the shadow, as far as I see you are correct. You are working in what is called local coordinates (what most physicist do), I personally like to not work in coordinates as long as possible, and only do the last calculations in some coordinates, but that's because I work mostly with theoretical physics, and I would say that to do that and fully understand the underlying math, you would need a course in manifold theory and riemannian geometry. But you can learn the skill to work in coordinates all the time, if you only need to do calculations, but maybe then the whole thing can seems like a mystery, but guess that's ok, if you don't care why it works, but wan't to use the fact that it do, to make calculations on concrete problems.