It has begun...

In case you weren't aware the Edinburgh Fringe Festival takes place for "3" weeks in August every year, it officially runs from the 3rd to the 27th of August and love it or loath it; it is very difficult to ignore if you live in Edinburgh.

In past years I have managed to avoid it by just not going into the centre of town but with huge number of shows available there IS something for everyone. For photographers there are opportunities abound, one of my favorite pastimes during the fringe is to stroll up and down the Royal Mile, the High Street is closed to traffic and packed with tourists and performers. The official Fringe team normally do a great job of organising performances on the street, these are a mixture of your regular "street entertainers" (jugglers, uni-cycling escapologists, sword swallowing, etc) there are also normally small stages where "venue performers" give a few minutes performances to promote their show (although I didn't see any stages today, maybe they'll put them up overnight for the official start?).

Amongst all this, throw in hundreds of performers promoting their shows in any way possible backed up by an army of flyerers (a person who hands out flyers).

Expect to see anything and everything, these young ladies are promoting two different shows (from the same production company) which are 99.9 Degrees and Don Juan. No idea if their shows are any good, but I thought this image sums up the somewhat bizarre images that can be seen on the Royal Mile over the next few weeks.

I did go to my first show, while taking a break I overheard a young lady promoting a free stand-up show starting in 15 minutes nearby so I headed to the City Cafe and saw John Hastings: UnRelentless he's a Canadian stand-up comedian and quite entertaining, certainly good for a free show and worth donating a couple pounds.