Buskers

After dragonboat practice we went to the Waterloo Busker Carnival. We were early enough to see a couple of acts.

The first one was Exsulis, the Fire Show. He eats fire, transfers fire from one place to another using his head and hands, and breathes fire - I didn't think that he could do such a long show doing basically only those three things, but he did. Of course he had some help from the audience. At one point, he asked some audience members to feed him the fire. That would have been a hard trick. The part Ian liked the best was when he was building up to breathing fire, he asked if anyone was from Alberta. Ian made my hand go up higher, and the guy singled me out for a "breathing fire is dumb because it's dumb" speech in a redneck voice :) The strangest thing about this performance was the social message. He says that he's doing this to get his message - which basically boils down to "don't trust mass media - find your own truth and justice" and "love yourself because the world's problems can be solved if everyone loves themselves enough to love their neighbour" - out to people. Those are good messages, but it was a little weird hearing them at a busker festival.

We skipped the Dan Show, mainly because he was going to do contortions and I don't like those (I don't like it when they dislocate their shoulders). We also skipped Svetlana Transylvania because she didn't seem that funny.

We caught the end of the Arizona Jones show. He had a whip, which is always compelling :) He did a thing where he went up a 4.3 metre pole, lit a whip on fire, and cracked it to put it out. The funniest part was that the audience member that he'd recruited to throw the torch up to him couldn't actually throw. Her misses (and his responses and contortions to try to catch the torch) had us in stitches :)

We'll try to go back Saturday night after paddling. Tomorrow we're going to Simcoe so that we don't have to drive too far on Saturday, so we'll miss the acts tomorrow.