Mmmmm Festivals

Well, well, well festival time is upon us and I am kicking it off next weekend with Bungay Balls Up!  It is a ten day camping festival in Suffolk, England.  Then at the end of June, I will go to the Berlin Juggling Convention, mid-July the Prague Juggling Convention, and late july/early August is the EJC in Athens!!!!

For now, I am biding my time in Edinburgh, and take every sunny spell I can get to juggle outside in the park.

I wrote this post right after the British Juggling Convention and the British Unicycle Convention.  I saved it for now so my experiences would be in chronological order.

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I am strained and drained.  I just spent 2 weeks at the British Juggling Convention and British Unicycling Convention in Nottingham and Billingham, respectively.  The festivals were held back-to-back and in a convenient route back to Edinburgh; what a perfect match!

The trip back to England began horribly because I had arranged to take a bus from Galway to Dublin (about a 3 hour journey) at 2 am in order to catch an 8 am flight, so that I could have a full first day at the BJC.   About 15 minutes past the pick-up time, all the travelers at the bus stop began to get worried.  Soon it was half past 2, 3 o’clock, half past 3……where was the bus!!??  At this point, people started grouping together and hiring taxis to take them to the airport; at 300 euros a pop!  I decided it would be cheaper to book a flight the next day, instead of splitting a 300 euro tab.  Luckily, it’s easy to buy cheap flights off of Ryan-Air, so I ended up paying an extra 10 euros for another flight.  The bus company refunded me for my missed flight, refunded me for the missed bus, and gave me a free ticket for another bus journey.  It was a tiring hassle, but it didn’t end up as the worst thing in the world.  And what happened to the bus?  The driver never woke up for his shift!

My unexpected last day in Galway was much better anyway than my intended last day.  The sun was beaming, I spent lots of time loafing around the waterfront with jugglers (the remaining few who were not at the BJC, haha), and I had a proper huge dinner with Kate, Brad, Simon, and Ben.

The British Juggling Convention was amazing and huge!  It was the largest festival I’ve been to yet, and it has only built up my expectations for the EJC in Greece.  The BJC ran from Wednesday to Sunday, and it was held in a Sports Complex in Nottingham, which is in middlish-east (?) England.  There was on-site camping, on-site food, a huge tent for bands, dancing,and  entertainment, the WJF was holding their open exhibiton in another hall, and the first ever British balloon Modeling Convention was held in another hall.  There must have been 7 or 8 vendors including Henry’s.  Check this out – Henry’s offer a lifetime warranty and if you bring them your battered and beaten clubs they will repair them for free!  My clubs were in an awful sad state when I left Calfiornia, and they only suffered more from traveling.  The top had busted off of one, the knobs were bent on two, and a staple was protruding from the third.  Now, they are nicely patched up.

As far as shows go, I watched the BYJOTY, Public Show, an hour or so of Renegade, and a trapeze street show.  Unfortunately I didn’t hit up the WJF – I did see the competitiors practicing in the gym anyway.  It all looks a bit too mechanical after a while, and I think I had my fill of it in Humboldt 2 years ago. haha.  A small dose goes a long way!  I regret not watching a bit of it though….more to come.  BYOTY was great, all in all, but it just carried on for a long time with a “best trick” competitioin afterwards and it wasn’t clear if they were going to announce the winners after it, whcih is the only reason i stuck around.  So, I wasted about 1 1/2 hours watching lots of failed extreme tricks by kids.  For the first time in my life I actually saw a trapeze show that made me gasp, gape, and wonder how the athletes could pull off their stunts.  Most trapeze acts I have seen are very flawless, polished, and graceful, but this show, by Swamp Circus, featured clowns on trapeze!  The gimmick was a sleazy carnival-type barker trying to sell an “Elixer of Life” to the audience, and he demonstrates how it can keep you young and beautiful.  Then, out comes a very classy lady and she does a standard trapeze act.  Next, the announcer demonstrates how the elixir can go horribly wrong if you take the improper dosage.  Then, out comes 2 frazzled and bedraggled girls who stumble about and run into one another.  Then they do a pairs trapeze act that is flawless, but rough at the same time!  I really admire how they can maintain their haphazard attitude but still do hard physical stunts.

