Yesh Li Blog: Central City Opera Weekend 2010

Friday, July 09, 2010

Central City Opera Weekend 2010

This weekend we embark on our 8th annual Central City Opera Weekend. The picture below comes from their website here. Also, I recently discovered another excellent resource, the Central City Opera Festival Blog: Behind the Curtain.

Along with two other couples, we spend Friday and Saturday night at our favorite Bed & Breakfast, the Chase Creek Inn B&B, nestled just around the corner from the hustle and bustle, the flashing lights and electronic sounds, of Blackhawk's casinos.

We see two of the three operas offered this season by the Central City Opera House Association.

On Saturday, we'll see Orpheus in the Underworld by Offenbach.

And on Sunday, we see Puccini's Madama Butterfly (photo taken from the CCOHA web site).

We relax in the B&B's hot tubs; enjoy the gentle breezes in the rocking chairs on the porch while listening to the babbling brook (Chase Creek) and watching the hummingbirds and chipmunks.

We take walks into town or into the nearby mountainous countryside. Friday night has become the night to walk to the Ameristar casino and enjoy their fine buffet. Coincidentally, the Chase Creek Inn B&B is "an historic structure saved from demolition by the Midcap family. The top of the structure was moved from the current site of the Black Hawk Casino by Hyatt (currently the Ameristar) and placed on a long abandoned mining site."

Then Saturday we reserve a table after the opera in the Teller House's Face Bar for a fine meal provided by the Kevin Taylor Group.

All in all, this is a weekend we look forward to with eager anticipation throughout the year. It is a weekend to relax, to unwind, to enjoy time with friends, and to appreciate marvelous music in the splendor of the majestic Rocky Mountains. Does it get any better than this?

Check out previous weekends here: 2009, 2008, 2007.

3 comments:

andrafaye said...: What a great way to spend the weekend!; 6:56 PM
Bonnie said...: I love that this is your EIGHTH annual Central City Opera Getaway !!Sounds like so much fun !!; 3:26 PM
Central City Opera said...: Thank you for the wonderful blog post. We hope you had a fantastic time. What a great combination of things to do in one weekend.; 3:46 PM

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Why Yesh Li Blog?

Why do I have a blog? Quite simply, I have a blog to share my favorite things with others. The right side of the blog has a long list of links to some of the places on the Internet that I visit often. In addition to sharing those with others, I often come here myself to find a quick link to where I am going.

Bonnie, our eldest, led the way into blogging with her Simple Beauty Blog, and later with her extremely popular Beans Blog. I decided I would give blogging a try and thought "I have a blog" might be a clever name, but in English it sounded rather lame, so I did it in Hebrew, a language I love more and more the more I learn it.

What does Yesh Li Blog mean?

We would translate (i.e. interpret) yesh li blog to mean "I have a blog" in English, but the literal Hebrew means "There is for (or to) me a blog." You cannot literally say "I have" something or other in Hebrew. It is always "there is for me," or "there is for you," or "there is for us," etc. Hebrew, the language of the Bible, is showing us that we are really stewards of what has been provided for us and for our use. Rather than private ownership, perhaps a better term for what we "own" would be private stewardship.

Languages have been my passion since at least the fourth grade, when I studied Spanish from a library book called Fun with Spanish. In high school, I was the rara avis that became enamored of Latin. In later U.S. Navy tours of duty in Spain, Italy, and Japan, we did our best to learn the local languages. Along the way, I studied some Russian and picked up some Greek by studying etymologies and some Chinese by studying Japanese writing systems.

My first introduction to Hebrew was in the early 1980s, when I took a correspondence course, but it was not until the past decade that my primary focus has been on this wondrous language. It has been deeply rewarding, and especially in the past few years since we met Ori, an amazing Israeli woman, who has become not only my primary Hebrew mentor but also our good friend. Moreover, the small group of people who meet weekly to study Torah in Hebrew in Boulder have become dear to us and enriched our lives greatly. Further, reading Jewish commentaries on the Web of the weekly Torah portions has deepened my own faith and opened up new understandings of the scriptures we share and of Christian writings based on those scriptures.

The pursuit of words has been an essential part of my life for many years (since birth?). Many things have changed in my life, but I don't see that part of it changing any time soon (until death?). Lehitraot! Shalom, Chaverim!