Since I don't eat in the evenings I volunteered to serve the feast, and enjoyed my evening spent in the kitchen helping with dish washing/drying and feast serving, with breaks between courses spent in the hall visiting with people. As often happens at a feast, I found the amount of food thrown out at the end of the feast heart-wrenching. At least this site has a separate can for food scraps, which is later fed to hogs, so something gets to enjoy the food. But so much of it would have been good for people to take home and eat later (or for lunch the next day) if only they'd had a way to keep it over night (the hall has a commercial kitchen, to which we did not have access, so the only refrigerator facilities available to us was the small fridge in the breakfast hall--I think the cooking itself was done by catering staff as per our contract with the site).
There was, alas, no dancing at this event. I did ask Her Majesty about it, since she is a dancing Laurel. She explained that she has been so spoiled recently with live music at every event she has been attending that she couldn't bring herself to organize dancing to recorded music at this event, where the only person with an instrument was a singer with a guitar who didn't know any dance music. I understood where she was coming from, but it did mean that my only exercise for the day was my yoga.
Sunday at Drachenwald events are just about packing up, cleaning up, and heading home. Breakfast was provided, but no activities were scheduled at all, since people had to drive home to Finland, Sweden, the UK, France, and distant parts of Germany. Despite the lack of official activities, it still turned out to be a fun time visiting with people, saying good bye, and making myself useful with some of the clean-up tasks. Site was scheduled to close at 14:00, and the clean-up was sufficiently well enough along that my driver was able to leave at 13:30.
She drove me into old-town Lubeck, which was once an important Hanseatic League City and dropped me there, armed with maps and bus scheduled provided me by the event reservation steward, and I enjoyed the afternoon exploring the island and admiring the old buildings--some of which date back to the 1200's, and most of which are from the 1500's or older. People put some effort into making pretty buildings in those days! Eventually I was too tired to explore further, so I hoped a city bus out to the airport, where I was early enough to take a nice long nap before proceeding through security (which wasn't yet open when I arrived) to wait at my gate reading my 1000 and doing yet more embroidery. My flight finally landed in Bergamo about midnight, which meant that I was back in Milano at 01:00, so completed my walk home by 1:30.clovis_t was hosting a couple of CouchSurfers from Poland while I was gone (they'd first contacted me, but I explained that I would be out of town, but he would be in (since he decided to return to Milan after I'd purchased the tickets to Crown) if they wanted to stay with him), who were asleep when I got in (they had to get up early this morning to catch their flight home), so I did my yoga as quietly as possible and left unpacking till this morning.
Today I had my first Italian lesson. The class started with the teacher introducing the class in Italian, which I rather expected. However, she then asked us to form in pairs (or one set of three, we being an odd number of students) and ask one another our names and something about our selves (in Italian), so that we could then report to the rest of the class what we learned. I found this part of class *very* frustrating--I can go anywhere to display my lack of Italian Vocabulary, I don't need to do it in the class I took in hopes of rectifying that problem! After that she gave a brief lecture on the difference between the formal and informal second person singular pronouns (with which I was already familiar due to the Italian Phrase book thatblamebrampton gave me when I passed through Sydney a few months back). However, she didn't use grammatical terms (like I just did), but rather gave examples of the use, and then listed off a variety of different sort of people (doctor, police, friend, etc.) and asked the class to state if we should use "tu" or "Lei" when addressing them. Alas, most of the words she used to describe people I was unable to guess at a meaning, and she had no photos to accompany that lesson, so I found my frustration levels increasing as she said something unintelligible to me, and the class said either "tu" or "Lei" and she'd say something else I couldn't understand, and the others would respond. Fortunately, before the frustration actually crossed the line into tears we moved on to our first exercises, photo copied from a text book. Finally, vocabulary given us to use! We had to work out the meanings of the words ourselves from the photos and the context, but the words were there, so when it was time to fill in blanks in a sentence, we could look at the example sentences and work out whcih word fit. I was ever so much happier with that part of class! When we moved on to listening to the correct pronunciation of a variety of words, and then had to use those words to determine the pattern to when to use which of the possible sounds made by the letters C and G based upon what vowel(s) follow it in a word I actually enjoyed myself. Pattern recognition is something I'm good at, and working it out for myself before she wrote the pattern on the board in full increases the odds of my remembering when to say the sound that in English would be spelled "ch" an when to use the one that I would have thought should be spelled with a "k".
