I never thought I would enjoy going to a four hour opera. When i received professor Ugoretz’s email about the opera I was anything but excited. How could someone sit though a four hour play- nonetheless an opera.

When we got there, I realized that A Midsummer’s Night Dream would actually be done in English. Most people who have previously been to operas were upset about that, but I was very happy that at least I’d somewhat understand what was going on.

I really enjoyed A Midsummer’s Night Dream. The scenery, the costumes, the people’s voices- were all amazing. I was very amazed at the scenery and kept wondering how it worked. I was surprised to see that the fairies were so young, I thought most people in the opera were older, but I was clearly mistaken. It shocked me when those little boys entered the stage, especially when I heard their voices and how amazing they were.

While I wouldn’t go to the opera on my own, this was a great experience for me. It may not be a “real’ opera, because it wasn’t in Latin, but for me this was better. I wasn’t really a fan of the very long breaks which made it seem longer than it should have been. But all in all, I did enjoy my first opera experience, and maybe I will even convince my family, who have never been to the opera, to go to an opera. I’m sure they would like it just as much as I did!

I’ve never been to a photography museum before so I was excited to go to the ICP today.

The museum was, I guess, just what I expected it to look like- pictures everywhere with a little description card next to it. However, as I got to look at the pictures on the first floor, I really just wanted to get out of there. Some pictures were rather disturbing to look at and I couldn’t understand the photographers purpose for taking the photographs and displaying them in a museum. Then I went downstairs, hoping that the pictures would be easier to look at. the first thing that I noticed was that all the pictures on the lower level were in black and white and most were taken in the early 1900s. As I looked around the lower level, I began to see many differences between the two floors. The top, very colorful and bright, and the bottom, very dull and in black and white. There was one similarity, however, both photographs on the floors seem to have portrayed some sort of struggle depicted in them. The top floor – struggles with one’s body (i.e. infected body piercings, amputations, deformities) and the bottom floor- social struggles (i.e. poverty and intensive labor). That was pretty interesting to notice.

As I was looking at the black and white photos, one photo stood out to me. It was because of the Hebrew writing in the picture. It was a picture take in 1912 called “Blind beggar and poor children.” It was a picture of a fee market type area with one guy, the blind man, holding up a sign that read “Help the blind man” and directly under it it said the same phrase, but in Hebrew letters (with English pronunciation.) It took me a while to understand that the Hebrew letters didn’t actually spell out Hebrew words, but English words written in Hebrew letters. I tried looking at the background of the picture to see if there was anything else outstanding in the picture and I noticed three little Jewish-looking boys looking at the blind man. The picture was really interesting because it made me question what was going on at the time that the picture was taken. Where was it taken and what kind of town was the picture taken in that the blind man felt the need to translate his phrase to Hebrew- and then again not even to full Hebrew? The picture just made me think a lot , and I stood there looking at the picture from all different angles for a while.

All in all, besides for the few disturbing photos, the museum was really great and portrayed a nice timeline of history and the present day.

Waiting outside for the jazz concert to begin I was excited for the unknown. I’ve never really listened to jazz music and it didn’t have any significance in my life.

When the performance started I liked the upbeat music. It was catchy and I found myself bobbing my head along to the tune. However, as the performance went on, I realized it was taking a slow, downbeat turn. The tunes were very mellow – like something I would listen to to put me to sleep. It was very soothing to listen to.
Before listening to the jazz music, if you asked me to describe jazz in one word I would say saxophone. So naturally I expected to be hearing a lot of the sax. But that wasn’t the case. Most of the time it was only the piano, base and drums playing. That was a little surprising to me, but when the saxophone started up, the music became very upbeat.
The musicians looked like they were so into the music, moving their bodies and tapping their feet along to the beat.
The drummer was amazing. I was in awe at the things he was doing.
Although jazz may not be my type of music, it was really an experience that I probably would have never had if not for the Macaulay program. Overall, I really enjoyed the night.

I am not very interested in art museums, so when I found out that we were going to the Brooklyn Museum I wasn’t really that excited. I knew what I was expected to do- look at a painting or sculptor and talk about it for five minutes. All I could think was  ” Five minutes?! I’ll be lucky if I could talk about it for two minutes!” It seemed like an impossible thought to me.

However, when we split into our groups I chose to work with two of my friends from high school- one that goes to Brooklyn and one to City college. I’ve always shared hilarious moments with these two girls so I thought that this museum idea might actually be fun. We went in search of our first piece to talk about and found a carpet. We talked for about 3 minutes until the guard kicked us out and made us delete the recording because we weren’t supposed to be in there. I was a little upset, not because now I had to go and look for more pieces to talk about, but because I really liked the ideas we came up with about the carpet’s design.

While describing the three pieces of art we chose to talk about, I realized that everyone looks at art differently. No one person has the same opinion on what the artist drew. I actually had fun looking at all the art work in the museum and trying to understand the meaning of the works. Even though I didn’t think I would enjoy the museum that much, it ended up being really interesting and I liked looking at art in a new way.