Edinburgh Diary: Day Two

So, Ryanair screwed me over...

When I booked my flight to Edinburgh, I was semi-outraged to have to pay €15 each way for my checked-in bag. So, you can imagine how objectionable I found it when I arrived at the airport on Wednesday morning and was told I would have to pay €15 PER KILO that my bag was overweight. My bag was 17.8 kilos, which apparently is 3 kilos too many for Ryanair (rounded up to the nearest kilo) and warrants a surcharge of €45.00.

Would. You. Be. Able?

I forked out the cash (well, put it on my newly-acquired credit card) and decided that I was not going to let myself interpret this as a bad omen for my four-week stay in Edinburgh. To Ryanair’s credit, I made it to Edinburgh safe and sound, and on time for my 10am training session.

The training was daunting to begin with. I sat in a room upstairs on George’s Street (which is slightly more grand than our Irish equivalent) and watched as beautiful, trendily-dressed, arty-looking person after beautiful, trendily-dressed, arty-looking person filed into the room. I wished to myself that I had managed a few more exercise sessions before I came or given a bit more thought to the clothes that I’d packed but The Assembly Staff addressing us were really nice and their scatty introductions helped me to relax a bit.

The venue that I’m working in is fairly awesome. It’s a bit like a mini-castle or a church. It has it’s own courtyard called ‘the quad’, lots of portraits of people I can only assume were important at one time or another and seems to play host to Edinburgh University’s School of Divine Studies when not being used as a Fringe Venue.

There are 24 Front of House staff, a lovely, Australian Venue Manager called Gabby, and two Front of House Managers, one of whom is mildly attractive but, rather tragically, has a girlfriend. The pretty people I’m working with all seem friendly enough. I’ve yet to establish a ‘crew’ but hopefully that will happen in time…

In the short time I’ve already seen three shows. The first was ‘The Gala Assembly Press Launch’, which was basically a variety show and featured an onstage meltdown by Michael Barrymore. I wasn’t sure whether to feel sorry for a man that’s clearly still haunted by his spectacular fall from grace or to boo and hiss when he told us not to see his show until we’d ‘learned to be a proper audience’.

‘Krapp’s Last Tape’ by Samuel Beckett, performed by Peter Dineen (who apparently was in ‘Father Ted’) is appropriately described in the Fringe programme as ‘a work of peculiar beauty’. To put it simply: it was weird but I liked it.

Lastly, I saw Jason Byrne tonight performing his ‘Cats Under Mats, Having Chats with Bats’. Byrne’s humour is as silly as the name of his show and I never really liked the stuff I’d seen him do previously. That said, I was definitely impressed with his performance tonight. I liked the way he could speak to someone in the audience and make up something funny off the cuff as well as make something rehearsed look completely spontaneous (like when he conveniently 'tripped over his words' the exact same way he did at the Gala Press Launch to set up a sketch.)

I reckon I’d be a fairly desperate reviewer because I’m far too easily pleased. I’m hoping to see two more shows tomorrow after work so maybe I can ‘get the knives out’ then?

Probably not though.