Transe Express perform Maudits Sonnants at the Thames River Festival – Saturday 15 September 2007A giant moving mechanical chandelier contraption is suspended from a crane. The dropback is the London Eye and Big Ben. Platforms with fire torches surround. The musicians come out in silver costumes ringing bells, jumping around and yelling French from the fiery platforms. Eventually they make their way to the chandelier contraption and all of a sudden it lights up, expands and raises into the sky. The musicians dangle from it like christmas tree decorations and they play music mid air with trapeze artists moving and swinging around above them. The music is sweet and loud, like music box with tinkling bells, but amplified and with drums. If you are familiar with Sigur Ros – they sounded similar to some of their songs that sound like a music box or songs with bells in them. The chandelier expanded and contracted, changed colours, moved up and down and climaxed with a reddish pink smokey explosion below. Truly amazing.
Earlier that day I also went to St Paul’s Cathedral, and climbed the 1 million stairs all the way to the top – it’s worth it and the view is fantastic – and the weather was surprisingly nice – blue skies and even the “Sun” decided to make a rare appearance. I love St Paul’s – it’s so beautiful inside - I could just sit there for hours looking at the ceilings. In the gift shop afterwards, I was looking at books and postcards, and this old man had a name badge on for some reason. His name was Douglas Home. I’m not sure if he was deaf or just didn’t understand my accent, but we established that we both had the surname eventually. Strangely, if your surname is Home over here, you’re actually supposed to pronounce it “Hume” – weird. People have hard a hard enough time spelling Home (they like to add L or S), I think it’d even be a bigger pain to tell people how to pronounce it, so I think I’ll just stick to spelling it and pronouncing it HOME. Apparently there’s some society for people with the surname Home with about 4000 people in it (who knew there were so many?). His wife said we probably have the same ancestors in Scotland. He also said, gee you’ve come a long way visit here. Made me sound like an alien who’d travelled many light years from a far away planet to get here. Hmm.Speaking of HOME, I’m coming home for Christmas for 2 weeks (hoorah!). It’ll be great to see family and friends, my cat!!, go to a real beach, go to my favourite restaurants, drive a car, see my Dad’s new house, dive in his new pool etc etc etc. It'll be nice to get a few things out of my system and also temporarily escape the middle of British winter and.. defrost. Meanwhile, I’ve got a few things to keep me going/busy – next weekend – Wales. October – Paris, November – Edinborough (these are all weekend trips), and 4 concerts to go to before the year is over (yes, poor me, life is tough). It’s so incredibly cheap to travel here – I can’t wait to plan more weekends away for next year when I get back! And all my favourite bands seem to play here all the time – whereas normally you have to wait ages for them to come to Brisbane – IF they come to Brisbane.
I also wanted to attend / watch the Annual Running of the Gorillas charity fun run, but alas, I got the date wrong and I’ll be in Wales next weekend when it happens. But I encourage you all to at least watch the video via the link above (it’s very funny) or if you’re feeling inspired, donate. More people run in this race dressed in gorilla suits than there actually are real gorillas in the wild :( And someone needs to organise a race like this is Brisbane or Australia. Anyways, that’s all for now. I’ve also included some photos extra random photos from here and there such as when I went to the Dali exhibition the other weekend. Enjoy! Amanda :)PS: here's a link to the photos again: www.amanda.com.au/uk/thames
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