Embra Part One...

I'm having a rather topsy-turvey blogging experience right now. I am listening to the Garvey, and I am blogging, but it is not a Sunday evening. It is in fact Saturday morning. I do feel a bit like I'm having an out of body experience. Anyway, I'm catching up on Guy's show from last week when I was in Embra, and instead of being out having fun at the weekend after a rather hard week at works I am stuck at home nursing a sick mother. And trying not to feel too disgruntled about it.

So here is, as promised, my Embra diary Part One, because halfway through writing I realised how long it was going to be and decided to split it. Warning - contains large consumption of alcohol and some adult content.

Thursday
5am - I literally drag myself out of bed attempting to erase the debacle that was the War on Drugs show in Farnham the night before. Being the orginisational bunny that I am, today's outfit is already laid out for me to squeeze into, and there's a handy list of everything that needs packing.
6:15am - One big mug of coffee later I am trying to not fall asleep in Southampton departures. Would've indulged in another big mug of coffee but a latte cost £2.90 and it was not a trusted mulit-national chain.
6:45am - Am herded into a tiny 'gate' (bascially just an area of the departure lounge with 3 sides partioned) amongst lots and lots of business men who all know each other.
7:10am -There was a plane ride, but to be honest I took a nap. We did fly over my old Southampton house which was nice.
9am- Be impressed, I am on the (right) bus on the way into Embra city centre.
10:30am - After streching BHS's Coffee Lounge hospitiality to the limit (which really isn't that far, it is BHS) the partner in crime arrives and we embark on the hike to our lovely halls.
11:30am - We finally get there, I am sweating like a beast and my neck and shoulders have seized up due to heavy bag carrying. And of course the room isn't ready, so we dump the luggage (literally) and trek back into town.
12pm - I think we ate a rather delicious muffin from Chocolate Soup (if there is one within a 100 mile radius of you, go there, it's worth it).

I think of the rest of the afternoon we hung out in town, and then went to investigate our room, which was lovely.

8pm - Bill Bailey. I'm going to say 2.5 out of 5. He's gone a bit surreal, and his set mainly centres around songs now rather than traditional stand up. And some of it seemed familiar, I think because it was just a similiar concept to his show that I saw a few years ago.
11pm - Some olympic watching and then bed!

Friday

9:30am - Tried the porridge at breakfast but it was way too runny for me. I am Goldilocks. Had some museli instead which was probably the best museli I've ever had.

14:15pm( I think) We saw a rather enjoyable play called 'Lucky You'. I'm going to go for a 3.5 out of 5 for that one. The American accents were slightly dubious, but the music was done by Loudon Wainwright III and the cast were playing about 3 characters each.

18:50pm - In a ridiculously hot shoe box (which was hot becuaes the rest of the venue was nice and cool) we witnessed the bizarre ramblings of Andrew Clover, who does the Dad Rules column at the back of Sunday Times Style magazine. He was a little more 'theatrical' (read camp) that I was expecting, and pretty much just read out his coloumns as 'stories' with a bit of filler inbetween. Quite funny though. And made the Americans in the front row feel really uncomfortable when he kept picking on them.

21:30pm - Yeah so we though we'd catch a show in a swimming pool. Seriously. We weren't the in pool, Liz Bentley was. We were roasting sitting round the side watching her. She was a bit wierd, funnily enough, but apparently she was only in the pool cos it was the cheapest venue she could get! Brilliant. She did poems and sang songs with a ukelele and a thirty quid Casio. I want a ukelele. A lot. I think we pretty much hit the entire spirit on the fringe nail on the head with that show. After it finished we attmpted the climb home, but we were so cold after being sat fully clothed in a pool that we had to stop off at Pleasance for a drink haha. When we got back I had the munchies and we ran into a security guard who took us on a super confusing route through a million corridors to a vending machine! We were then stuck though, cos we couldn't remember the way back and our swipe cards wouldn't work. We did make it to bed eventually though.

Saturday and Sunday to come...