Anyone going?
Anybody been in the past?
Loren
Gee, looks like Boxwood is really popular around here…
Oh well.
Loren
On 2002-06-24 14:39, Loren wrote:
Gee, looks like Boxwood is really popular around here…Oh well.
Loren
I think the 1400 mile drive (from here) has something to do with that. After paying $1000’s for flutes, we don’t have enough cash for the sea plane trip to the site. Go figure.
Well I tried Loren, but I’m low man on the vacation senority list this summer and Boxwood got nixed. Next year.
MarkB
Yeah, I know it ain’t cheap, but none of these things are. At least Boxwood has a work/study program that cuts the cost of tuition in half (already full this year).
I thought maybe I could sell a guitar or something and afford to make the trip this year, but the cheapest airfare I could find to Halifax was $395., add to that the cost of lodging and full tuition…no can do.
Maybe I’ll see you there next year Mark B…
Loren
That airfare is US, it is just as expensive for me to fly to Halifax from Windsor, Ontario, in Canadian dollars. Air Canada doesn’t do any favours for the people who subsidize it. I can fly to Ireland return, cheaper than I can fly to Halifax — go figure!!!
The good news is that next summer is the summer that I have first dibs on vacation time, and am already starting to save for it.
That will give me another year in which to work on the flute, so I don’t make a complete ass of myself. I’m having a hard time with it and not enough time to spend on it.
See ya next year —
Markb
That’s funny Mark,
I was hoping to go this summer so I don’t continue to make a complete ass out of myself for the entire upcoming year! 
Loren
[ This Message was edited by: Loren on 2002-06-24 18:23 ]
Yur right, but I don’t play the flute right now in public or in sessions, just don’t have all the mechanics happening at the same time. When alone and all is quiet and I have the time to focus, then something happens, I can manage several tunes at a slow speed.
And I just keep plugging away. There is no lack of tunes to try, I have been playing whistle and bodhran for twelve years. It’s just the time and trying to find a teacher, their scarce in this area.
MarkB
Yeah, I’m with you man. It’s very difficult to find instruction my area as well. Sounds like we’re in about the same bind 
Boxwood next year it is then!
Loren
I’d love to play with someone or work with a teacher as well. But, alas, all I can find in China are erhu teachers.
Anyone up for classical Chinese? or Mandopop singing?
Yeah, but that’s why you get the Big Bucks G. =;^)
Loren
Oh joy !! Someone else who doesn’t live in the US. China even. Boxwood looks great - but hell - the cost from New Zealand – sorry !.
I did get a bonus this year though - Chris Norman who is a Boxwood tutor I believe passed through NZ and I got to see a concert which was just great.
I suppose I have one advantage - it’s easier for me to get to Australia to try a McGee when it is time to spend and that has to be better than waiting for a turn on the roving ambassador system.
Keep up the banter guys - you never know where it is being read from do you?
Loren:
Big bucks? You get to rock climb, mountain bike, practice gong fu, play all those flutes and whistles…while I toil away 80 hours a week as a manufacturer in China.
It’s a yin/yang thing, for sure. What you get is not what you want, and when you get what you want, the desire kicks in to tell you you really want something more or different. If I didn’t have a family with two awesome little boys, I would want to be in Boxwood, play music, volunteer as an (old) apprentice flutemaker with Pat Olwell.
Such is fate. 
Alas!
Warren,
Good to hear from someone in NZ!
Greg,
I was kidding of course
Yes, I know all too well about the price one pays in return for those high paying corporate jobs - that lifestyle almost did me in, and I seriously can’t imagine ever going back. Being single with no kids though, I do have that option. In fact, if Pat were hiring an apprentice, I’d jump right on that!
Loren
With nine and half years to go till retirement, with no chance of early parole, I to have thought that if given the chance to jump from where I am as reference librarian, it would be a flash of bright light and a pile of dust.
Four summers ago here in Windsor, I met a man from Algeria at the reference desk, it was the day that I happen to have two bodhrans with me at the desk and was demonstrating how to play it to the music librarian. He asked me to show him and I did,that is when he introduced himself as a professor of music from Algeria and his speciality was percussion of North Africa.
To make a long story short, we got together at his place and I spent the summer in his basement learning the different techniques and rythyms of North African drumming,with me teaching him the bodhran. He has since moved on to Alberta. I don’t know if he has found a academic position or not.
So I would run away to the world to follow the rythyms of the drum, of course I would also pack my two favourite whistles and my flute.
In whistle playing and now the flute, I owe a lot to this forum and the whistle forum and its knowledgible members in their countless questions --how do I do such and such — and the immediate response and threads that kindly reply by saying – try this.
I read, I try, and keep trying until I find what works for me, I don’t dismiss anything until I find that it works for me or it just to difficult at that moment,or abandon it all together. Through my years as a visual artist, I have learned discipline, to work through problems if the idea is worth pursuing and not to rush – and find my own way!
So in actuallity, these forums and those who kindly take the time to explain something, and the glorious fact that an answer can come from anywhere in the world even at times when the question has been asked a dozen times are my teachers.
MarkB