On Saturday, the convention moved locations and buses took us all to the city centre.  We were dropped off at the castle, built up on a hill in the middle of town, and were allowed to roam the grounds and juggle all over the place!  Then there was a huge parade from the castle to the main plaza, where the street shows and BJC games were held.  The convention was turned into a public spectator event, which I thought was really neat because it actually made people aware that there was a juggling festival in town.  There were so many unicyclists and jugglers roaming about the plaza; it was fantastic bringing the un-real attitude of the festival to the humdrum real world.  Some of the games I had never seen before included random prop endurance, unicycle gladiators (just pushing and shoving, no foam noodles), and one-footed jumping gladiators,   I played the last two and didn’t get very far. The one-footed jumping was almost like a mosh pit, yikes!

The public show was amazing and my favorite acts included an Austrian girl who did entire body contact juggling, and GET THE SHOE.  This is by far the best club passing act I have ever seen.  It started off with one juggler demanding of the other “Give me your shoe” and the other juggler replies with “Get it yourself!”  Then, the entire routine is a martial arts/ fighting club passing routine that was flawless – it was amazing!  The team was from Germany.  Thomas Dietz was in the show, and he came out in a tutu and spun poi – very badly.  It was a major disappointment after looking forward to a juggling routine.

At the BUC, I met a bunch of unicylists who were hosting the British Unicycle Convention the next weekend in a town not far from Edinburgh. So, I stayed with a mad girl named Maddy, who I usually hang out with at the conventions, because she only lived about an hour from the BUC location.  Thank you Maddy!  And thank you to Roger and Miark from unicycle.com for all the rides I needed!

The BUC was amazing!  It was such an eye-opener for all the new things going on in unicycling.  There were lots of street and trials uniyclists doing insane things that I have only seen in videos!  I am DEFINATELY getting some new unicycles when I get back to California.

Now,  if you think a juggling festival is messy, just wait until you go to a unicycle convention……..no contest!  Imagine all those juggling clubs converted into uniycles that take up much more space and have those pesky cranks sticking up into the air…….all disposed of in a small school – gym and hallways  – yup, I tripped a lot.

And at the BUC, I found all the jugglers anyway and did more juggling than unicycling…what can I say – I’m better at juggling!

Hello Scotland, Nice to Meet you Again

Helloooo Edinburgh! Yes, I am back in the ‘burgh and waiting for that sunny day so I can juggle on the Meadows.

I spent one month in Ireland participating in various shenanigans, most of which involved juggling. The first week was kicked off in Dublin with the Dublin Juggling Convention, discussed in the previous post. Then I headed out to Galway where I lived with Kate in a hostel for about a week. In the hostel, I met some really cool people who I kept in contact with after I moved out (so I had friends, yay!) and I also ran into a girl who I had met in the Edinburgh hostel – the travelling community is a small world indeed!

Kate found a flat about a 10 minute walk from the city centre, and I found the couch……satisfactory, haha. I had a killer St. Paddy’s weekend, in which I travelled out to south east Ireland to meet a poi spinner I had met in Edinburgh. Her family lives on a small farm in Westport and she invited me out to spend the holiday. They had a farmhouse over 100 years old, and it was awfully rural and cool! It was made of wood and clay and it was heated with a wood burning stove. The weekend weather was beautiful, and the walks around the property were stunning. We even hopped in a rowboat and floated through the wetlands until we came upon an ancient and abandoned farmhouse that we explored. The structures were crumbling and vines were growing all around the old junk left out and about.

