Gera Off The Beaten Path

A few minutes northeast of Gera you find the town of Altenburg. It has around 40,000 inhabitants and is world wide known for its Skat cards. Landmark of Altenburg is the Castle. Built in 12th century and remodeled to Baroque style between 1706-1730.

The next scene would show our suave and dashingly handsome hotel guest being greeted, not by a human receptionist but by this lovely Hotelomat Check-in machine.

After poking around at the touch-screen for a while (this will give the composer a good opportunity to write a buffo aria with several silly verses), he is finally rewarded with a loud clunk as his room key drops down into a tray at the bottom of the machine.

Then there would have to be some spooky music as the guest unlocks the deserted hotel, makes his way through the deserted lobby and past the deserted reception desk, up a deserted elevator, through another deserted corridor and finally arrives at a perfectly ordinary hotel room.

Greiz is a town of 26,555 people (at last count) in the Elster Valley 33 kilometers south of Gera.

When I was asked to conduct a teachers' workshop there I first had to look at the map to see where it was (it sounded vaguely familiar somehow, but I couldn't quite place it), and then just to make sure I sent an e-mail back asking if they really meant Greiz and not Zeitz, which is about the same distance to the north of Gera.

They really did mean Greiz, which turned out to be an attractive but *very* quiet little town. On a Friday evening the only open restaurant we could find was a Greek place on the second floor of a sterile new shopping center. My colleague thought she remembered a nice little restaurant in the Old Town, but when we finally found it there was a sign in the window saying "Restaurant for Rent."

At my workshop the next morning I was surprised to see a number of familiar faces. Turns out they were teachers who had been to previous workshops of mine in Gera, Leipzig, Reichenbach or Dresden. I thought it was really nice of them to come all that way to Greiz (sorry Greizers, please don't take it personally but any trip to Greiz is bound to be "all that way") just to attend my workshop.

The third scene would show our suave and dashingly handsome hotel guest eating breakfast the next morning in the hotel, while gazing out at the scenic roof of this picturesque 21st century shopping center.

(I don't know what kind of music would fit this scene, but that's what we have a composer for. I'm sure he or she will be able to come up with something appropriate.)