I was going to call this particular series of posts “Reception, Rehearsal, and the First Tiny Stirrings of An Unnameless and Overwhelming Desire to Make Something Wonderful Happen”.
Then I decided that would be far too long, and would be something of a cop-out in terms of taking responsibility for the real content of the posts. Because if I can’t describe this in an entire blog entry (or three), I have no business trying to cram that kind of a Twitteresque recap into my titles. And you’d end up disappointed anyway, because my whole description would be in the teaser with no substance left for the actual post. Like American Pie. The commercials gave away all the funny bits. Remember that? Man, that pissed me off.
So I won’t do that. Or, I’ll try not to do that and do a lot of laughing about how I nonetheless gave everything away before I’d barely begun. (It would help if I’d had more sleep!)
Breathe, Megan.
Wednesday.
It’s Wednesday the 4th, and this means that for all intents and purposes it’s Go Time. My first (and essentially only) rehearsal with my accompanist, the reception for Cymru A’r Byd, and a trip to the Maes required to actually bear fruit rather than simply be a relaxing reconnaissance and scouting-out. I woke at 8. I washed myself. The shower in our suite at Park Place was glorious, have I mentioned it? It’s really just a pane of glass on one side of the bathtub. It was fascinating and unfamiliar at first, but I came to adore it because it felt like my shower space was actually as big as the whole bathroom (which of course it technically wasn’t).
At any rate…
Wednesday was the day I started having huge breakfasts again. Mine had tapered down over the past handful of days, because I just wasn’t used to eating a whole lot for breakfast. An egg, a rasher of bacon, some fruit and some tea. Today, I had a full traditional breakfast again — huge and wonderful. I knew I’d need the extra fuel, because today was going to be the first of my major Eisteddfod days and I wanted to have plenty of energy to meet it head-on.
We had a lovely time talking with Jon and Caryl and Elgan and his parents. They explained a lot about the Eisteddfod that I hadn’t previously understood, mostly in the vein of a local perspective and the feeling of the event to someone to whom it is a far more familiar experience than it is for me. Marty and I didn’t linger long, though, because we were planned to meet Gareth at 12:30 and we didn’t want to run late.
It was rainy and foggy as Kev drove us over the moors toward Ebbw Vale.
Look at those hills.
When we originally arrived at the Birmingham International Airport, we collected our luggage and went straight to the nearest currency exchange booth. I didn’t really know what I was doing, but I knew that was probably the best place to ask questions and get some local cash in case we needed it. The woman there was a darling, and although she signed me up for something I am not sure was a good idea (a sort of debit card that worked locally and could — theoretically — be refilled via internet for a conversion fee) she was otherwise quite helpful. I wasn’t sure if it was a sales technique or not when she told me that our American plastic might not work everywhere in the UK. But when we arrived at the Maes this Wednesday morning, we had our first major run-in with Swipe Fatigue.
Yes, Swipe Fatigue. Wherein the swipe doesn’t work, and I become fatigued. (And then write about it on the internet.)
It seems that in the UK, most establishments read plastic cards by way of a certain chip. This lets them (somehow) scan the chip, or just insert one end of the card into a little portable processing device that some clerks carry around, rather than a device that stays on the register where customers check out. We saw a variety of different systems while we were there but one thing trended true: The slightly uncertain or confused look we encountered easily 70% of the time when we mentioned that our cards were swipe, not chip.
Don’t get me wrong. Plenty of places had no problem with this — they knew how to swipe the card and they knew how to get it to go through. Most of them hadn’t had to swipe something in ages (if ever) and weren’t entirely sure they knew how, but when they tried what they knew it worked fine and we went along our way. In this case, however, the girls selling tickets at the entrance had no clue what to do to let us pay for our tickets. I don’t blame them, but it was pretty weird after having so easily paid for tickets at the same entrance a few days earlier. Eventually (after a lot of trial and error and phone calls to other Eisteddfod workers) we got it figured out. It was ultimately no problem at all, and we met Gareth just about on time. (Well, pretty close.) But it stuck in my head, this random swipeless moment in our trip, and made me wonder if we can upgrade our cards in some way. I know some credit cards are using chips… but what about regular bank cards?
Something to ask the credit union when we switch banks, I think.
Through the entrance and onto the field, we laughed — because if we’d had Kev drop us at the north entrance, we’d already be there by now. Well, it was okay. It wasn’t raining heavily, though it was a bit windy. I wrapped my tartan around me, and we set off to find a pianist!
