For the curious:

That's us:

Our Projects:

Our Background:

Have a Look:

Come on in:

Write:

german

Home > MonaLisa News > Goodbye Concert to Australia

Goodbye to Australia!

Saturday, 10 January 2009

Today we are reporting from Austria the last time before we steam off to Australia!

The next 5 months we are going to paint Adelaide and neighborhood red!

And we mean that literally as they currently have midsummer with bizarre 45° Celsius (113° Fahrenheit) there. You probably heard already in the gossip factory that we will spend a student exchange semester in Adelaide.

Each of us will visit a Highschool there that has specialized in (you have 3 guesses ...) music and art! They offer subjects like drama, dance, media (making websites, videos, music recording) and of course lots of music - instrumental and vocal. These schools are well-provided with recording studios and huge ball rooms that have large stages including professional lighting. Students regularly perform stage plays and musicals and bands play concerts there. Yeah, that's exactly what we have in mind!

The basic intention of going to Australia is to improve our English. One can do that best in an English-speaking country. Each of us will live there with her host family for five months. Yes, you read correctly: 2 schools, 2 families. We separated on purpose in order to know how it will be there on our own. But don't worry! We are in the same city, and if we should get hit by longing for little sister, we just catch the next bus and go shopping or to the beach together.

We are very looking forward to get known to a new culture and we are curious about how the "Aussis" will be. Per the cliché they are sports-mad (may be more like passiv sportsmen in front of TV) and masters of BBQ. Well, it could be worse ;).

Of course, most important for us: If we want to write lyrics ourselves in the future we not only have to talk English, we must think and live English. Idioms, humor, how they express their feelings, that's all a lot different from German. And we hope to get a little insight into this world.

Beatles for Goodbye

But before we take off to "Down Under" we wanted to say goodbye from our families and friends appropriately. And what do MonaLisa consider "appropriate"? - Correct: A concert! Whereat it is to say that we only had a short of two weeks to study and practice our program, namely winter holidays. Anyway we didn't want to make nothing. This time we intended to perform Beatles, the hot stuff.

"Kansas City", a song that we played at the end of our Beatles-Concert.

As Daddy and Michaela were fully stretched with video cutting and CD/DVD producing they had not much time to practice. So they played only some pieces with us.

For the main part (about 13 songs) we had a special band this time, namely our guitar teacher Erwin on the bass and our drums teacher Michael on the drums. We both were on the guitars and mics and rocked in two voices.

Unfortunately a little accident happened. We had built up all our monitors orderly. These are louspeakers that are on the stage pointing towards the musician so that he can hear himself while singing and playing. But by a bad coincidence the monitors were off during our performance. That's why the full sound of the loudspeakers went into the audience (which was good), but we played in the "thin". We wondered somehow why it sounded so dry, but we didn't realize that it were the monitors. And for that we have to say that we didn't sing soooooo false *hahaha*. Just joking, of course we messed up the one or other tone, but the atmosphere was good and it grooved very well. The audience shaked to the music. People were kind of surprised and delighted to hear rock songs from us (as the 1st live concert mainly were ballads).

Of course, we wouldn't call the show perfect, but for a paid concert we wouldn't have practiced just two weeks and we wouldn't have played with monitors off :). In return we did a good show and were quite relaxed on stage. It was something new for us: not only to play but to open up to the audience and create some vibrations. We think that we did it pretty well. It is also to say that Mona who is basically coming from the drums, this time only played guitar (which she does not do that long yet). And right at her first such gig she sang second voices as well and performed very nice guitar soli too. Not for nothing did Erwin on his bass grin at us from time to time. We think he was quite proud of us. He really enjoyed to play a concert with his own students.

This time our music teachers were the band! Erwin left, Michael right.

A mega-thankyou goes to Erwin and Michael who also had only two weeks to practice 15 songs and to let them sound Beatles-like. We had only two rehearsals together where we very well cared about all the characteristics of the instruments like the Beatles used to play them. Without Erwin and Michael we couldn't have performed such a show.

During the whole evening people passed a little guest book round where they wrote and drew their messages and wishes for our Australia stay. But we are not allowed to read them before the plane takes off. A friend of us also filmed and "forced" our guests to leave us a video message which we can watch in Australia too. We are very curious about that. Thanks to all who came up with something!

And the winner is ... Oliver himself!

And we should not forget to tell about our contest. After we gave a little power point lecture about Australia we asked our friends a question. (To which state does Adelaide belong? Answer: South Australia) The winner could choose one of our CDs or DVDs. Everyone took part in the game, and so did our 6 year old cousin Oliver. When it came to drawing we needed someone to pick out one paper slip. Someone in the audience suggested to choose Oliver as he was the youngest. He didn't need to be told twice. He jumped on the stage and picked out ... his own piece of paper! Hahahaha, we were all rolling on the floor laughing. Oliver was overhappy that he had won the DVD and obviously enjoyed to be the center of attraction ;).

California Video Show

	To the California Videos!

As another highlight of this evening we showed our three "California Videos" that we had just released. For that showing we had rented a beamer and a huge screen to show them off to their best advantage. Our audience was very impressed and especially Daddy earned many compliments from our guests as they knew well how much work he had put in this.


	If you'd like to support our projects, click here.

Thanks a lot to our parents who again spared no efforts to organize us a great party that we will never forget.

We have left a short of 10 days before we start! We are so excited already. But there still is a lot to do - packing, shopping, cleaning our rooms, etc. So, don't let us keep you any longer :).

We will keep in touch and very soon will write about our Australian music adventures!

Take care,

Mona and Lisa

5 back to news-overview 5 top of page

testfooter