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| | Older Than Keeping Time
Posted on 6/5/2010 by Isabella
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Ahhh, Eastern Europe. Where time is fluid, indoor plumbing still in the pre-mastery stages, girls are girls (don't lift that suitcase) and toilet paper a rare and precious resource. Always check before you sit.
The trip, after only two hours crying at the Air France counter (they WEIGH your carryon) was otherwise smooth Toronto, Paris, Sofia, Skopje, we've done this before. Sure, we'll drop our bags in a tent in the main plaza and head to the wine bar for mystery soup! Yeah, we'll swing by the hotel before deal-making back at the wine bar with Albanians! Todd Various is sitting in the fountain! There's popcorn!
It's a great group this year we traveled from Sofia with an Italian jazz/folk band full of hot Italian jazz/folk guys, and our friends Figo the Scottish magician, Andy the angry Montreal acrobat, and Dorothea the klezmer clarinetist have all returned. Most of all, we're less uptight. Sure we have a show at 7pm in one part of the city backed with a show at 8pm across town! Yeah, we only have one show on three midweek days! But you know what? Nobody cared last year, and nobody cares this year. There will be a sign-up sheet for bonus shows, Natasha (NA-ta-sha) supervising a huge penciled-in grid with a harried expression as buskers point and lunge, "Can I have that spot?" Nobody's expecting it all to run perfectly.
There's wifi at the wine bar, and I sit on the edge of the restaurant deck, buskers chatting in seven languages, the band on the upper level belting out uncanny Peter Gabriel, Alanis, Tracy Chapman, Bowie. The purple sky is blotched with clouds, laptop on knees, the stones beneath my feet older than Jesus, older than keeping time. I'm in the old market, and for a thousand years buskers have come here to do shows, with crazy schedules and Muslim-Christian tensions and people who must be bribed or coaxed or shown the benefit to them to have us here.
Us.
Here. |
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