fringed

so i'm sitting at a hostel in cairns, australia which makes it hard to type blog posts. just for reference, it's winter here and the temperature has been floating around 30º C, which i have to get used to using but for the non-metric users out there that would be about 86º F. amazing, huh? i'm glad we didn't come in summer because that would probably about about 20 degrees higher, not to mention that UV rays that come blasting through. anyway, whole point is that the UK already seems so far removed and that's possibly due to the ridiculously long flight it took to get here. but i don't want to gloss over edinburgh. good ole edinburgh doesn't deserve that. edinburgh was great.

a bit of a disclaimer: i was there for the fringe festival, the largest alternative type festival in the world with some 3,000+ acts over the course of a couple months. that was great but it also created a wholly different experience than the everyday edinburgh. i have a feeling though that i still would have enjoyed edinburgh on it's own. the city, kind of like bristol, cascades down a large hillside. the most striking part of this is edinburgh castle which suspends over a cliff which can be viewed from most of the city. my hostel (castle rock, ★★★★ – not exactly nice for the same reasons the fort was nice, castle rock is massive though. funky decor, nice public spaces, a real backpacker's hostel you might say. wasn't as clean as the fort but had more personality) was actually just down from the castle so every morning i was afforded a nice view of both it and the stadium where the tattoo would perform each night. from there the streets spread out, up and down and diagonal throughout the city. there's a great mix of bars, restaurants, coffeeshops, second-hand bookstores, venues, etc. which of course makes its a great setting for a multi-venue festival such as the fringe.

i guess the real irony of this post is that i have about zero photographic evidence of what made the fringe so great – the shows themselves – as photography was prohibited in all the venues. i can still do my best to describe them but my best advice is to check them out online. the first day i actually missed my first booking, a walking tour of the city, as i got in later than had expected. not to worry as i would find a free one the following day. so the first act i caught was a night act, a candian comedian by the name of clark graham. i decided to check him out because a blurb said zach galifianakis likes him. and now i like him too because he was a funny dude. i suggest checking him out here, because like, how else can i describe a comedy show? that same night i decided to stop back at that venue because i saw a poster for an existential comedy show called squidboy, which was getting rave reviews. the best way i could describe this would be a seaman coming to terms that he's actually a squid and then the squid coming to terms that he's actually a seaman. it's a one man show full of imaginary friends and pantomime and a surreal kind of infantile silliness. the very kind of show i'd imagine the fringe is supposed to highlight. and then around midnight i caught a senegalese jazz band at a place named, appropriately enough, jazz club, however i've completely forgot the name of the band.

the next morning i found a really nice coffee joint, which i've determined is somewhat rare in the UK as they prefer the european style espressos, which means the dreaded americano version of coffee instead of delicious whole bean filtered coffee. but this place did it up right and had nice pastries so it was my go to place for the next couple of days. following that i went on the free tour i mentioned before. it wasn't as comprehensive as i imagine the paid-for version would have been but it ran about an hour, hit most of the places on the royal mile (the main thoroughfare running from the castle) and the guide hit the right notes of being passionate about his city and being a bit funny, so no complaints, especially for a free service (even though i tipped at the end). let's see if i can pass on any gems from the tour (otherwise what good would it be?): edinburgh alone killed more women than all of europe combined in the great european witch trials; the iron maiden supposedly comes from edinbugh, although they came up with a version that was so intense that it was banned in all other european countries (think about a normal iron maiden but with prolonged suffering involved); in order to study the human body edinburgh, whether knowingly or not, employed the services of two serial killers to produce observable corpses; etc. it was a grim and grisly tour, but then edinburgh has a grim and grisly history. later that day i saw another one person act, this time performed by gemma whelan (of game of thrones!), taking on the character of chastity butterworth, a posh type whose whacked out on uppers and can't quite contain herself. it's full of punny one liners and clever little short segments, a definite 180 from her character on game of thrones. finally that night i went to see bianco, an alternative circus type performance, like a rougher cirque du soleil. having never seen anything like it i can safely say i've never seen anything like it. it was, to use the type of hyperbole that reviewers are prone to employ, a triumph of the human body. the set, which i was able to sort of photograph below, was a transformative set of pipes and bars and ropes which were constantly being shifted and moved, which required the audience to move and shift right with them. at times you were on the outskirts looking in, othertimes you were on the inside looking out on the performers all around you. and it was all accompanied by a live band who played mostly rock music in a balkan style, sort of like golgol bordello or devotchka which felt totally appropriate for the type of performance. it was amazing. it was profound. it made me glad to be alive. i was on a bit of a high so i wandered around and found a bar that was open on one side and kind of had a barn motif? but there were free performances all night so i just grabbed a haystack and a beer and thats how i finished my night.

