Traveling To The World Of Art

I’ve always been a big art enthusiast. I had tampered with the idea of becoming a fine-arts major. Practicality and life, however, directed me to language and literature – beautiful art forms in their own rights. Though, in order to quench my thirst, I did take a few fine arts courses on the side. I never expected to use that knowledge practically though.

I was set to go to Germany to visit my cousin and take a break from life. I had been using language apps to try to learn German in order to impress my cousin- or at least learn enough to get by! Sadly, duo lingo left me with enough vocabulary to say milk, cat, please and good morning, but nothing that was of genuine help for my unexpected artistic escapades.

My cousin knew I was passionate about art, and was nice enough to take me to the Stuttgart art museum. There, I saw paintings I studied about. I saw them right there in front of me! I couldn’t believe it. He then surprised me with tickets to see Cosi Fan tutte at the local Stuttgart opera house. The opera was in Italian with German subtitles projected on a screen above the stage. Needless to say, their voices were amazing, the acoustics were wonderful, and the vocals mixed with the tunes of the live orchestra took my breath away. Unfortunately, I understood nothing. Though upon reading the subtitles I did realise that words in German are relatively easy to break up. Also, after breaking those long intimidating words up, understanding the fragments wasn’t that much of a challenge.

On my way back home, I decided that if I really wanted travel to the world of art I had to pick up an extra language or two. It was also clear that language apps weren’t going to help me with that. I decided to start with German since I have relatives there and visit frequently. I also have my eye on Italian. After a year of learning German at pomegranate, I’m finally going back to Stuttgart this summer to put my language skills to test, and I have a sneaky suspicion I will redeem myself.