Back in Galway, I saw the Cliffs of Mohr on a sunny day and they were just as majestic as the postcards looked. I went in a cave and I saw the peat bogs. One of the jugglers I met, Steve, invited me and a friend on a drive through Connemara county and he told us history bits and facts since his family was from that area. It was very picturesque (imagine the sheep grazing/stone walls/green pasture image) and we saw the remains of the old fields with ridges carved into them where they used to grow potatoes.  I have to give a huge “thank you” to Steve who was so generous to me!

During the last 2 weeks in Galway I juggled, juggled, juggled. There is a cute touristy street lined with shops that leads down to the waterfront where there is plaza called the Spanish Arch. If you ever want to run into your friends, the Arch is the place to meet them! On a typical weekend, it looked like a mini juggling convention – it was amazing how many jugglers would show up. There were also musicians, artists, and cool kids just hanging about watching the water flow by….  The pictures in the sidebar were taken there – Brad brought Connect 4, haha!

I started to regret my choice to leave Galway – it had everything I wanted. But the biggest juggling festival in Britain was calling my name, and I can’t resist a good festival!

Juggling in Dublin!

I went to the 8th annual Dublin Juggling Festival last weekend to kick off my stay in Ireland.  The most outstanding feature of this festival was, hands-down, the people.  The Irish jugglers were so friendly, genial, and really made me feel welcome.  I arrived in Dublin on the Tuesday before the festival, and attended each juggling club during the week.  There are 5 juggling clubs in Dublin!!!  I almost considered staying in the capital, but the city itself didn’t really capture my fancy.  Dublin is huge, spread-out, and everything looks the same.  It sounds a bit silly, but I would recommend skipping Dublin and head out to the smaller towns in order to experience Ireland.  Dublin mostly consists of shop, after pub, after shop, after pub, after shop…  However, I did some really enjoyable things like going to the National Gallery, Natural History Museum, monument hunting, park roving, coffee shop grazing, and…….OH.  I went to the MOST fabulous vegetarian cafe that I have ever been to.  It’s called Cornucopia on Wicklow Street in the Temple Bar district.  That cafe is reason enough to hit up Dublin.  Therefore, I take back my previous suggestion and insist on a visit to Cornucopia before leaving Ireland!

Back to the juggling….  It was nice to meet all the jugglers at the local club meetings before the festival because I felt like I had a starting point to talk to people.  There was a public fire show in the Temple Bar district (sort of the vibrant, cultural quarter)  on Friday night.  On Saturday the festival was held in a community centre not far from my hostel.  Some of the highlights included an 8 foot unicycle, a gymnastics mat maze, lots and lots of balloon modeling, and a secret renegade show!  At 7 o’clock we all met in front of the gym and buses were hired to take us to a secret location for the mystery renegade show.  It turned out to be a small town about 1/2 hr away where we could have the pub to ourselves for the night.  Basically, people would juggle on the dance floor, there would be about 45 minutes of renegade acts, and then people could juggle again.  I kind of remember the show disintegrating into chaos and eventually everyone was just milling about.  Somebody made a huge fire ball that we all watched get swung around in the car park…

All in all, the festival seemed thrown together in a hurry (there wasn’t even a website advertising the event!), but the fantastic Irish ways more than made up for lack of structure.  I met a great club juggler who rocked at shoulder rolls and reverse-back crosses, and I also met up with a fun  girl I had met at the Scottish juggling convention, and she had lived in High Street Hostel for a few weeks.  Her and her friends invited me out to their farm in south-east Ireland for St. Paddy’s Day, so I hope I can coordinate that in time for the weekend!

I was able to catch a ride to Galway with a juggler, and now I am exploring the juggling scene here.  I went to my first club meeting last night, and there is another one tonight.  I was a bit late last night, but I there are club passers here which I am excited about!  I tried something new – bouncing a ball on my head while passing clubs with somebody.  We juggled 5 clubs and bounced the ball between us, where the 6th club would go.

