As you may know, August in Edinburgh is festival month. There are five major festivals: Fringe, Jazz and Blues, Book (Literary), Film and International (which is mainly focused on the 'traditional' performing arts such as ballet/modern dance, theatre, opera and classical music). These festivals are staggared throughout the month and draw a huge number of tourists to the city. I think the streets are at least five times as busy as usual. There is stuff going on everywhere and all the time. Fringe events run 24 hours a day and pubs which usually close no later than midnight are permitted to open until 3am during this time. The popularity of the festivals have some interesting effects on the city which I will try to describe.

During August, street entertainers appear like earth worms on the pavement after a heavy summer rain; Amoungst these are an alarming number of human statues. These people dress up in costume and pose like marble, metal or wax sculptures. There are generally two stratigies to their art. The first, is what I think of the the 'Queen's Guard' strategy, that is they stay completely still and appear oblivious to any annoying behaviour a passer-by might inflict upon the performer. The second requires the performer to attract the attention of an on-looker and convince the on-looker that he/she is really a maniquin. When the on-looker is convinced the performer makes a movement to startle the on-looker. The person above is getting ready to join the human statue army.

Edinburgh has a resident population of about half a million people. The number of permanent pubs and venues available is insufficient to accomidate the festival tourists. Entrepreneurs have solved this problem by erecting a large number of temporary buildings to accommodate the new clientele. I've included some architectually interesting examples here. The first one is a juice bar. I thought this was a clever design because it immediately advertises the product without words. The geodesic dome thing houses a few small trampolines. A fee is paid in exchange for some time jumping time. The purple building is actually huge and i couldn't get it all into one frame. It is a temporary pub and houses a large outdoor stage around the corner from the cow head. The cow also has 4 inflated purple legs which stick up towards the sky.

The book that advertises the fringe events is 256 pages long (A4 paper of course) so the competition for patorns is fierce. There are many marketing strategies that productions will use to get attention. For me, this is one of the most facinating aspects of the festival. The pair above might be characters from a show, I'm not sure, but there were other people in-costume hiding behind trees and boulders in the vicinty. I assume they were from the same show because all their costumes had a similar alice-in-wonderland quality to them.

Smaller exhibitions also show up during festival season. The curator of this installation in St. John's chruch clearly recognized that he/she had a captive audience and placed these small frames on the pews. Each frame had a picture drawn by a child from somewhere around the world and included the slogan "Let peace prevail".

I also came across a small Scottish furniture exhibition at St. John's chruch. This chessboard is the coolest thing I saw. Notice the little nooks along the side for the killed off chess pieces. It is made by an artist named Fiona Campbell and can be purchased for 1,950 pounds.