Yesterday I conked after blogging and slept until 3pm when I was awakened by a phone call telling me it was time to eat lunch. So I dragged myself over to the vegetarian of the two cafes. Someone had already ordered a lunch of lentil soup and “doorstop” bread for me, so I sat down, ate, and tried to wake myself up. The rest of the day was pretty uneventful, there was a show that was put on at 8pm that different performers could enter with their routines. There were some entertaining and amazing routines with acrobats, fire, juggling, and even singing, but there were also some pointless magic routines and random things that didn’t make any sense. Leigh and her friends (she had a couple of good friends show up) had eaten earlier, but Roger, Miark, and I had waited and so when the show finished at about 10pm we did battle with the cafe people to try to get dinner-type food at such a late hour. Finally, however, we managed to get our hands on something real and sat down to eat. I wasn’t feeling very good and I retired to bed as soon as Leigh figured out how to fit her two friends with us in our two-person tent. I slept marginally well, Leigh and her friends talked quietly but nonetheless, I didn’t fall asleep until they stopped chatting and woke up when they started up again in the morning. This combined with how cramped and cold it was that night meant that the best sleep I got that night was the couple hours after they got up.
The rest of the day was a late breakfast, late lunch, and then the starting of the games at about 2:30pm. These were different competitions ranging from gladiator-type games (people trying to do some trick – juggle three clubs, hula hoop, etc. – while trying to mess everyone else up and remain the last one successfully doing the selected task) to endurance competitions (who can balance a club on their chin for the longest, who can juggle five clubs the longest, etc.) I didn’t compete, but I enjoyed watching. The funniest thing that happened was while Roger was playing unicycle gladiators (riding around and trying to get other people to fall off without falling off yourself). Not only is Roger a very skilled unicyclist, but there was few enough unicyclists there and he is noticeable enough that he everyone knows him for some reason or another. So it was hilarious to find that the biggest cheer that came out of the crowd all afternoon was when Roger went flying off his unicycle during unicycle gladiators.
Roger has also been teaching himself to ride the B.C. wheel so he has been speeding down grassy hills for a couple days so everyone is always watching and remarking that he is incredible or insane. I suspect it’s a little bit of both. He is a ferocious learner and has completely taught himself how to mount (on his own) and go several hundred feet (downhill, nonetheless) in just a few days. Miark has taken to teaching me a new thing every day, so Thursday night I learned some new Diablo tricks (Shawn taught me those), Friday he tried to teach me “Contact” (which is SO hard), and today taught me the basics of Devil Sticks. I am barely passable at any of these (especially Contact which I am royally bad at), but he hasn’t given up on me yet. And I am getting used to hearing “So Hope, what would you like to learn today?” every once and a while. I also sat down for a while and just tried to perfect my three-ball juggling (which still needs a lot of work). So we’ll see. I am being lazy and now practicing clubs – Mini is going to kill me when he finds out.
Roger with the US Postal Service mailbag that he keeps his sleeping bag in when he goes camping.
Hope Helps 