Oh, Ireland, this will be a fun couple of weeks until the BJC!

What’s the Craic?

Hello all I’ve posted lots of new photos from the Scottish Juggling Convention and the 7 day Highlands trip I took a few weeks ago. I don’t have much time to write about it now, since it took so long to load the photos. But check them out on

www.flickr.com/photos/britree

Scottish Juggling Convention

The Scottish Juggling Convention was fabulous! There were pirates galore, poi spinners, club passers, ball jugglers, club jugglers, diablos, devil sticks, unicycles, rasta shrines, a ceidleh, drummers, Jello-breakfast, haggis juggling, staffs, ball spinners, football jugglers, flying pigs, a science center, toys, and flair bartending. Whew, I think I just about covered it.

I went to Glasgow a few hours before the festival began and met Birgit to go to the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum. I thought the French artists were the most interesting, and I also saw the Salvador Dali painting of Christ.

The festival began on Friday evening and it was in a small building with several floors. There wasn’t too much space to juggle in, but there was a kitchen and a sleeping area so we didn’t have to worry about accomodations. On Saturday, the festival was held at a Science Museum for kids. All the exhibits were interactive and fun to play with. My partner in crime at this festival was a girl I had met at Durham and Leeds. We mostly liked to wander about and find pointless things to do. On Saturday we went up to the kids museum and played with all the exhibits.

I had to leave the convention late Saturday night in order to catch a bus in Edinburgh for a 7 day Highland tour. Unfortunately I missed the Jelly Breakfast and Haggis Juggling, but I had a great time regardless. Check out the photos on Flickr.

Booking and Looking

I have been booking and looking lately. I am always looking around Edinburgh for new things and still drinking in the sights and novelty of the architecture. In addition to lots of juggling, I have also been reading every day. I am learning about expatriates who lived in Paris in the early 20th century. It all began with a Regina Spektor song (“Poor Little Rich Boy”) , and one line sparked my interest in Hemingway:

“You’re reading Fitzgerald, you’re reading Hemingway. They’re both super smart and drinking in the cafe….”

I was going through a sci-fi phase that focused on government control over our lives (Faherenheit 451, the Disillusioned, Brave New World) and really got interested in Aldous Huxley. It amazes me how some people can be so insightful for their time. Huxley and Bradbury both had such amazing ideas about our modern world that are more than true today! Anyway, I went through a couple of Huxley books that reflect a bored and jaded American society (Chrome Yellow, Antic Hay). They immediately reminded me of “The Great Gatsby”, and when I was listening to Ms. Spektor I was inspired to check out a Hemingway book. I borrowed “Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises” by Hemingway and I really enjoyed it. I started researching Hemingway on wikipedia and ran across a slew of other authors who were unconventional. I was especially interested in women writers, and found out about Gertrude Stein. She is certainly not very popular at the Edinburgh library! I could only find one book called “Three Lives”, but I did find another book called “The Biography of Alice B. Toklas“, who was Stein’s partner, friend, and manager. Those two women led such interesting lives! Gertrude Stein practiced automatic writing, and they socialized with such people as Picasso, Matisse, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and other modern thinkers. It sounded like a very glamorous lifestyle, especially since they would go out decked in Oriental robes and strange clothes! Next, I want to get the biography of Isadora Duncan, a pioneer of modern dance.

Speaking of Regina Spektor, I am going to see her in Glasgow on February 19th! These upcoming weeks are bringing lots of excitement, change, and travel for me! This weekend I am going to Glasgow for the Scottish Juggling Convention. Then, Kate and I are going on a 7 day tour of the Highlands with MacBackpackers. The hostel was offering the tour at 1/2 price – how could we resist? Then, the Regina Spektor concert is taking place. Last, Kate and I are planning on moving to Galway, Ireland at the beginning of March.

P.S. I have uploded new photos on Flickr from the Edinburgh Univeristy Juggling Club, hostel, and city.

