Happy Hogmanay -- Edinburgh's Night Afore International

Edinburgh's Night Afore featured pipers, people towers, the world's largest Strip the Willow, tap dancing, dancing dinosaurs, more pipers, and a rock piper, blending the Catalonian traditions with the Scottish.

The Castellers were a troupe of Catalonian performers who build human towers. When we gave up getting past the traffic jam at the tap dancing stage, we were treated to two of their towers. They stacked people from the heaviest at the bottom to the lightest (the children) at the top. The amazement of the crowd was funny. "Look at the wee lasses!" "Oh look at the babies!" as the smallest girls made the tallest climb. The first tower was a single stack of four people. The second tower was a taller, thicker stack. They took a break and joined in the traditional Scottish dancing for a while.

Strip the Willow is a traditional Scottish line dance. Eight pairs form two lines facing each other. Then the pairs take turns spinning down the lines alternating a spin with their partner along the way. In the street party setting, it quickly degenerated to spinning chaos, which perhaps was more fun. Many people spun longer than the eight required, just for laughs and perhaps dizziness. One guy said, "Somebody... make... the... band... stop..." as he spun past me. Was it a Strip the Willow worthy of the record books? The target number was 15,000. Time will tell if we made it.

After Strip the Willow, the Castellers went for tower number three, with support (literally) from the crowd at the base. Like before, the tower stacked with the biggest people at the base and the smallest at the top. The smallest were the children. Two young girls, no older than four or five crawled up the top, crossed over and climbed down the opposite sides.

We wandered down to the middle stage and were treated to dancing dinosaurs that "hatched" from a giant egg on the stage. The dinosaurs danced their way to the exit forcing the crowds to part along their path. We followed the pipers down one of the side streets and found ourselves confronted by dragons on stilts, a stilted band and a performance by a rock and roll bagpiper. Sensory overload seems an exaggeration, but that's not a complaint.