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June 22, 2008— in San Juan

It's been a while since we had an overnight bus ride on tour. It was pretty stuffy upstairs on the bus, downstairs was more reasonable. It's not impossible to sleep on the bus, though the roads were at times rather noisy, but it can be difficult to not feel like you're still on the bus when you're needing to do something on solid ground. We had perhaps our most important concert this evening, and fortunately we had most of the day to relax and prepare. It was quite cold when we arrived in San Juan. We started with rest period to take advantage of the beds.

On our way to the concert hall, we see more dogs everywhere. Some seem to belong to houses, some clearly are stray. They're everywhere. They leave the humans alone for the most part, but there's almost this whole other community on the street. Very odd. They don't seem unhealthy; there's plenty of trash in the streets to pick through. I've only seen one cat so far.

After a midday tour meeting we had lunch, then another rest period and some recreation before showers for the performance. We got to Auditorium Juan Victoria. We walked right in to rehearse, and it is an amazing concert hall. Thanks Page! The acoustics were very impressive, and it had a big stage for us to spread out. We had a good rehearsal, then headed to dinner in the cafe in the concert hall, where we met our host, the President of Mozarteum, the organization that brings artists to San Juan for performances. He said they had Vienna Boys Choir here three or four times, so it was nice we had a chance to show we were worth performing on the same stage.

Mr. Tarango ran very efficient dressing rooms, both before the concert and during intermission. We were asked to provide 75 minutes of music plus an intermission, so this would be the most music we were to sing yet. We had a couple subtle blips which most in the audience probably didn't ntice, but on the whole the concert went very very well. The stage presence improved and the singing was our best yet. The audience was very enthusiastic, and we did two encores: Dont' Cry for me Argentina (in Spanish) and Hey Jude (in confused English).

The audience cheered loudly, and we were invited to come back to San Juan on our "way back" from South Africa next summer.