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.