Jenni Ajderian

Photo by Dan Hems, gnarley waves by Mother Nature      My dad went to hospital last week. He's okay, he just learned some valuable lessons about launching a kitesurfer in 30 kilometre-per-hour wind too close to a car. An ambulance ride and an x-ray later he possibly has a broken rib, definitely has a sprained ankle, and certainly won't be running the Fairford 10k tomorrow, only ten days after he got too friendly with someone's brake-light.            So, tired from travelling and sitting in the hospital, and frankly overjoyed my father was still breathing, I suggested I take up dear old Nick's place at Fairford.      Looking back, we both did something stupid that day.      What followed was ten days of training, on and off, to get me up to speed with my mother, who has been doing this for the last 3 months. As an experience, it ranged from 'interesting' to 'whatthehellwasithinking', right through...

(originally published by EdinburghExchanges blog)           Freshly-rested and a little over-stuffed after Christmas, we're all back in Aix to knuckle down and try to pass an exam or two. I'm sure I'll get round to writing about them soon, when I'm not actually doing them, and when my hesitant daily excursions into the outside world stop providing me with such interesting things to see.      One of I'm sure many unannounced public art installations, Joséph Donten's simply-named 'Arbres Cours Mirabeau' certainly brightens up the street now the twinkly lights of Noël are gone. It's as if the trees have become incredibly tall, incredibly chic French fashionistas declaring that Polkadot is, very much, in. Though with my anglo-eyes I can't help being reminded of Pudsey Bear.      With January comes sales, and if you add to that a love of Franglais and sensationalism in shop-fronts, you get something like this. A phenomeno...

     I’ve written before about how eager students are for anything that is free. Food, clothes and branded pens can be the carrot on the string of any advertiser or local business looking for a new batch of regular customers, and, it would seem, l’Opéra de Marseille is just one such business.      It was clear from the start that last Friday night’s Concert Offert Aux Etudiants was no normal night at the opera. Hipster glasses and ripped jeans took up seats usually reserved for suits and ballgowns as l’orchestre philharmonique de Marseille drew out the first few notes, but even before that the musicians seemed far more relaxed than I’d ever expected. A few were already in their seats before I was, tuning and reading over parts or just chatting away. During the performance a whole string of them made corrections in their music while not playing, then passed the pen on to the next person once they were done. At the back, a surly tuba player sat with arms ...

     I sat on the edge of the wall and held my arms out so I could no longer see it under me. Though I'm well aware that Mont Ste Victoire has been solidly standing for a thousand times longer than I will ever live, and the wall was probably put there a hundred years before I was born, I could feel them both move under me.      In the 1870s a troupe of church-goers did the same two-and-a-half hour hike I had just done, but with ten feet of metal on their backs. The cross now erected on the peak of Mont St Victoire is visible from miles away, has now rusted and charred in a hundred and fifty years of weathering, and makes a simple, omnipresent statement: we were here.      It's easy to see why people build churches on high points. The walk up took us sixteen Erasmus students from sea-level to over a kilometre in the air, and each rest-stop was punctuated with sounds of awe and breathless, admiration-filled statements. In our last half hour...

     I'll admit it, I spent most of my day in Marseille on the beach, so I don't have a proper feel for the city yet. Ask a local and they'll tell you France's third city is dirty, dangerous and full of rude people, though I'm sure the Marseillais would say much the same about Aix. The rivalry between the two sister cities puts me in mind of that between Bristol and Bath, or Edinburgh and Glasgow- the smaller city pulling tourists in with its looks, the bigger with its personality.      Still, Marseille does make the effort. Making one's way out of the la Gare St Charles, the first view of the city is nothing but stunning, and the city's success as a port has made for some breathtaking architecture through years of development and eventual rebuilding after the second world war.      And so to the beach, where we spent several hours lying on tiny pebbles and getting a little bit sunburnt. Two metro trains and a bus took us out to the co...

     There are few things for which someone with a hangover as bad as this will trudge through the rain, and fewer still which take place in a converted church. But this band, this particular combination of formidable horn section, guitars, drums, orange beanie hats and dual vocalists, has proven itself all over Edinburgh throughout the festival and beyond. The Victorian Trout Conspiracy , a group made up of too many locals to count, begin their set with a wall of sound that dissolves into higher, janglier stabs on that lead guitar. As the beat picks up, its player, Fraser, pumps his legs up and down, bassist Calum becomes a swirl of hair and the whole front line is a blur of moshing, jumping musicians, and suddenly sleep deprivation and the Hive's unidentifiable gunk are things of the past.      The music is stompable, danceable, chantable, shoutable, and soon the Tron church is full of early drinkers and tourists curious about the noise, all of them sm...

