Today I met went into London to meet up with Olav. The plan was to meet at 2pm right in the middle of Trafalgar Square. I got there a little bit early and discovered there was a concert of some sort going on with a huge big screen at one end of the square. Every now and then they would do a soundcheck with some keyboards and orchestral instruments. Not knowing what was going on I thought it could be interesting if this thing started at 2pm! Anyway not long after that I met up with Olav and the concert hadn't started. When I met him I also found out that Rita and Kari were also in town and they were on their way. They were over for Kari's graduation, she studied Lighting Design or something similar in London for a few years and has only just moved back, in June, to Norway. She now works in a theatre in the south of Norway doing lighting.
We decided to go and grab some food and a drink and I got to practice my Norwegian. It was a bit hard at first but after a little while pronunciation and vocabulary started coming back again(to some degree). For the rest of the afternoon we just wandered around in town. There's a fair bit of life on London on a Sunday, you've always got a street performer of some sort a musician, people, cars, buses etc. etc. After wandering for a bit we found a little cafe to sit at and were entertained by a musical construction witches hat, yes the orange rubbery ones that they put on roads. It was played by a guy called Ivan I think. I'm not sure whether it was the guy or the witches hat that dictated what came out but the repetoire consisted of only three songs, without words. Very entertaining though, listening to "What shall we do with the drunken sailor" mumbled through a witches hat for an hour.
After a bit more wandering and talking in Norwegian vi bestemte oss å spise litt mat. Så funnet vi en liten.... oops sorry. ...we decided to have some dinner. So we found another restaurant and had some food. It was fun catching up with the Sivertsens. It's always a worry when you havn't really spoken the language for quite a few years not knowing how much you'll understand, but I survived. I caught up on everything that had happened back in Røros. The aim is to go there for Christmas, so I'll see it all first-hand then.
At about 7pm we decided it was time to make a move so they headed back to hotel and I thought I'd go back and find out what was going on at Trafalgar Square. 1.5hrs later in the rain and darkness a concert started that was a showing of a 1920's movie called Battleship Potemkin about a revolution on a ship directed by Eisenstein a famous Russian film director. It had been re-scored by the Pet Shop Boys, so they were there performing it with a small orchestra. It was very Pet Shop Boys, with lots of electronica combined with strings and horns and that distinctive voice. I only lasted about 45mins before I decided to head home before freezing. The problem was that as I was there early I was in the middle of the crowd and it took about 10minutes of pushing through people to get out. There were apparently about 25,000 people there.
Then I caught the train back to the station and drove home.
No comments:
Post a Comment