Ligia and I wish all of you a Wonderful and Merry Christmas! Should you happen to celebrate something else, then Happy Holidays to you and yours!
These are photos I’ve taken in the province of Transilvania, during the past several days, after a beautiful early winter snowfall blanketed most of Romania.
If you’d like to see Christmas photos from past years, here are my posts from 2007 and 2006.
Yesterday, the Seventh-day Adventist Church of Medias gave a charity Christmas concert at Sala Traube. The entry was free, but a call for donations was made halfway through the concert. All proceeds went to U.A.M.S. (Unitatea de Asistenta Medico-Sociala), a charitable institution run by City Hall, which provides medical and living assistance to the poor and the needy.
A large, 54-person choir, in which my wife participated, sang Christmas carols accompanied by piano and violin. The repertoire was as follows:
I am happy to announce that over 200 people were in attendance, and over 5,000 RON were raised for UAMS. (That’s about $1,700 USD at the current exchange rate.) That’s a really good sum considering it was raised in a small city, and in Romania.
You can watch the entire concert below, on blip.tv, or on YouTube in five parts (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5). Merry Christmas!
There was a nice little Christmas program at our church this past Saturday, December 19, 2009, and you can watch a video of the three groups which sang in it below. My wife planned the program, in-between planning her own art show, directing our church’s choir, and taking part in two separate choirs that each gave Christmas concerts this past week. Can you tell she’s had a busy agenda lately?
A children’s choir sang first, followed by the church choir. Then she read a short story, which she wrote the night before, and handed out Christmas sweets, prepared from her own recipe following raw food methods, with the aid of a friend. After that, it was a mix of carols from the church choir and a women’s group, plus a musical bells group (which I didn’t record, but which you can watch in action here).
http://blip.tv/file/2997419
Watch this video on blip.tv
You can also see me singing in the video, as part of the church choir. Given how different the photo on my about page is from the way I look now, I wonder how many people can spot me. Should be fun to know that.
This past week, churches of several religious denominations from the city of Medias got together and gave a wonderful Christmas concert, as they’ve done every year since 1989, at Margarethenkirche (Church of St. Margaret). It took place on Wednesday evening, December 16, 2009. I recorded video sequences from the concert, which you can see below. While I couldn’t record it in its entirety, I know a professional video team was on site with two cameras, and they’ll make their edited video available to the public in the near future, possibly even this week.
I need to apologize for the quality of the video… At the time, I had a cold, and was literally shivering up there in the drafty upper level, trying to hold the camera steady. It didn’t work very well, so the video sequences are quite shaky. I had to leave early, too, as I felt a fever coming on and didn’t want to make things worse. At least I stuck around until the choir in which my wife participated sang their carols (Seventh-day Adventist Church of Medias).
http://blip.tv/file/2997380
Watch this video on blip.tv
At the end of the concert, selected choristers from each church choir sang together in a unified, ecumenical choir. Unfortunately, I wasn’t around for that, but my wife sang in that choir, and she said it sounded heavenly. By the way, in the video, my wife is the very pretty, curly-headed girl on whom I kept focusing my camera. 🙂
This is a summary of articles I read and found interesting during this past week. The list is shared from among my feed subscriptions. I only share a certain number of articles in each of these posts, so if you’d like to see more, visit my full Google Shared Items list.
Raoul Pop 