Festival Fun
It's amazing what you see during Festival season in Edinburgh, as the out-of-the-ordinary becomes the norm.
I nipped out for a sandwich at lunchtime, and in the 20 minutes I was out I saw a ginormous purple cow, a busker wearing a hat shaped like a piece of Swiss cheese and singing a song about a whale (I only heard the first line but it went something like this: #baby beluga, swimming in the deep blue seeeeea# - GENIUS!), and an elderly gentleman, dressed impeccably in a lovely suit and a trilby hat, tripping over a paving stone and shouting 'FUCK' very loudly, right in my face.
Yesterday I saw a man dressed as a tomato handing out flyers. And when the fire alarm went off in the building next door to my office, the flyer-hander-outers descended on the poor evacuees like a swarm of locusts. Within 5 minutes there was an impromptu circus underway, involving fire-eaters, gymnasts and a lion tamer.*
I'm used to the Festival having lived in Edinburgh all my life, and I love working in the city centre during this time of year** but it can get slightly annoying trying to go about your daily business with all these tourists ambling about the place (see footnote below). I'm also quite disappointed with how expensive it's getting. I'm going to a couple of things in the Book Festival, and a couple of things in the Fringe, but that's probably all I'm going to be able to afford. However as I realised today, even just walking about the Old Town is entertaining enough, and that's free. Auld Reekie puts on a damn good show.
*Ok, I'm exaggerating, but wouldn't that have been FUN?!!
**Well, I do until I have to actually GET SOMEWHERE FOR A SPECIFIC TIME. Oh my god why do tourists walk so damned slowly? And MUST they walk 4 abreast so that they take up the ENTIRE PAVEMENT? Don't they realise some people still have to work and catch buses and get to Kookai to return a pair of ridiculously expensive trousers before it closes?!!
I nipped out for a sandwich at lunchtime, and in the 20 minutes I was out I saw a ginormous purple cow, a busker wearing a hat shaped like a piece of Swiss cheese and singing a song about a whale (I only heard the first line but it went something like this: #baby beluga, swimming in the deep blue seeeeea# - GENIUS!), and an elderly gentleman, dressed impeccably in a lovely suit and a trilby hat, tripping over a paving stone and shouting 'FUCK' very loudly, right in my face.
Yesterday I saw a man dressed as a tomato handing out flyers. And when the fire alarm went off in the building next door to my office, the flyer-hander-outers descended on the poor evacuees like a swarm of locusts. Within 5 minutes there was an impromptu circus underway, involving fire-eaters, gymnasts and a lion tamer.*
I'm used to the Festival having lived in Edinburgh all my life, and I love working in the city centre during this time of year** but it can get slightly annoying trying to go about your daily business with all these tourists ambling about the place (see footnote below). I'm also quite disappointed with how expensive it's getting. I'm going to a couple of things in the Book Festival, and a couple of things in the Fringe, but that's probably all I'm going to be able to afford. However as I realised today, even just walking about the Old Town is entertaining enough, and that's free. Auld Reekie puts on a damn good show.
*Ok, I'm exaggerating, but wouldn't that have been FUN?!!
**Well, I do until I have to actually GET SOMEWHERE FOR A SPECIFIC TIME. Oh my god why do tourists walk so damned slowly? And MUST they walk 4 abreast so that they take up the ENTIRE PAVEMENT? Don't they realise some people still have to work and catch buses and get to Kookai to return a pair of ridiculously expensive trousers before it closes?!!
This entry was posted
on Wednesday, August 09, 2006 at 1:51 pm.
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