The lyf so short

Yes, I got back from the Renaissance Dancing weekend yesterday, but I was too tired to write much afterwards. Actually I still am, so I'll make it short. And afterwards, there'll be the March kitten/Easter/chaos/dancing picspam.

We met on Lohra castle, which is in Eastern Germany in the vicinity of Eisenach. A beautiful place except for the Númenorean beds (i.e., wavy mattresses with a tendency to swallow you at night). To our surprise we weren't alone on the icy, wind-blown castle: There was an intrepid LARP group as well. They were dismayed at first to see that they didn't have the castle to themselves - which they booked and paid for, but apparently the owners messed up - but relaxed when they learned that we weren't some kind of retired people's hiking club or building project for incurably criminal teenagers but a LOTR fan troupe with a will to dance. Most of us were wearing garb, too, so when we had to march through their game to get to our dancing hall (the dancing room the castle owners had meant for us was way too small for thirty people, so we used another which was in the middle of the LARP territory) they could just pretend we were random farmers or merchants... They invited us to their tavern and joined us for the Saturday night ball, which was quite nice because we only had three actual men in our group and half of us girls had to dance in the man's place but for the ball almost all of us could dance the girly part. Yay!

The dancing was great fun anyway; it's so annoying when I go to the Renaissance dance group in Cologne and people sit around talking most of the time instead of, you know, dancing. So a weekend full of dancing was just the right thing. We didn't actually do Renaissance dancing only but danced, so to say, through the centuries, from the 14th to the 19th. My favourites were two dances from the Regency period, "Comical Fellow" and "Hunt". A Gallopede with thirty pairs and only one longway is rather amusing as well though :D

Great non-dancing moment: A break when we were all enjoying the sun in the windows while the LARP group was fighting a battle beneath our window. Leaving the dancing hall after the ball under a clear, starry sky and seven of us (the members sing in the Middle-earth choir) spontaneously sang the Passing of the Elves. *dream*
Oh, and the spontaneous snowball fight (stopped quickly by cold&wet feet, but still) at night in the courtyard. :D

So aside from cold feet from the icy wind on the muddy way to the dancing place and the messy kitchen and the really, really uncomfortable beds* it was a lovely weekend, and it's a right shame Daylight Savings Time stole an hour.

*I do not mind hard beds; it's the overly soft ones that try to eat you while you sleep that I don't like.

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( Also, der Tanz fängt an mit einem Dübel vor und zurück... )
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