Bappity bap bap thonk
Another fun African drumming session, continuing to learn a rhythm called ‘yagga’. Today was even more fun than last week as the weather was even more gorgeous, the flies were less plentiful, and we all managed to keep the rhythm going for ages without messing up. Sweet! It’s great just sitting there banging away at the drum – you go into this completely different zone, until you realise that you’ve missed the cue for the next section of the song and have to catch up. Oops!
Post drumming went to see ‘The Spanish Apartment’ (L’Auberge Espagnol) – a French film about a group of Erasmus students of varying nationalities living in Barcelona for a year. Very funny movie, and also quite intellectually challenging if you stop reading the sub-titles (sous-titres) for any length of time as the dialogue moves rapidly between French, English and Spanish – both Catalan and traditional Spanish at that! Been a bit of a film week already as also went to see Spellbound yesterday – a film about the final of the National American Spelling Bee competition. It’s amazing how interesting a documentary about a load of kids spelling words on stage can be… and also nice to see something about American culture that didn’t involve violence in any form.
Final bit for the day – bought a new toy for my camera antics: a Vivitar Zoom Thyristor 3500 flash unit. If you’ve been looking at my Fotolog over the past few weeks you’ll have noticed the photos using more random direct light sources. Mostly this has been anything I had to hand, especially other people’s cameras – or at least the flash from those. Anyway, decided it was time to stop wasting other people’s batteries so you can expect to see a lot more randomly lit shots coming up in the foreseeable future. Even better news is that this AU$70 flash does trigger off my EOS SLR contrary to what the bloke in the shop thought. Although being an old flash it doesn’t pick up all the exposure info it needs so it’s a full manual job. And, of course, having bought that second hand flash I found a ‘proper’ EOS flash second hand the next day – d’oh!
ps, If I don’t write anything more in this blog ever it’s because I’ve been eaten by the one (or all) of the hundreds of spiders that seem to have set up web in my bedroom suddenly. Lovely. Hope they’re not all expecting me to buy them Christmas presents…