[edited to add: by the time I reached the event site the cold (or whatever it was) was largely past troubling me--I no longer needed to blow my nose regularly--just a few times a day over the weekend, and was not troubled by any other symptoms. I may not like the fact that I actually had to fight off a cold twice in one year, but I suppose that when the battles are so quickly won, I can't really complain.)
clovis_t's single tunic he'd brought with him) over my modern clothing on the plane--that way my food, water bottle, sewing project, and geologic literature (so I could still read my 1000 a day), toiletries, and change of under ware would all fit into one small bag. There was a brief time on Thursday evening when I wondered if I should consider cancelling the trip. For the second time in a year I was showing some symptoms of having caught a cold (the last one prior to this year was on my way home from Estrella war back in 2005). Both times this year that I had a brush with something resembling an illness I'd been pushing myself too hard--one was soon after submitting my thesis and boarding the plane to leave Tassie, and this time was after too many days last week staying up till 04:00 and still trying to be at work during business hours. No wonder my body had to actually deal with a couple of symptoms. I'm not certain if I picked up whatever it was from Wednesday's dance practice (our host had been feeling a bit under the weather earlier in the week), or on public transit on the way there or back, but either way, late Thursday evening my nose was a bit drippy, so I made some Echinacea tea, took a long, hot shower, and went to sleep with my head on a handkerchief in case of drips. Woke up in the middle of the night (ok, 04:00), repeated the hot shower treatment, and went back to sleep. When I woke up a few hours later I felt much better, so decided to continue with plan A and packed my bag (such as it was).
I brewed up more Echinacea Tea and filled my water bottle with it, took one more hot shower (to help cook out any remaining nastiness) and set out for the 30-minute walk to the train station around 13:00. From there I caught the bus out to Bergamo, where the airport used by Ryan Air is located (1 hour trip) and then waited at the airport till time for my flight (did my 1000 at the airport). I arrived in Lubeck at 19:00 and was met by one of the local SCA folk, who drove me out to site (1.5 hr trip). Friday evening was spent in pleasant conversation with people I'd not met before (this being my first event since moving to this Kingdom). One of the first people I met was a kind countess, with whom I was sharing a cabin (the site is a scout camp), who had sent me an e-mail earlier in the week offering me the use of some feast gear when I'd posted to the Kingdom list saying that I'd need to borrow some for the weekend). I like it when it is that easy to find someone you need to track down but haven't met yet.
Saturday was a bit cold and rainy, so most of the people (~90 some odd total on site during the day, I think, with ~70 staying in the bunk houses) spent the morning in the breakfast hall, making it easy for me to work on embroidery and visit with people, or listen to old friends catch up with one another while I struggled to learn names and faces, and admired the pretty embroidery, lovely fabric, and cool garb that so many people were wearing. In the afternoon the company moved outside, where the gallery took refuge under a "sun shade" and the 8 combatants in the list conducted a round-robin tournament (fought to the best 2 out of 3 for each bout). At the end of the day two emerged from the fray to meet in a final round. As is tradition throughout the Known World, the members of the Order of the Chivalry were summoned to the field to bear witness. Then his Majesty announced that since so few of his Knights were at liberty to travel just now (there was one Knight in the finals, one marshalling, and another on the field to watch) he invited any Royal Peers present who were willing to brave the rain to watch to also join them on the field. I felt that there was only one possible response to that invitation, and promptly put my stitching in the bag and went onto the field, joined by a number of other ladies who have inspired their champions to victory, where we were privileged to witness the final bouts of the tournament and see the victor declared. (As it turns out, the above mentioned countess and her champion are the new Crown Prince and Princess).
After the list the Peerage meetings happened, during which I got to meet the other Laurels on site and obtain an introduction to some of the differences in standard operating procedures between this Kingdom and the others in which I have lived. After the meetings and a bit of a break everyone gathered in the Feast Hall for court, followed by a feast. Since I don't eat in the evenings I volunteered to serve the feast, and enjoyed my evening spent in the kitchen helping with dish washing/drying and feast serving, with breaks between courses spent in the hall visiting with people. As often happens at a feast, I found the amount of food thrown out at the end of the feast heart-wrenching. At least this site has a separate can for food scraps, which is later fed to hogs, so something gets to enjoy the food. But so much of it would have been good for people to take home and eat later (or for lunch the next day) if only they'd had a way to keep it over night (the hall has a commercial kitchen, to which we did not have access, so the only refrigerator facilities available to us was the small fridge in the breakfast hall--I think the cooking itself was done by catering staff as per our contract with the site).
