On The Blog

Melbourne!

Thursday, 27 March 2014

Well... We're here. In Melbourne. in Australia.

we still can't quite believe we're here to tell thr truth. anyway, let me bring you up to speed with the story so far...

On sunday morning we set off from london for the 22 hour journey. now as you may know, the gimps aren't very good travellers. matt and paul spend 99% of any journey soleley trying to annoy richard, lee sleeps like a narcoleptic and david has a massive fear of flying. so it's always a joyous experience when we travel as a group. this time we survived remarkably well though... david took enough valium that he doesn't remember anything after going through security, lee managed to stay awake enough to eat at least two meals on the plane, and matt watched frozen. twice.

we arrived monday night local time, got to the hotel, dumped our stuff and with our body clocks not knowing which way was up, headed out for some food. within a few blocks we'd seen a dubiously named restaurant called "sushi burger" and more hearteningly, a nando's. unfortunately it was closed so we found a little fast food joint with this enticingly sick challenge in the window...

then we had our first "pot" (that's aussie for 'small beer'- we're learnng the lingo) and headed to bed.

the next day with the score at gimps 1 - jetlag 0 we got up and out to explore melbourne. it's like a slightly more chilled out new york in look and feel, and the good news is it's hot. too hot for these pasty english mugs, as paul keeps reminding us before lathering himself in sunscreen before we go anywhere. he put some one before we went out last night. it was 11pm.

we had a good look round the city, bought some sunglasses, hit up "target" (the local primark equivalent) to pick up some props and costumes, had our first of many excellent flat white coffees, then attemped a big shop. we'd been out for nine hours by this stage and were -it's fair to say- hot and bothered and with patience not in abundance we hit the shopping equivalent of rush hour. it wasn't pretty. the trolley was broken, we didn't know what we wanted and after about an hour of crying we left with a packet of rice crispies and some grated cheese. i think we'll look for internet shopping for next week...

yesterday was much more labour intensive. jet lag equalised in the night and we had a full day technical rehearsal. this meant we got to see our venue for the first time. the space is great, if a little intimidatingly large for a group performing in this country for the first time! no matter how long we're given for tech rehearsals, something always manages to conspire against us so that we barely get one run of the show in, and yesterday was no different. fortunately we have tech heroes in the form of matt britten (he's head of tech at the pleasance in edinburgh, fact fans) who managed to wrestle a disobedient lighting desk into action, and a lovely sound expert called jeff who's sorting our mics. so we stumbled through an attempted run at the end of the day and will be crossing our fingers it all works for our first show tonight.

on our way out of the venue we spotted this hilariously positioned poster. let's hope our first review is less harsh...

tonight's our first show. so if you're in melbourne, or know anyone that is, we'd really love you to send them down to Trades hall, 9.45pm. we promise our australian debut will be worth the wait...

lngf.