We Do Adventure

I guess it was iTunes that began the new music Tuesday thing. I'm sure the back in the days when Our Price existed you'd go and buy new singles on a Monday. Times change and Tuesday's it is. While I can have few complains about iTunes' service the Tuesday thing is slightly annoying. Monday's are often a day off – we work most weekends – and therefore an ideal day to go previewing new releases. Obviously, I'm ultimately the winner the way things are as the chance of impulse buying a new release is effectively removed. And for that my wallet is thankful! Throughout this summer Tuesdays are our music day. We didn't want to stop music courses altogether over the holidays so we set aside Tuesdays as the day to teach. This morning I've taught keyboards, guitar and bass guitar. I will be back in this evening for more lessons. All of us on the Novi Most team in Jajce teach music, all of us have students at different levels. Some came to us with a little ...

Over the past couple of months we've done a lot of walking: the streets of London, must-see Vancouver, most of Seattle's downtown and the pretty bits of Cape Town. We haven't, however, done much running. I had foolishly thought our pedestrian pavement pounding would be an adequate exercise substitute during our travels. I was wrong. This weekend I was back at floorball training here in Jajce. We have about a dozen, mostly athletic, teenagers who form the core of our team. As well as being committed to training twice a week they often organise running together too. A couple of them also train in handball and football teams. And they are competitive. With a game against a team from Prijedor, a town a couple of hours north of us, just a week away I was rejoining a team focused on delivering a winning performance. Training was intense. I didn't expect it to be otherwise. I just expected to find running a little easier, my recovery times a little shorter. Keeping up ...

You'll spot maybe half a dozen umbrellas in this video, if you watch closely enough. What you won't see is any footage of the two enormous thunder storms that sought to disrupt last Thursday afternoon's performances. The first of these storms was freakishly heavy, with a healthy dose of hail mixed in with the torrential rain. It came on so hard and fast that, despite being under cover, our PA desk looked like it had just take a shower. The area where you see people dancing was a lake just half an hour before some of this footage was filmed. What this video does show is young people getting up to perform in front of their peers and their community, a few of them for the very first time. (All the musicians attend Novi Most music courses with me or Budo.) You'll also see some of the organisers, and the Director of Novi Most, enjoying a moment of madness as rain-stopped-play once again. The final performances happened inside, although in the rush of re-rigging the PA...

It is not every morning you are shaken from your sleep by the sound of a gun fight; nor that this is immediately followed by the sound of someone running under your bedroom window; nor that you get to take a photograph like this from the comfort of your own living room. But that was last Thursday in Jajce. It was a day that was supposed to have been all about Project Avant-Guarde, a street-art project Rowan has been part of organising for the past couple of months. However a rare armed robbery, or attempted robbery , got in there early in an apparent attempt to steal its thunder. Real thunder and lightening had a go at playing with the best laid plans too. Our PA equipment got caught in a freakishly fast and heavy hail storm. For a moment I thought our mixing desk might have shipped a little too much water to work again, but careful use of kitchen towel, with the aid of gravity and a hair dryer seemed to save the day. Going into details about the Project is best saved until ...

'Mission Accomplished' is probably forever tainted by the George Bush connection, which, for the sake of fairness I should add, was probably not his fault. The huge banner, that is. Undeterred, let me declare today a mission accomplished moment. It was the end of a two month crash course in piano playing that saw my student (right in pic) achieve his goal of performing a famous local pop song with a fellow student singing at an end-of-term school performance. The show was a wonderful mix of different acts, from belly dancing to a Britney Spears cover. He had shown a real aptitude for guitar over the past couple of years at the course we run at Klub Novi Most but showing ability on guitar and being able to learn piano are two very different things. I'll admit I was slightly skeptical when he explained his plan. This morning persistence and dedication paid off as he put in a great performance in front of a packed room full of friends, staff and fellow students. He'd been ...