In article <6qjfq6$hrt$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com>, <TonyMo@my-dejanews.com> wrote:
>In article <902481940.17095.0.nnrp-11.9e98e5dc@news.demon.co.uk>,
>admaster@circustuff.co.uk (Stewart Hutton) wrote:
>> The weather has been pretty good to excellent overall.
>
>You come from Scotland but in England we describe that weather as bad to
>average. The Spanish I spoke to descibed it as terrible- far too cold and
>windy. Friday was very wet but Saturday good, unfortunately that was the day I
>left. In the business meeting the weather was a big point for those trying to
>set up the 2000 convention. For next year the only proposal was from some Dutch
>who were not up to organising it and so proposed a professional company. This
>was not greeted with much enthusiasm but is the only proposal for next year.
Where I live usually (Paris), we have better weather in august, but I would
agree that the weather was very good. Except for one day, no notable rain,
enough wind to dry stuff up, and not cold at all.
>It was generally agreed it was a good convention. Some didn’t like the
>formality of the sports centre but with the weather it would have been terrible
>without all those buildings. The showers and toilets got a round of applause at
>the business meeting.
It would have been MUCH better if we had been told from the beginning that the
sports center being privately operated, the organizers did NOT manage to
negotiate a franchise for other food supplies to operate properly. Not to say
the food was bad, but I for one would have boycotted it. Not having the same
choice and the same cool JUGGLING RELATED food operations as usual was
definitely un-cool.
I will also recommend NOT to choose an english speaking country for the next
hundred conventions… it seems that some native speakers are incredibly dense,
including some of the hosts for the evening shows. They simply don’t grasp that
some people don’t understand english that well and that they should really slow
down… a pain in the ass for everyone. Some of my friends didn’t get what was
going on, and I got tried pretty soon trying to translate garbled scottish with
half the words missing.
When you’re in France or Germany, the accent may be horrible, but you get some
chance to grasp what is going on.
A shame really. On the other hand, scottish hospitality was grand.
Okay, last gripe: unicycling. Focus is one thing, but when I come to a juggling
convention, I expect to be able to choose between several workshops, and then
attend a workshop. Coming to a workshop, getting ten minutes of pretty fuzzy
general advice, then having those people who already know each other from other
unicycling conventions go chat away in a corner about the english carriage ways
and why you can’t go unicycling on these is no fun, especially when you chose
that workshop amongst several other workshops going on (will it start, will it
not start ? Twenty minutes gone… will it restart ?.. another quarter of an
hour. Shit, I should have followed the other workshop). Definitely gets a point
across though: I don’t think I’ll try any unicycling convention soon.
Okay, there were some very good points though: Jay Gilligan is a great guy. Top
performers, very interesting workshops.
Thanks to the guy (sorry, I don’t remember your name) who taught the juggle &
unicycle workshop, that one was cool.
Thanks to Tarim and friends. As long as they come to conventions, they will be
successes.
Bruno and Hans workshop was great. Ben Hutchins’ was too…
loads of other nice things to say, but I’m too tired tonight. It was loads
of fun overall. Just a few little points I had to get out of my system
right away…
Marc Espie |anime, sf, juggling, unicycle, acrobatics, comics...
|AmigaOS, OpenBSD, C++, perl, Icon, PostScript...
| `real programmers don’t die, they just get out of beta’