     This time last year I spent my August running around Edinburgh reviewing Fringe Festival shows for the free publication Three Weeks- a kind of pop-up magazine custom built for the Fringe that endeavors to cover everything listed in the festival programme, from free one-man-shows to Ukelele orchestras, Shakespeare to Interpretive Dance and huge exhibitions at the National Gallery. In exchange for free tickets I turned in a total of 68 painstakingly hand-crafted reviews, got about seven hours' sleep a week and ruined a pair of converses staggering across cobbled streets through sun, wind, rain, slush, insistent flyerers and rumors of a Londonian riot.      This year, I'm in Edinburgh for a scant three days at the start of the festival, but last year's old habits die hard.  In lieu of the aforementioned free writing gig, I give you Three Days of the Fringe, where I will attempt to sample the comedic essentials as much as possible. To get a good tas...

     I don't like running in public. It's not far from Glasgow Central Station to the Arches, but I'm still out of breath by the time I get there.      "I am SO sorry, it took an hour and a HALF to get here from EDINBURGH."      They like you to be early to pick up press tickets. They like to see your credentials and cross-check everything before handing over a free ticket.      "Nae bother, it happens. Enjoy the show!"      Uhm. Okay.      As it turns out, the show is half an hour late to start anyway, and continues far longer than the normal hour-long slot I'm used to. Since venues aren't booked up 24/7, the Glasgow International Comedy Festival is a lot, and I mean a LOT more relaxed than the Fringe over in Edinburgh. Spanning over a mere two weeks, and mostly occupying the evening, the festival goes on while normal Glaswegian life continues above ground, with none of this traffic-stopping ...

(originally published by The Student )      Watch any western, any black-and-white adventure film, any rags-to-riches adaptation, and you'll realise we've seen this all before. The guy gets the girl, the evil tyrant falls and the True King rises, be it Middle Earth or the Mid-West. We've seen these scenes repeated across time and space, and we know how it goes. Without the speech, the scene still goes the same way. New film The Artist proves this, without saying a word. Aside from the picture-perfect cast and a dog which will reach cult celebrity status any day now, the film addresses the transition between '20s movies and '30s talkies, and a sparse use of sound which offers a challenge to the film-makers.      In one scene, uncharacteristically static, a pair of old friends meet and greet, swap stories, laugh- the details, irrelevant, are replaced by an emotive score and some close camera-work, all of which makes us feel no less connected to the...

(originally published by  The Student )      For a film aficionado, Edinburgh is the place to be according to Chris Brooks,  archivist for the Edinburgh Movie Production Society. “ This is a good city to be in. There’s the film festival, and there are always contacts bubbling away,” said Brooks.      Founded in 2004, EMPS brings the complex art of film production to a more accessible level. Even those who have never touched a camera before can create something, while those with more experience have the opportunity to make films using top-of-the-range equipment and mentor others.      “There’s a danger people will assess us very quickly,” Brooks said. “That it’s just for geeks who know how a camera works, but most of the society is made up of people who don’t even study film.” Drawing its members from across the University, members’ knowledge of film-making varies, meaning a range of talents and styles ...

If you only see one monumental multi-media sensory-deprivation performance artwork this festival, this year, this lifetime, Il Pixel Rosso's And The Birds Fell From The Sky should be it. A mere fifteen minutes takes us from the real world to a dream and somewhere in between, everything communicated to us through the dense black goggles placed over our eyes and the headphones in our ears. Daylight seems unnatural. As we move through a world to which we are now blind, the world in the goggles reacts, and what starts as a mere vision turns into a story which has us responding to its every whim. We travel in a car with four Faruq- a race painted to look like monochrome circus clowns who speak an impenetrable language, see dreams and visions; we smell the rain, the vodka, the lighter, the grass, we hear the birdsong, and we are asked- Are you sleeping through the best part of this journey? We are given a keepsake. Mine was The Fool, The Tower and The Hanged Man. In Tarot cards, these p...

(originally published by  The Student )      Though uniting the likes of Howard Moon, Ned Flanders and Mr T, the stand-alone moustache has largely been shaved off the face of society. An association with seventies porn stars and paedophiles has given the fashion what one can lightly call a bad reputation- one which Movember, the Australian-born month-long charity moustache-a-thon, wants rid of.      On top of its aim to bring back the lost art of the solo Mo, the Movember Foundation raises huge amounts of money and awareness for the fight against male cancers. From an initial seven members way back in 2003, Movember recently crowned its one-millionth Mo Bro and last year raked in a huge £26 million for its partners worldwide. Not bad for a bunch of guys refusing to shave for a month. Now in its seventh year, Movember straddles the globe, and one-month moustaches are grown by hundreds of thousands of formerly clean-shaven Mo Bros. At the ...

That is the sound of the last two months going by.      Once you've been to so many cities and X amount of museums and Y amount of art galleries and Z amount of top-of-the-world best-panoramic-view-ever places, they start to blur into one a little bit. Memory becomes a flip-book. Each image on its own makes no sense, but as part of a swift-moving whole they are imperative to the overall effect. Though separated by a bus journey or a series of roadsigns, each city, museum, tall place visited forms part of one big multi-coloured moving drawing.      Once you return home, you get asked How Was The Trip, challenged to describe the last couple of months in a few choice words. I still can't do it. I sat in a sweat lodge for four hours with scantily-clad strangers, I've climbed mountains and weeded vegetable patches and pulled all-nighters in New York and New Orleans, I've made pancakes with the natives and taken a bike around Stanley Park. Been ...

