Thursday 27 May 2010, The Culture Trail has become a team working together; painters, actors, dancers, musicians.... We arrived at the boat after the world music concert at midnight and began to prepare our leave. Chicken legs in the oven, eggs on the boil, wash the salads for sandwiches, cut the salami, butter the bread. We packed it all ready for the next days hunger.
The travel day to Soltvadkert started at 5am and a quick coffee on the boat before leaving. Mother duck and her fledglings were out early too and their tranquility allowed for a quick breather before packing the red cross beds together to return them to the 'Katastrophen Lager', the warehouse for catastrophies. On the ship for a few days alone and with little contact to the outside world we were a bit like the artists refugee camp, a term coined by Patrick from the Netherlands when he saw all the red cross beds in the very large container type of room on the ship.
By 6.30 we had packed the trailer and got all other bits and pieces together. On the road for Würzburg, Nurnberg, Passau, Linz and Vienna. Then in to Hungary to Budapest and then south to Soltvadkert. |
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From the Culture Trail's first festival in Frankfurt.
The point of meeting for all the artists is a ship on Frankfurt's river banks. The band arrived first. From Spain, France, Ireland, Southern Germany, Poland and the Netherlands they came in from all corners of Europe. The rehearsals began and the ship took on a different form of rockin'. The Whitsun weekend passers by were attracted by these new-comers on their beat.
The first festival day began quiet with room to get used to the style of living, eating, working and travelling together – a whole month of theater, music, literature and dance started to take place.
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Soltvadkert- Festival, day 1 |
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Saturday 29 May 2010 
Robert was the first one up this morning. Irish dance workshops from 8am until noon. A large number of children and adults met him in the old culture centre of Soltvadkert in a large room which holds the towns local modern dance group. |
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Soltvadkert- Festival, day 2 |
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Sunday 30 May 2010
Both the Protestant church and the reformist church had full congregations this morning. A little extra for them was organised by Lajos, Soltvadkerts tourist and culture director. In the one church Philippe acompanied Thomas, Judith and Antonio from the theater group on the piano and in the other church Ingo, Peter and Bob from the band played as well as Grzegorz on his zither.
The different groups were then invited to lunch by the church leaders.
Robert had spent the morning with the Roma dance group learning some of their steps. Later the workshop was joined by Bekir, Jonathan and Miguel. Patrick was still sleeping off his second palinka night. The time was passing very fast now with just an afternoon and evening left in Soltvadkert. Patrick and Bob took the cam corder and camera and went to some of the host families houses.  Bobs host family was first, a Schwaben-German family who came to this town in the late 18th century. Janos Köhler, the father is a wine maker and his wife teaches in both German and Hungarian at the local kindergarten. |
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31 May 2010. Travel day from Soltvadkert (H) to Schwemsal (D)
At 5 am Bob was up and packing the 70 litres of wine in the van he had bought from his host family, the Köhlers. Janos senior has vinyards for both red and white wines. Bob chose a light red wine. It is to be a surprise for not just the artists, but also our next hosts in Schwemsal and further along the Culture Trail.  All the artists met at the Culture House in Soltvadkert to pack the luggage and get on the road. All of them had packed lunches with them from their host families and the odour of paprika sausage, tomato, garlic and spring onion mingled in the air with the freshness of the early morning smell of awakening flowers. Some of the guest families and translators were helping with loading, whilst others were boiling water for a final coffee. |
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Schwemsal Festival |
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Schwemsal 1 June 2010
Awakening to the aroma of coffee on the boil and fresh rolls out the oven the lads made it quite easily out of their beds in the guest house. Ute and Gottfried, our hosts have been active already for a few hours preparing everything. Robert, Patrick, Bekir, Thomas, Judith, Antonio and Bob were ready to go at 9.30 with Ute to the evangelische Grundschule in Bad Düben. The evangelic school has 120 children aged between 6 and 11 years of age. Our three workshops took on almost 70 of the little ones.  They were thoroughly enjoying themselves with paint workshops, Irish dance workshops and a theatre workshop. Bob left them all to their kids and went off with Ute to get the bits and pieces needed for the tour. Getting gas for the van, sending off film and foto material to their friend in Frankfurt, Thomas Tschur, who is cutting all the film material to make a documentation film of the whole Culture Trail. A quick visit to the foto shop to get an extra sb card for the cam corder and then back to the school to take an interview with the music teacher. |
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