Edinburgh Fringe

Well this festival certainly was on my bucket list.

Some 6 years ago I read an article about it in a newspaper where there were 4 full pages devoted to it.

Some background for a start?

Edinburgh Fringe festival is the largest arts festival in the world.

 It takes place every August and last for the whole month! The history goes back to the year 1947 when 8 theatre groups came to a festival to Edinburgh with the mission of trying to wake up the cultural life in Europe after the Second World War.

Gradually it grown into an enormous size. 

This year had 3,193 shows and 49 497 performances. 

Others cities

Last year my friend Lexie pointed out that there is also a similar festival taking place in Prague - Prague Fringe. The Fringe festival went beyond the Scottish borders. I Europe I went to a show  and went to one show and loved it.

Smartphone app

The fact is that the amount of shows is overwhelming and it is not easy to choose from them. The organisators of the festival organised the phone app which you can download for free and make your own planned of the shows, which suit you according to the time and topics. 

The earliest shows starts around 9 in the morning and the latest can be very late at night.

The people on the performances are singing, dancing, doing theatre and comedy performance in the classic venues. The topics range from sports, environment, philosophy, arts, etc. 

"When I did this show in Australia"

The shows are more or less same every day, at the same times. Some speakers do same their shows 25 days in a row. The speakers however sometimes make a common mistake. The starts saying "when I was doing this show yesterday" ,"I screwed up the joke this time", "people seemed to enjoy the show more yesterday"...etc. 

Well, this is not a nice thing to hear. Deliver me a unique experience, don´t remind me that you do this often or every day....that takes a lot of my enjoynment of it.

The crazy life on the Royal mile

The venues are not the only places that the performances are happening. The whole Edinburgh lives and sparkles. There are street artists are taking up every inch of the Royalmile (the main street in Edinburgh) doing their best to attract your attention, give you their leaflet.

My experience

I went to 5 shows all together. 

2 of them were comedies and 3 of them were targetted on the up-coming referendum. This is a very unusual topic that was covered in many many shows this year.

I really enjoyed myself seeing all that shows.

Freestival

The prices of the shows ranges from 5 to 50 pounds, but a part of the Festival is also so-called Freestival. All the shows there are for free. But what the tradition is, that you give few coins to the artist when you are exiting the place. Usually 2 to 5 pounds should be fine... depending on how much you liked the show.

Glen Cosby

What was very unique for me that at one point I was looking on my phone and I saw that one of the shows saying that the speaker in Glen Cosby. 

Glen Cosby was my media studies teacher 5 years ago when I was in England. It was him who introduced me to the beauty of critical thinking and made me think that this is something I would like to study further.

So I googled his show instantly and found out that he switched from teaching to baking. Yes, he does baking shows right now.

I went to see the place that he is and asked the assistant people and found out that he left already. BUT!!!! On my way back from that place I run into him and his husband! He actually remembered me and had a really good chat. 

What a highlight!

More information about the festival on their webpage.

Dumyat, vol.2

After numerous days of a persistent cold I decided to tolerate the annoying symptoms no longer.

What did I do then?

I went for a hike. A bit risky, maybe...but should definitely be worth it I thought.

Where else would I go then ... good old Dumyat.

How come I have not been there yet since I arrived in Stirling for the second time (technically third, but the first time was 10 years ago, so that does not count) ? 

No idea.

A link to my first ever hike up the Dumyat hill (8 months ago)

The hike?

What can I say...the joy of being able to climb that hill is almost undescribable. 

Although, quite short of breath, I was the happiest person there. I took a few pictures as a proof. Mind you there...I am not good at taking pictures of myself at all - which you will see just now.

¨

Arghh...the sun is in my eye!

Aaand just about to sneeze in 3, 2, 1...

Not capturing the whole face, whatever....

Finally an attempt to smile?

Went wrong of course.

Moooving on!

Did I mention how beautiful view of Stirling you can have from climbing Dumyat half way?

And those two pictures are for my friend Hazel...when in February we climbed up Dumyat, we thought that this tree is dead and we were quite sad, because it is a stunning one.

And now I find...it is alive!

