Since we are poor, poor volunteers but want to discover some culture in the same time, we look for events with a „for free“ note. So my flatmate Mireille found a free concert of Indian classic music in the opera of Brasov on Sunday.

Naïve and curiously, we went there in the evening and discovered a very beautiful opera filled with some unusual Indian spices in the air.

Well, this was the beginning of an incredibly strange, strange, strange evening. Because we didn’t read the title of the evening properly, we sort of missed the fact that it wasn’t just Indian classic music, but some Indian yoga-meditation-thing as well.

The two middle-aged musicians started music which is pretty hard to describe. In the programme it said “Harmonium si voce” and “Tabla”. After three 10 min songs (which sounded like one very long song to me) the strange part of the evening began.

The leader told the audience to make some bizarre moves with the hands and pray to the woman who invented this Indian yoga meditation thing.

“Say ‘I am not guilty’ while putting one hand on the top of your head and the other on your leg”  was only one part of it. The big photo of the woman stood in the corner of the stage surrounded with flowers. “Say ‘I forgive everyone in the world’ ten times” he continued.

And the strange thing: The fully crowded hall did all of this! Mireille, Jennifer and I were the only spectators laughing quietly in the back of the room. We sort of felt being in the middle of the meeting of a sect like Scientology…

Well, this meditation or praying or I-have-no-idea-what-this-is-all-about lasted for about half an hour. After this, the last song of the ensemble motivated the audience to dance in the opera. One woman two rows in front of us did some incredibly strange dancing moves which I couldn’t describe at all. All I can say is that we felt the need to laugh in secret again.

So in the end, we stumbled out of the opera with many question marks in our faces. Where have we just been?? Was this real or just in our imagination?