There was, alas, no dancing at this event. I did ask Her Majesty about it, since she is a dancing Laurel. She explained that she has been so spoiled recently with live music at every event she has been attending that she couldn't bring herself to organize dancing to recorded music at this event, where the only person with an instrument was a singer with a guitar who didn't know any dance music. I understood where she was coming from, but it did mean that my only exercise for the day was my yoga.
Sunday at Drachenwald events are just about packing up, cleaning up, and heading home. Breakfast was provided, but no activities were scheduled at all, since people had to drive home to Finland, Sweden, the UK, France, and distant parts of Germany. Despite the lack of official activities, it still turned out to be a fun time visiting with people, saying good bye, and making myself useful with some of the clean-up tasks. Site was scheduled to close at 14:00, and the clean-up was sufficiently well enough along that my driver was able to leave at 13:30.
She drove me into old-town Lubeck, which was once an important Hanseatic League City and dropped me there, armed with maps and bus scheduled provided me by the event reservation steward, and I enjoyed the afternoon exploring the island and admiring the old buildings--some of which date back to the 1200's, and most of which are from the 1500's or older. People put some effort into making pretty buildings in those days! Eventually I was too tired to explore further, so I hoped a city bus out to the airport, where I was early enough to take a nice long nap before proceeding through security (which wasn't yet open when I arrived) to wait at my gate reading my 1000 and doing yet more embroidery. My flight finally landed in Bergamo about midnight, which meant that I was back in Milano at 01:00, so completed my walk home by 1:30.
clovis_t was hosting a couple of CouchSurfers from Poland while I was gone (they'd first contacted me, but I explained that I would be out of town, but he would be in (since he decided to return to Milan after I'd purchased the tickets to Crown) if they wanted to stay with him), who were asleep when I got in (they had to get up early this morning to catch their flight home), so I did my yoga as quietly as possible and left unpacking till this morning.Today I had my first Italian lesson. The class started with the teacher introducing the class in Italian, which I rather expected. However, she then asked us to form in pairs (or one set of three, we being an odd number of students) and ask one another our names and something about our selves (in Italian), so that we could then report to the rest of the class what we learned. I found this part of class *very* frustrating--I can go anywhere to display my lack of Italian Vocabulary, I don't need to do it in the class I took in hopes of rectifying that problem! After that she gave a brief lecture on the difference between the formal and informal second person singular pronouns (with which I was already familiar due to the Italian Phrase book that
blamebrampton gave me when I passed through Sydney a few months back). However, she didn't use grammatical terms (like I just did), but rather gave examples of the use, and then listed off a variety of different sort of people (doctor, police, friend, etc.) and asked the class to state if we should use "tu" or "Lei" when addressing them. Alas, most of the words she used to describe people I was unable to guess at a meaning, and she had no photos to accompany that lesson, so I found my frustration levels increasing as she said something unintelligible to me, and the class said either "tu" or "Lei" and she'd say something else I couldn't understand, and the others would respond. Fortunately, before the frustration actually crossed the line into tears we moved on to our first exercises, photo copied from a text book. Finally, vocabulary given us to use! We had to work out the meanings of the words ourselves from the photos and the context, but the words were there, so when it was time to fill in blanks in a sentence, we could look at the example sentences and work out whcih word fit. I was ever so much happier with that part of class! When we moved on to listening to the correct pronunciation of a variety of words, and then had to use those words to determine the pattern to when to use which of the possible sounds made by the letters C and G based upon what vowel(s) follow it in a word I actually enjoyed myself. Pattern recognition is something I'm good at, and working it out for myself before she wrote the pattern on the board in full increases the odds of my remembering when to say the sound that in English would be spelled "ch" an when to use the one that I would have thought should be spelled with a "k".[edited to add: by the time I reached the event site the cold (or whatever it was) was largely past troubling me--I no longer needed to blow my nose regularly--just a few times a day over the weekend, and was not troubled by any other symptoms. I may not like the fact that I actually had to fight off a cold twice in one year, but I suppose that when the battles are so quickly won, I can't really complain.)