Tag Archives: music

On the Christmas Eve excursion you saw in the previous post, we wandered around the super-fancy shopping mall for a little while. One of the shops there is a Steinway piano “gallery,” filled with some really, really expensive grand pianos. We’re talking literally hundreds of thousands of dollars for some of them. (One of them tried to justify that price by having a small diamond embedded into the body. I mean… what’s the point??)

Clearly we are nowhere near that level of nouveau riche to be buying anything even in the same universe as those pianos. But they were there for the playing, the salesman was friendly and welcoming, and Nyan loves to play the piano, so we spent a good amount of time in there.  

Not bad, eh? Check out the awesome lighting in this next video; that’s all the doing of the store – sorry, the gallery – not your humble photographer/blogger

Not that we would mind having our own grand piano, or even a real piano, if we had the space and the cash. We don’t have either, of course, so this will have to do for now. Not a bad way to spend a little time on a holiday though!

We’d been wanting to get Nyan into piano lessons for some time. Finally bit the bullet and did it: got a recommendation for a nearby music studio, signed him up, told him that if he wanted his Nintendo Switch, he had to do piano. He didn’t resist and started attending weekly classes in January. He actually seems to enjoy it! We are of course very happy about that. Here are some videos of young Nyan in his early days of tickling the ivories:

In class: 

They work on theory too, not just actual playing:

Here he is at home, showing off his knowledge of specific notes. (We were pretty impressed!)

There will, of course, be many more posts about Nyan playing the piano in the future…

For Mother’s Day in May, Nyan and Daddy accompanied Mommy to a production of the ballet, Swan Lake. It was a very nice performance, and Nyan did quite well with his first-ever ballet, sitting patiently, enjoying the dancing and the music, and not fidgeting much at all (although, about 15 minutes into the show, he did ask, “When are they going to start talking?”). 

The theater was in the western part of the island, pretty far from home, so we made an afternoon of it. That included a stroll to a nearby office building that has a lush garden on part of its roof – and features the Jedi master himself standing in a pond:

(Of course, Nyan had to do his thing where he tries to look miserable for the camera!)

We then headed to a nearby shopping mall for some food, browsing and – crucially – a haircut for the young man. Came out pretty well, we thought!

Before the haircut, we had dinner at a Japanese place, which featured mellow Japanese music playing in the background. Nyan did a sort of martial arts/dance combo. What can we say; he’s a goofball sometimes.