     A late bus brought me not to the home of my next WWOOFing host, but to his uncle Clément, the sixty-year-old who responded to my explanation that I was on une année sabbatique (a gap year) with the explanation that he was on  une vie sabbatique.      Sitting in the midday sun at Marché Jean-Talon sipping face-twitchingly strong coffee, you could easily be convinced you were in Europe. Here in the depths of the francophone part of Montréal there is barely a shred of english in sight, and now in the absence of a travel companion (apart from the ever-loyal Boogie Bear, of course), I find myself feeling a little more intimidated by the city. Grand in every sense of the world, it teems with a life hidden in some respects by this language barrier and simultaneously improved by it.      Following a day of working in 36-degree heat, my new hosts came to pick me up. The trip back to the farm lasted an hour and drove us...

Boogie Bear and I thoroughly enjoyed our two days in Vancouver.      The parents of Fiona, my last WWOOFing host, live in North Vancouver and are absolutely wonderful. They've opened their doors to me for my little sejour in Vancouver- not only that, but after picking me up from the Seabus station I was hailed as elegant and offered a glass of wine. Following a six-hour Greyhound bus ride and the customary short hike with the 80-litre backpack, this was more than welcome.      This morning was spent walking through the Capilano Canyon with the dogs, before I jumped back on the Seabus and into the big city of Vancouver. From thousand-year-old trees to skyscrapers, I wandered a little bemusedly through city streets and the glittering Downtown all spruced up for the Olympics. This is all only a short walk from Gastown, the infamous Amsterdam Café, Chinatown and finally the eastern edges and the highway. Staying on a single road there is a ta...

Well, it seems the wind changed and blew the whole Icelandic ashcloud out of the way!      Winds have been changing here, too- I'm supposed to be in a place called Rossland right now, 283km east of where I actually am.      But rolling with the punches is an important part of travelling. I made two mistakes in this part of the journey- number one was trying to organise so much so far in advance- I first emailed my WWOOFing place in Rossland about three months ago, but due to one thing and another I now felt less and less inclined to go there. Nonetheless, Zan and I jumped in the van (named Morgan Freeman, of course), and started on Highway 3 heading south to Rossland My second mistake came when Zan  handed me the map. When we hit Grand Forks, about 100km west of Rossland, I realised what I'd done, and we came up with another plan. And so here I am in Penticton. After a seven-hour drive in a van that goes at exactly the speed ...

The news of the Icelandic Volcano filtered through the other-worldly media of Nelson and reminded us that reality exists outside of the town.      The last week has been incredible. Staying in the centre of Nelson means being a block away from the best coffee and two from one of the most eventful streets you could find in a teeny tiny city. As well as JusDance me and the incredible Zan have been to yoga, open mic nights, a hike up Pulpit Rock (giving a view of all of Nelson- very pretty) and numerous wanders down to the lake for tarot readings and meet-ups with whoever happened to be there.      Out of town we hitch-hiked out to Ainsworth Hot Springs, which was an experience in itself. After a measly half-hour wait we got two lifts which hopped us up there, stopping in Balfour, where a guy from Open Mic recognized us and waved hello from the queue for the ferry, and a guy in a Bakery recognised us as the two girls painting the ho...

Zan and I were kind of uncertain whether to go out, having spent the day shovelling gravel, re-laying a path and climbing a mountain. The usual life of a WWOOFer in British Columbia.      I showed up to JusDance completely over-dressed. I thought it would be something more akin to a silent disco, but then, waiiit, this is Nelson. Whatever you're expecting, it will turn out to be completely different.      And so I stood in my skinny jeans, nice top, even wearing mascara, watching people in tank tops and yoga trousers swaying and dancing to music completely unfamiliar to me.      There are a few important rules to JusDance- No shoes, No speaking, No alcohol. You're encouraged to move around the space a lot and to interact when the 'vibe' is right (very important Nelsonian word there), and, crucially, to dance exactly how you want to, because "ain't no one's lookin".      In focusing completely on your own...

There are numerous advantages to WWOOFing or CouchSurfing instead of just crashing in a hotel.      There's the free food, free roof over your head, the skills you learn- but most importantly, there's your host. Without this person letting you take up some of their personal space for a while, you'd never get so much of an insight into someone else's life, and never get to muscle in on certain experiences orchestrated by a friend-of-a-friend.      I sure as hell never would have been to a Sweat Lodge if I was just in the Best Western down the street.      The people at Buie's place were up on the hill at 9am building the fire and preparing the grandfathers- the heated rocks -for the lodge, so that by the time we got there a couple of hours later, the two fire demons were well practised in levering another log onto the great tipi of heat. Behind it our Elder stood whittling what looked like a longbow. What followed was an...