People Pics

The RRFCS Tubeteers

I've travelled with people who stick themselves into every picture they take on holiday, as if there was no point in taking the photo without proof that they were actually there, grinning inanely in front of this building, and the next one, and this one too...

I don't.

Others only ever take photos of people at parties. Just people being silly and making faces and such. Every photo with an unattached shoulder on the side.

I don't, at least not often enough.

But just occasionally, I do. Or my camera gets into other hands and photos are taken. So here is a little exhibition of some of my friends/colleagues at RRFCS.

Hannes and one of the many Marks (9 at RRFCS?)

Ilias

Mattias Kahl and Ilias

Hirad

A hairy chested man with Hanne, Christina, Fiona, Guiliana (all of unknown hairiness).

Pierre & Guiliana

Pierre dancing, or possibly skurking away from his latest victim

Macho Hirad

Hmmm

Anna, inspecting Hannes' nipples

Alex, wondering what...

Edinburgh Festival Fringe

So I have a girlfriend in Germany, limited leave, and not so much spare cash, so what do I decide to do? Take another few days off to visit her... NO! Take a whole week off and fly to Edinburgh, alone, for the Festival Fringe.

I am living the dream! Why? Because I love comedy, always went to the Melbourne Comedy Festival (the 2nd or 3rd biggest in the world) and missed such things while in Sweden. Actually, I lied a little about being alone. A German friend who I met in Sweden has his girlfriend in a flat in Edinburgh, and he was going to be around at the festival start and offered me the floor for the first few days, so that probably added that little extra bit of motivation to make the plans.

The Edinburgh Festival Fringe incorporates comedy, dance, musical theatre, theatre, street theatre and has ~2100 shows over 3 weeks in several hundred venues, not including the simultaneous Jazz and Blues Festival, the Book Festival, the Military Tattoo (which adds 8000 people per night to the streets) , and with a staggered start the “proper” Edinburgh Festival.

It was great. I was there mostly for comedy, and saw 20 shows. Prices were generally around 10£ each, though big names charge up to 17£ for their hour, which makes it actually quite expensive when you think about seeing at least 3 shows a day.

I paid for the following shows:

• The Liar Show
  
• Two Drummers Drumming (actually just talking, not so funny)
  
• Greg Fleet (a great aussie veteran, and even my german friend laughed at the half he understood)
• Tim Minchin (One of the best. Has a great love song that might be called "If I didn't have you, someone else would probalby do, statistically speaking" see the featured comedian from 05/08/08 http://www.myspace.com/comedyuk )
• Aluminium (an Israeli dance show in the vein of Blue Man Group / Stomp etc using funky balloons and expandable piping http://www.aluminum-show.com/)
• Mark Watson (English comedian from my favourite show Mock the Week - youtube it, seriously)
• Reginald D. Hunter
• The Jim Rose Circus. Been around a while, but I never saw it until now. A strange mixture of really lame stunts and some shockers.
  
• Office Party (an audience participation thing set up like a real office party where the audience are the workers, with staged entertainment, bar, dance-floor, competitions. Great premise, but could have been better.)
• The Wau Wau Sisters (An Acroband - they do acrobatics while guitaring and singing. Cool)
• Mould and Arrowsmith - Sketches via Powerpoint. (A pretty good sketch show)
• Anaes Faversham -(a great victorian era murder mystery with great character style comedy. A pleasant change from all the standup I was seeing)
• Kiddy Fiddler on the Roof - My winner for best name! It is a musical, about, well, what happens when accusaions of pedophaelia start flying.
• Stephan Golaszewski talks about a girl he once loved (one-man monologue, great)
  
• Spank! - the best night I had, this being the midnight to 4am show with various comedians popping in. Great atmosphere amongst the drunk crowd, and OK, so some acts fell flat, but it was a good mix. A Norwegian couple who didn’t seem to be enjoying themselves and were probably discussing where they would do the laundry tomorrow got heckled by a comedian from the stage, but they just didn’t get it. Other performers could promote their shows – if they nuded up on stage to do it. Highly recommended!

I think my favourite joke comes from Loretta Main (aka Pippa Evans), who after doing a gruesome song about ex-boyfriend revenge, made the disclaimer “I didn't really do all those things. I called the ambulance before it got too serious. But I did give them the wrong bloodtype, so now he knows what rejection feels like!” Okay, maybe it's in the telling.

There are also quite a few free shows. I saw several, and they ranged mostly from unbelievably bad to just shit, with the odd exception.

