Norwegian speciality

Thursday was a special Norwegian day (Saint Olaf), so we were served a special Norwegian dish. Rice porridge with dried meat. The description of it raised quite a few eyebrows. I thought it was very good, though it was quite strange to turn a sweet (desert) dish into a savoury lunch just by adding prosciutto and dried salami.
It was very multi-functional though: someone had it for breakfast on Friday morning and some of us had it for desert on Friday evening.

Asker prep week

We moved into the rehearsal space in Asker, and in true NIE style it only took us half an hour to make a mess and feel at home. Also in true NIE style we've been playing a lot of volleyball.


It's great to have a week to really look at the show and work on it before going to Edinburgh, as over there there will be no space or time to adjust anything.


The school we rehearse in is across the road from Kjell and Iva's house, so we're all staying there and have lunch and dinner there (in the garden if the weather's ok).


On Monday our new tour kit arrived: it is beyond me why flightcases would be wrapped for transport, but they were: two cases for the set and two guitar cases.

On Saturday we will play a lo-fi version of the show for some friends and then we're off to the Fringe Festival.


As I'm writing this, Sasha lost his first tooth. He will be 5 on Sunday, so there will be a big party then.

Edniburgh here we come!

Holidays are over. I could tell you many stories of my holiday in the land of the golden smiles, but this is not my blog, it is NIE's blog. But to keep up traditions: I now sport an Uzbek haircut, which you can come and see at the Pleasance Two every day at 5.30pm.

If you want to see stories or hear photographs (I've just travelled for about 14 hours...), I've learnt a lot about bribes. So come and find me at The Pleasance, watch the show and afterwards I will show and tell. If you buy me a coffee. Or a beer. Or dinner. Or a Vespa Scooter.
If you buy me a Vespa Scooter, I might let you cut my hair and then you will appear in the International Haircut section of this blog.

So tomorrow we will all join in Oslo to spend a week rehearsing My Life With the Dogs so it's in top shape for the Fringe festival.

I must say it's cold in Europe...

Last show in Linz

In a few hours we will play our last show, which is at the same time the last show of this year's Schäxpir festival. It's been a busy week, and we've had lots of fun, both with the shows and in between the shows.
This is our week in pictures.

Autographs

Brass band after the rain

Beautification

The man in the moon

Tomorrow we all go home and then NIE's summer break starts. We will be back at work at the end of July, to get ready for Edinburgh in August.

Ssssscchhhhäxpirrrrrr

We're back on the Schönbrunn in Linz, and this time it is boiling hot.
Last time we kept complaining about how cold it got on the boat, now we're complaining about the heat. But the complaints are not real: we're all happy to be back on board. I think we have the best venue in the whole Schäxpir festival.

Together with some helping hands from the festival we turned the boat back into hours, moved all the furniture, raised our flags and did a run through of the show.

Yesterday we played our first to shows, to two very lively audiences. We're sold out for the entire festival, so all three performances we played so far (two yesterday, one this morning) were very full.

It's been great to hang out with old friends from other companies, and some of us have already had a chance to go and see other performances.

Apart from the very exciting and very full schedule of Schäxpir, Linz09 has also added to the fun by mounting a ferris wheel on top of a carpark in the middle of town.

We checked it out last night and re-checked it out this afternoon. The ferris wheel is scary: it goes faster than you'd expect it to go and it rocks a fair amount. But it's great fun.

Last night I went with Mago.

We could almost touch the towers of the Ursulinenhof

Today we took Nora up there, slightly against her will...