the last day i started off with coffee and a pastry. and then i went to a choose your own adventure documentary, which was a documentary about choose your own adventure stories but also allowed the audience to choose their own adventure through a series of inputs at various intervals. there were apparently 500 different possible endings to the story. the one we got was created specifically for the documentary by the original creator of the choose your own adventure stories. i won't give it away but it didn't end well. the frustrating part about that of course is that you never really get closure in the fullest sense. in a choose your own adventure book you can cheat and read all the different endings, but here you're stuck with one, but hey that's life isn' it? we're all stuck with the choices we make and maybe that's sort of the point of the documentary: some of us turn to page 27 and slip down a flight of stairs, hitting our head on a sharp corner killing ourselves instantly, while others go on to discover the secrets of the cosmos. i decided to turn to whatever page the national portrait gallery was on and check out the man ray photography exhibit, which was great. not only was the photography significant - man ray dabbled in experimental printing techniques, such as solar exposures, which are fairly famous - but it was interesting to see the subjects of the photography, many of them being surrealist contemporaries of man ray, such as dali and ernst, or authors such as james joyce. my last show of the fringe was an australian comedian named dayne rathbone. the show starts out as an awkward crawl, with dayne presenting himself as an uncomfortable tim heidecker type performer, and, much like an episode of tim and eric, gets progressively more bizarre. at one point audience members are up on stage acting like cats sucking at the teat of rathbone as the mother cat. and that's before he starts stripping. anyway i was crying by the end of the show so if you get a chance i'd definitely say check him out.

in between shows i was able to do a little bit of sightseeing, which you can see in the photos below. all in all i had a great time. i would definitely recommend edinburgh to anyone, fringe or not, but definitely fringe. i think i've described it as something i wasn't even aware as being on my bucket list but am incredibly happy to have scratched off. so, add it onto yours. you won't be disappointed, i promise.

i'll probably have another post to write off the UK. i did stop back down to england to hang out with abi some more as well as connie and francois, couple of friends from south korea. but after that it's gonna be australia from here on out.

some street performers street performing it up

no idea what building this is or whose statue that is, where's the time to look up those kinds of details?

they really were quite tiny

these guys were part of some kids show about dinosaur pirates

outside the national museum

bbc at the fringe

hostel on the left, castle and stadium on the right

castle

dude actually playing a saw

according to the tour guide this statue has a hole in the top of it from rain exposure. it also a hole in the bottom of it so it can drain. the hole, aptly enough, is in the horse's johnson.

our tour guide

haggis, neeps and tatties - dad's right, it does taste a bit like goetta, which is to say pretty delicious

the scott monument, named for sir walter scott. i climbed to the top of it which explains the following photos.

dat castle, dat overlook

sir walter scott

honest abe in some cemetery

this is up on a hill overlooking the city. no idea what anything is named though.

i call this "the tourists"

"the tourists, 2"

dad photo

this bit is out of order because they were taken on my phone. this is in greyfriars, a massive old cemetary full of sweet skeleton motifs like these.

the set of bianco

the last performance of bianco was this intense trapeze solo act and these suddsy snow flakes started following down on the performer. was quite nice.

stairs in the scott monument. got pretty narrow.