Learning and Listing

Here are the things I’ve learned in Scotland so far:

* How to walk in the rain without an umbrella.

* Sunshine is ephemeral, but plentiful.

* Absinthe isn’t really hallucenogenic.

* There are no secrets in a hostel.

* Wait for the green man before you cross the street.

* Music on the radio doesn’t get any better .

* It’s always a good idea to talk to strangers

* There are wonderful people wherever you go.

Here are the things I’ve learned in Scotland so far:

How to walk in the rain without an umbrella.

Sunshine is ephemeral, but plentiful.

Absinthe isn’t really hallucenogenic.

There are no secrets in a hostel.

Wait for the green man before you cross the street.

Music on the radio doesn’t get any better .

It’s always a good idea to talk to strangers.

There are wonderful people wherever you go.

Tales from the Soup

Working as a barista is hilarious. Chocolate Soup is the sort of cafe that is quirky looking enough to draw in tourists, locals, and your random psycho customer. It is located right in the middle of “The Royal Mile”, which is the most touristy street in the Old Town of Edinburgh. Edinburgh is split into the “Old Town” and “New Town”, but both sections are World Historic landmarks, so for an internationally underexposed California girl, I can’t tell the difference between Old Town and New Town buildings since they are are all towering, dramatic, and antique looking to me. Anyway, I am trying to make that point that the cafe is situated on the main drag, and that makes for very interesting acquaintances.

For example, the most famous customer we have is a Brazilian woman who holds the Guinness World Record for having the most permanent piercings on her body. Yup. She dresses in colorful clothes, has a crazy weave, and not only is she pierced to the max,but she also paints her face in greens, yellows, whites, and blues. I have never seen anything like it! She has a fortune telling set-up outside, and works the tourist crowd. Every evening she stores her tables in our cellar.

Sometimes, there’s a “slightly off” woman who comes in and tries to strike up conversations with the customers. She usually tells the same stories over and over, and when she finishes the punchline to her story, she usually remarks, “So what do ya’ think of that!!!” and then whirls around and sits down quietly to her cup of tea. It’s almost as if she was never talking to you the way she calmly sips her tea. Oh, that’s another thing, she doesn’t ever buy anything. She brings her own tea, mug, and asks us to fill it up with hot water for her. And then we obligingly wash it for her when she’s ready to leave.

Right next to Chocolate Soup is a square where all the local teenagers hang out. These are the sort that buy every single item they own from Hot Topic, and they have that sparkling new black look about them. Do you know what I mean? When I think of someone trying to pull off the rebel punk or goth look, I expect their clothes to be a bit shabby because that reflects their bad-assness. Well, not these kids. they are just caught up in the materialistic Avril Lavinge image. Anyway, like I said they are teens so they are forgiven. And as kids will be kids, they usually are running and screaming and flirting and generally making a youthful ruckus on Friday and Saturday nights. Once a tourist came in, and she asked “Is there a goth convention going on?” Oh, silly tourists.

Yes, the tourists make for lots of laughs. There are either the snobby tourists, happy-go-lucky tourists, or tired tourists. Those titles are pretty self explanatory, but my favorite ones are the ones that leave drawings or notes on the napkins. I’ve been saving all the bizarre things I find when I clean up.

Chocolate Soup has that “White Gap” look about it, in that the atmosphere is light, airy, and almost clean looking. There are two huge bay windows at the front of the cafe, where there are tables and square stools for people to sit on. The hot chocolates are served in huge bowls, and many are topped with mounds and mounds of whipped cream that usually make your eyes widen and your heart stop beating because you are either in love or repulsed with disgust. I’ll try to nab some photos of the creations sometime. Oh, that’s another reason I like working there, there are so many bizarre kinds of “creations” that it’s stimulating enough to work there making drinks. We have 15 different flavored syrups….that is reason enough for me to work anywhere!