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Adelaide Memories

Wednesday, 22 July 2009

Hey everyone,

We're back in Austria!

For nearly 3 weeks now we're back home again. The "culture shock" was probably even bigger when we came back than when we left Austria to spend 6 months in Australia. It may sound weird but after only 6 months of being away it almost felt like beginning anew in the first few days. It was pretty hard talking German again and the landscape, houses, busses looked so different. And we didn't really like the fact of starting dreaming in German again, because we didn't want to forget our English. 

But we actually settled in pretty soon, visited our family and friends, showed them photos and talked about our awesome time. Between Birthday parties, shopping tours and relaxing sunbaths at the pool, (Yeah! Now it's summer) we reorganized and cleaned out our rooms, to create more space for our new life full of music that we have been so looking forward to.

But unfortunately we had to leave all our Australian friends behind. During the last six months we got to know so many unbelievable amazing and also talented people that the goodbye was very, very hard.

Easygoing, funny, uncomplicated – that's some of our friends from Charles Campbell Secondary School in Adelaide.

The Australians in general are very outgoing people who are really easy to become friends with. Our host families made us feel welcome and home and helped and supported us whenever we needed them. Because we both went to a Performing Arts/Music school and were together with kids with the same interests, it was easy to make friends. And after a performance as "MonaLisa" in front of the whole school we were "common knowledge".

The last weeks of our stay in Australia we made the most of our remaining time. We went busking a few times and with the earned money we bough things such as dresses for school performances or little souvenirs and gifts. Because our debit cards stopped working for a while we had to make all our money with busking. It was lots of fun and a good thing to know that with our music we had something that made us independent as teenagers. Without this ability we would have had to borrow money from our friends, but with music we could help ourselves.
 

One horse power shows the tourists Victor Harbor.

Of course we tried to see as much as possible from Adelaide and surroundings. That included long bus trips through the whole city and memory cards full with pictures. Among other things we made a trip to the small German village "Hahndorf", spent a weekend with Mona's family at "Victor Habor" and for another three days we went to a pretty beach house in "Normanville" with some friends.

All these had been so many great experiences and memories we'll certainly never forget. Of course we took our guitars with us wherever we could and we were singing 24/7 anyways.

How could we have ended this wonderful time without a big goodbye party which we had organized together with our friends? Our friend KC got us a primary school hall for free and everyone brought money along for food and drinks. As 90% of our friends were musicians we also thought about having live music which wasn't a problem at all. At the end we had three different bands playing there. One of the bands called "Guilty Before Existence" has got their own myspace profile. Check it out ;) http://www.myspace.com/guiltybeforeexistence

The party was amazing. It was a pity that some of our friends weren't able to come because they had to work, but we still ended up as about 35 people. The bands were all great, we laughed and danced a lot as you can see on the video below. At the end we also played a few songs before the lovely evening ended with some tears. It was a wonderful day which we were allowed to spend with the coolest people of Australia.
 

Great atmosphere at Simon & Garfunkel concert in Adelaide

But we did not only go to parties, made trips around Adelaide or went busking in the city, we also had the opportunity to visit two breathtaking concerts. In March we went to see the "the Who" and at the end of June we enjoyed "Simon & Garfunkel" live. Both bands were absolutely amazing. Besides that we went to a few gigs of some local bands of friends.

We ourselves had some gigs with our school's choir, the guitar ensemble and the drama class – and one performance as MonaLisa. It was at the International Assembly where a lot of students performed songs or dances from other cultures or in other languages and we were supposed to sing a German song. We chose "Jetzt ist Sommer" (now it's summer) by the "Wise Guys" which originally is an A Capella song. But we played it in two voiced harmonies on our new guitars only. From that day on EVERYONE in school knew us, which was pretty cool ;)
 

Here we have recorded our version of this song so you get an impression of what the about 2000 students from our school got to hear from us. For the video we have cut the song together with some scenes of our Australian life.

The song tells about summers in Germany and Austria which sometimes can be very rainy and cold (like June 2009 was). The Wise Guys made a virtue out of necessity that summer is in our minds whenever we decide to have summer and that happiness is not a question of sunshine.

Just for fun we've translated the German rhymes into English ones which you'll find on the lyrics page.

The last six months we were able to improve our English, our guitar techniques, singing and organization skills. We met so many awesome people and spent a lot of time with our friends and families. We became the owners of two really great Australian "Maton" guitars, got to know and love the Aussie Lifestyle and experienced the most exciting time of our lives.

We are sad that this time had to end so fast but we look back at all the experiences with a big smile on our faces and who knows, maybe we'll come back to Down Under one day.
 

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Now that we're back home we can really start to work on our music. We're talking about intensive  practicing, expanding our live-repertoire, making videos and the most important thing: Eventually writing original songs and recording them!

We hope you guys have a lovely summer (respectively a short winter in Australia) and you'll hear from us soon,

Yours, Mona and Lisa
 

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