The plan for Saturday was to get up early and walk to the ruined city. Of course I slept in, and by the time I got round to it, the heat of the sun was quite oppressive. I asked around, to see if anyone wanted to go with me, but most people had been there before. I walked there alone, but that was a good thing because most of the way I wore a towel over my head.
The view towards the convention site and the Tahtali mountain.
The city is Phaselis and, to be honest, the ruins weren’t particularly interesting. I’ve seen bigger amphitheaters, less broken aqueducts and better preserved roman baths. I understood why those who’d been before didn’t think it worth it to spend the time, energy and money to return.
However, the plan for next year is to have perform the gala show in the amphitheater itself, which I think would be an awesome idea:
I walked back to the camp site, and spent the afternoon swimming, juggling and generally hanging out, with a bit of sleep thrown in for good measure. I didn’t plan on sleeping but I lay down in my tent, my head fell back and…. gone. I was woken by the noise of my own snore, a single nasal outburst resulting entirely from the angle of my head.
There was a meeting for those in the gala show, but I didn’t attend. I did do the “artists’ dinner”:
Then it was another hanging out session until the gala show itself. The show wasn’t particularly good, mainly because the level of jugglers and performance in Turkey isn’t very high. And the organization was once again lacking. But, once again, none of this made the show unenjoyable. It began with a Bollywood dance choreoraphy:
From there on we saw some diabolo, club juggling, ball juggling, contact juggling and two more dance acts. I most enjoyed the Gypsy Dancers, mainly because I’ve not seen anything like it in a gala show before, though like many of the other acts it did seem to last a bit too long. I did my coat and 3 ball juggling routine, and it went down well, despite the audience not clapping in the right places.
Following the gala show was a renegade show that lasted many, many hours and swapped bewteen two of the big tops. I didn’t pay much attention, as I spent most of the evening chatting, and sitting by the fire, and drinking chai tea, and eating huge cheese and tomato sandwiches. The renegade finally drew to a close at about 5am, and I stayed up with 7 or 8 jugglers until sunrise. I took this photo, then went to bed.
Oh to be young again. But my old dad said “You can never claw the time back again.” Very obvious but definately worth thinking about.