This probably doesn’t deserve an entire post, but whatever. I went to this bar last week, where I had some beers with some friendly local guys. They organized an open mic night at the bar Wednesday nights, and they suggested I come by next time. As a rule, I think open mic nights are terrible, but, you know, when in Wales… PLus it was actually the second time I’d heard about the open mic night. A girl that sold a classmate her SIM card had also mentioned it. Basically, it was a big deal.

It started off as a pretty normal open mic night, except for the people in the audience all seemed to actually enjoy it. It was like, they were there for the entertainment, not just there to support a friend, or not just there because they thought a football game was gonna be on or something. So the crowd was pretty into it, which was enough to make it more interesting than I’d expected. The highlight was at the end of the night, when two.. um, oh, fiddlers! Yeah, two fiddlers played, later accompanied by the MC on guitar and two dudes sharing keyboard duties and the bar as a hole filling in on percussion, aka banging on everything. I took a video of that last bit, but it was pretty wobbly, so I’m not going to post it.

And… here’s a video of people playing fiddles.

That was last Wednesday, a week ago. Presumably there’s another open mic happening right now, but I’m not likely to go check it out. Anyhow, a couple days go by, Friday comes around, and the director of the summer school lets us know about a performance at the university that night. Some folk singers or something. So, since we don’t have other plans, we go check it out. Turns out the two fiddlers we’d met at the bar were also in one of the bands playing that night. (Finally got around to looking them up. Calan, they’re called.) Anyhow, they were great, as were all the other performers, though none were quite my cup of coffee. The last number features about thirty people, basically everybody that performed that night, including Ballet Nimba, a West African dance company.