• "I kissed a frog and it gave me herpes" was excellent, both in script, acting, and laughs
• "Hollywould but doesn't think she'll bother" - the other end of the scale. I only stayed because I couldn't get out. A one woman show, with no point, no jokes, no acting ability, and no more words should be wasted
  
• The next-worst act was on the first day where one of two comedians cut the set short because he couldn't remember the few bits of new material he had, and he didn't write any new material because he had indigestion.
  

So beware the free stuff!

Otherwise, the city is pretty cool. It is hilly and craggy, which means there are lots of little laneways and long staircases to explore which take you to places unintended. Which is fine on a lazy afternoon when you just want to wander, but can be confusing, annoying, and then physically tiring, when you can't find the right path to go from the underbelly streets up to the top ones in the pouring rain when you only have 5 mins to the start of the next show...

... and yes it rained bucketloads. Floods actually, as almost a month's worth of rain fell in one day.

I managed to pick up a bit of the Scottish lingo; they really do use aye as a standard response for yes, and wee for many things small but not golden.

Smash means to be out of notes and have a purse just filled with coins. Everything is a weapon if you use it right.

And the thick Groundskeeper Willie style of Scots is more a Glaswegian thing than an Edinburgh accent.

And of course there are more varieties of whiskey than you could think of to try.

So if you are a festival person, definitely make the pilgrimage. You'll love getting harassed by all the promoters with their flyers, the constant pleading for payment from street performers, the constant question "So have you seen anything good" to everyone you meet in every queue you stand in and every ticket counter person.

Just remember, you can't possibly see everything you want to, so don't stress over it (like I did one day paralysed at the ticketing tent). And if you go at the start of the fest, there hasn't been much time for reviews or buzz to develop over the acts, so its all a bit of a gamble, but pick a show with a funky name, and hope for the best!

Some pics:

Insert predictable "he's checking his cock-a-leekie" joke here



Tobias and Anne, the "local"

Artistic blur at the Jazz Cafe

Not the best angle of the Underbelly Pasture- it's a cow upside down!

The Castle

Overlooking North Berwick

More Jazz Cafe artistry

Loughborough - You're Living In It

Here are some misc pics in and around Loughborough. Minimal comment, maximum contrast.

An oak in one of the few remaining bits of the old Sherwood Forest, around Nottingham

One of several pubs claiming to be ye Oldeste in England. "The Old Trip to Jerusalem", built into the wall of the foundations of Nottingham Castle

A frosty Winter morning

Beacon Hill, the 2nd highest point around Loughborough

Overview of L'boro. Like Clayton, the highest building is the uni dorms.

Dunno what this pose was meant to be...

Alex: Also German, also a Rolls-Royce employee (technically a student), also living in my house

Note the ominous grey skies. This is summer in England, folks. And yes it rained shortly afterward.

Funk master Maceo Parker, live in Leicester.

So this is what happens when you attack the wrong end of a can of tuna

Tomomi visiting London from Japan...

...who was also here at the same time as "Albers" the Swedish Stone-crushers from Sandvik, Anders and Albin. Duncan and Peta from Glen Waverley / East Burwood in the back row.

BBQ at my place, the first for the "summer". Anders (Sweden, Sandvik stonecrusher), Christina (another german RR employee but not a housemate), Albin (Sweden, Sandvik stonecrusher), Hanne (Denmark) and Philipe (Ger, RR, not a housemate)

My house. Not on the left, the corner terrace on the right.

The end of my street - the bright lights are the cinemas, basically next door to the town hall. Yes, I am living it large in the middle of the city, er village, er township? Hamlet?

The Skoda in Easter

Red brick terrace houses are all the rage here. And they are all the same red brick, and go on for blocks and blocks. New houses don't look much different

One minute beforehand, the ducks were all lined up facing the wrong direction, but I was cameraless. Would have made for a much better picture.

Living room - now complete with electric drumset. Still loud enough to annoy my housemates, but not the neighbours. Unless I plug it into the guitar amp I found hiding in the roof...

What happened?

Me (new glasses - you like?) over Loughborough

I've been in the UK for 6 months now and I can't believe I've hardly written a word about what's going on here! What happened to June – not even one pic with a hollow sounding promise of more details soon, not a bad pun in sight, or an obscure tv reference? Compare this to my Swedish blog where every slightest cultural difference was chewed over, discussed and digested like one-too-many a bad meatball metaphor, here I am treating the daily British experience just like a warm, flat, English ale. Nothing to write home about.

