It takes a bit of organising, when you decide to visit Edinburgh and invite your colleagues to come with. Luckily, the more colleagues joined, the more they did about organising the trip. Where I thought we could all just hop on the train after work, we ended up going in a Volvo and a rented Citroën Picasso, with tents in the back. My Flemish fiend and colleague Bart drove the Picasso North on the M6 with his French girlfriend Katrina beside him and myself in the back, regularly at (ehhrm) a bit of speed. Oliver, who Bart and I had both worked with at Unilever years ago, followed closely behind in his Volvo - with our colleague Simone and her visiting Dutch friend Euer.

Our main aim was to see the "Amsterdam Underground Comedy Collective" at the Edinburgh Fringe, a show that promised us Dutch comedy superstars in small venue (Assembly @ The Tron, Hunter Square) - strutting their stuff in English for the first time. Mixed reviews, but the prospect of seeing Hans Teeuwen and Theo Maassen really gave us flutters. Imagine seeing Eddie Murphy and Billy Connolly at your local pint puller's, if you'd like to imagine our excitement..

We arrived in the nick of time, Oliver's satnav having routed us through Penicuik but we managed to park easily at Castle Terrace. The venue being at the Royal Mile, did however mean a walk around Castle Hill and up from the Grassmarket. Having wiped the sweat off our underground collective foreheads, my friend Fiona met us with the tickets. We entered the Tron, went down to the stage through a smell of urine and settled at the back - by the bar - while Micha Wertheim started presenting the evening's programme. I was pleasantly surprised to see the first comedian of the night: Hans Sibbel. I had already seen Dolf Jansen live a few years ago, who famously doubles up with Sibbel annually at New Years eve to take the piss out of the year's events. I got my first beer down while Hans Sibbel found it a tough crowd, and made way for more of Micha and the next comedian: Wouter Meijs. Never heard of him, but a 6'7 Dutchman is always pleased to see another lanky Dutchman on stage. Hans Sibbel had already touched on the subject of child pornography and the missing Madeleine, but Wouter delved into it further. It wasn't too funny, but became excruciatingly less so when a resoundingly Middle-English sounding twit started heckling. Sick jokes about sexual abuse apparently don't sit well when a missing girl is in the news. Understandable really, but then - why visit an 'edgy' comedy show if you have no edge nor a sense of humour?

By now we were all really pining for Hans Teeuwen to shut the heckler up, or for Theo Maassen to send her running with arms flailing. The next performer however was Kees van Amstel, who struck me as a Secondary School teacher type. Quite friendly and less of a child molester by the choice of his jokes (he probably steered clear of it on purpose), he pacified the crowd somewhat. Micha's presentation too, in between of the performers, kept pint glasses from flying towards them. And then, after an hour or so, that was the end of it. We glared and stared at the stage for a bit, wondering what had happened to the top billed comedians and why we had travelled over 200 miles for a rather disappointing night. But I shrugged it off easily: the trip had been good, the show had been alright and we had two days of Edinburgh yet to come. I felt overjoyed just to be in Auld Reekie again. The rest agreed.

Labels: travel