05 August 2007

Blogging the Festival

Over the next month I'll be posting a lot about the Festival, the world's biggest arts event and Edinburgh's year worth of cultural life shrunk down into the month of August.

The Festival transforms Edinburgh completely - every spare meeting room becomes a bar, and every kitchen becomes a room for let. It actually includes several unrelated festivals, including the International Festival (formal, more fine arts) the Fringe (the world's first and biggest), as well as events for the publishing and TV industries, even a politics festival.

The Fringe is the largest - according to the website, this year there will be 31,000 performances of of 2,050 shows at 250 venues. The Fringe alone estimated to bring £75 million to Edinburgh's economy.

Today is the first day of the Fringe, and things are getting pretty surreal. About a hundred schoolgirls from Taipei have been practising some sort of drill in my parking lot which is a bit like baton-twirling, but with rifles.

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