But write home I should, and that's my problem. Things aren't as different/novel/exotic here (to me) as they were in Sweden. Sorry to the small numbers of dedicated Swedish readers out there, but I still consider my main audience my family and friends back home in Australia. And for them the concept of "fish and chip Friday" is not as interesting as “pea soup Thursday”. Which I don’t think I ever actually wrote about, but you get the point. We in Aus have a strong tie to ye olde mother lande, and know the beer is warm, the chips soggy, and the peas mushy. Our forefathers and their forefathers, the BBC and a whole lot of backpackers all tell us about this green and pleasant (but grey and miserable) land. Who did we have to inform us about things Swedish? Just a muppet who can only says "bork".

Also, I am way busier. The daily pressures keep up a very high pace, and I am simply not home as early and am more tired, and seem to have more things to organise than before. I have an electronic drumkit sitting in the living room that I’ve hardly played. A trombone gathering dust in the corner and blogs unwritten... but it isn't all bad news. There are also lots of holidays to plan (next comes the Edinburgh fringe festival and over 2000 shows to choose from).

I also don't live alone, but in a share house, so there are a few more distractions which means less time in front of the PC. In actual fact interacting with real people rather than virtual ones should be a good thing. The only problem is that 2/3 of my housemates are also work with me, so I spend about 20 hrs a day within 5 meters of them. And work-related conversations are rarely avoided.

Combine these factors and I guess I just don't find my life as desirable to talk about as it was at the arctic circle, and I seem to have less time/will to do it. And the most interesting stuff about work... I can't really talk about for confidentiality reasons.

But I’ve never been known to not whinge when given the chance, so here goes my first list of “Things I can’t quite come to grips with”. There are definitely some things that are really, really "british". And the first:

-“ You right?”

Said with the exact same tone of voice a concerned friend would use if you had just tripped over, or given yourself a papercut, this is the English version of “G’day”. The tone of voice is too enquiring for me to treat it as a greeting, and I am constantly wondering if I look like there is something actually wrong with me. And an appropriate response to “You right?”, is of course “You right?”. Now that’s wrong.

- “Kit”. A very English-ism, this is used every time you or I would use the work “gear” or “equipment”. Except for actual gears on a piece of kit.

- Not great fish and chips. This surprised me, as I expected this Bastion of Britishness to give me great fish and chips. But instead... I’ve had really good fish, but almost never had good chips and for one main reason: they are usually pre-cooked and sitting around. Even the fish! It is rare to get everything cooked to order like at home, especially on a Friday when the demand is huge.

- The mix of metric and imperial units. Lots of metric is around, except for miles when driving, and pounds (weight) and gallons appear in fine print on labels. But when I wanted to I couldn’t find an imperial hex-key in the lab for the life of me last week!

- The invasion of US style coffee chains. Lattes are weak enough as it is, and when I first saw the same measly shot of coffee go into a ‘regular’ as into a pint-glass sized "large", I quickly got used to ordering a regular size but with a double shot.

- The weather. It is shit, simple as that. During the week of midsummer we still had the heating on at night and I changed back from my optimistic purchase of a summer doona to an autumn one. It is raining right now, and due to the wind I’ve gone through 2 umbrellas already. I’ve worn shorts on only a handful of days, and naturally the fine weather is during the week, during work hours. Even when it is sunny, it is often too windy to hang out washing outside without it being blown off the line.

-Curry, which I can’t not think of as Indian, has been absorbed from India into English cuisine and is as common in pubs as a chicken parma and appears on home dinner plates as often as pasta.

-Living costs aren't so much of a surprise after Sweden. Things are basically expensive. The trouble is you have exactly the same brands, sometimes with exactly the same numbers on them, but there is a >2:1 differential cost, so a pack of biscuits for 1.50 is really about 4$AUD. Pizza Hut was the biggest shock for me: a standard pizza was 30$ AUD! For 2 pizzas a drink and some sides, it cost 18£ (~45$).

- Wall to wall carpet in the bathrooms and toilet. Just plain wierd and unhygenic. And also there are no power points in the bathrooms. Just a little thing, but absolutely none of the (2) houses I've lived in have them.

So what is good about living here? The countryside is really beautiful, and certain areas like the Lakes and Peaks district (see earlier pics) are gorgeous. Some old castles and manors are cool, and London is reasonably close – I just did a day trip last week to catch up with friends, do a bit of shopping and listen to a bit of jazz. And Europe is still close by – I’ve been to a conference in Switzerland, Vienna for a long weekend with Christina, and have plans for Edinburgh...

But Loughborough is again a small, student town, which gets empty in the summer and has little to do in it on a weekend. It's not London. It is hard to imagine settling down here long term... but work is good and it is too early to make long term plans. Is it an improvement on Lulea - no and yes.

Anyhow, that’s enough words for this post. More pics and details to come, I promise.

Our house, in the middle of the street...

In Vienna, Shönebrun Palace