Sheep are fluffy occupants of this hill, make it look cosy and also slightly make you feel like an inappropriate intruder.

Let´s look behind back again, shall we? Isn´t the hilly country just gorgeous?

Someone discovered how to make panorama pictures with a camera, so here is the first one.

 And one from of the top of the Dumyat hill.

 And another one of the Dumyat and the rest of the Ochilds.

The top of the hill

Reaching the top of the hill is unbelievable satifaction...and I don´t mean it in a sense "yeah, I did it", but it is incredibly rewarding on it´s own. 

The time that you spent bathing in your own sweat it just truly worth the view. The view is breath-taking - no panarama picture can ever capture that. It is as if the nature wanted to embrace you and you wanted to embrace it back.

The other day I had a conversation with my friend about meditation. I have never done it, but what I did there - I just sat there, closed my eyes and listened.

I listened to the wind gently blowing in my ears, I listened to my heartbeat calming down, I listened to the grass, I listened the bees flying by and I listened to the sheep occassionally calling each other.

In the end, I had no idea, how long I sat there, but if I ever felt relaxed (and I am not usually able to do that), it was yesterday, up on the Dumyat hill.

And, there is another horrible picture of me, on the top of the hill.

Right after this picture the battery in my camera gave up and unfortunately prevented me from capturing a really amazing situation.

On my way back there was a sheep standing on the opposite hill and since sun was setting, what you actually saw was the silhouette of the sheep on the top of the hill. 

Honestly, a brilliant highlight of the whole hike.

Lastly...

3 things :

1. Those of you who climb the hill, say to each other "yes we did it in five minutes less then last time", don´t even look around and hurry back down...you are doing it wrong.
2. Those of you who leave rubbish behind, you rot in hell.
3. Those of you who ignore the rubbish, you rot in hell too.

FYI...a curly anonymous person picked up and binned properly all of it.

Peace.

Julie is back!

Yes,

I
am
back
in 

Bonnie Scotland! 

Finally!

On the 18th of August 

( the beft gift I have ever given to myself for my birthday) 

I got myself  a flight ticket back.

Surprisingly enough...I got really stressed. I mean I do travel quite a bit and rarely get stressed anymore...but somehow from an early morning I could not find peace. Seriously, I cannot remember the last time I was so stressed and nervous.

Anyway, once I got to the airport everything was better I met my friend in the duty free shop that I used to work with there and we had a really good chat.

Later on in the plane I was sitting next to two Scottish guys Brian and  Martin and they distracted me by talking to me about their Eurotrip that started in Vienna and ended up in Prague. They actually did not make it any further, because they succeeded spending all their money in Vienna.

Let´s skip a bit. 

For few days I was a bit dead...I was taking me a bit of time to absorb the overwhelming happiness of being back. From the very moment I arrived to the train station in Stirling I enjoyed breathing the air, seeing the Wallace Monument and Stirling castle.

Once I recovered from the travel and excitement I started to explore again.

On one of our trips to a pinapple building we actually discovered two very interesting places.

The first place we discovered, because we got lost was a donkey farm.
Yes, I am not kidding...a donkey farm. 

They were actually cute and cuddly.

Few kilometres later (lost again, still not nearer the pineapple building) we found something I have not seen before. 

It was a ruin of a really old castle.

I mean like...waaay more interesting than any ruin of castle you can imagine or that you might have seen in a film. This was a breathtakingly beautiful ruin with fallen apart staircases and most of the stones covered in moss and flowers.

I even had this moment when going throught the ruins for the first time, there was a flock of noisy birds that I interrupted and with they suddenly and promtly flew away with making a lot of a scary noisy.

Please let´s not think that I am being too dramatic, but seriously, it could not get any more mysterious experience at the same time. It felt like abandoned Thornfield (if you are into Jane Eyre book) or way mora magical than any other Harry Potter book with the Hogwarts castle.

 It actually was one of those moments when you wish to have tonnes of money so that you can invest it in a good thing - this case scenario saving this beautiful building.

In the end we reached the pineapple building.
It was built when Lord Dunmore came back from his journey around Virginia and like this fruits which according to the legend also means "welcome".
It is said to be the weirdest building in Scotland. :)