night under the stars, movies and the rain

the night that tim left australia, sydney had a movie festival of short films. one of our new friends’ friends actually worked on one of the films as a producer and sound manager (or something like that), a lot of the people went there early during the day to catch a spot, kevin, elen and i joined the rest later during in day, when the crowd was bursting the park to the seams.

as the sun was setting down, the weather seemed to become worse, and when it started raining lightly the announcers finally stopped pimping sony and other supporters and announced that the screening of the winning 16 short films will now begin. the movie that our friend produced had to go last.
8 movies later there was a break in the festivities for people to stretch, and that’s when i shot these photographs.

the movies were cute, funny, poignant, weird, interesting, different, and all of them were under 7 minutes, and included the theme of this years fest – bubbles – in some shape or form. we saw a lot of bubblegum popping.

when the second half of the event was coming to a draw (we were about 3-4 movies away from the end), the rain started pouring harder and harder until elen, oleg and i decided to leave, as we were becoming soaking wet – everything, down to our wallets, and all that we had with us. earlier, newspapers covered us, but at this point after 30 seconds of this rain, this monsoon, they would fall apart.

as we were leaving the park (with the beginning of the torrent of other people as well), they actually stopped the event before our friend’s movie played anyway. thus, we ended up not missing it. (the guy actually brought the dvd to our apartment later, so the end was a happy one, mostly. they didn’t win any of the awards).

the walk and the ride home was entertaining. on the way to the bus stop there were people dancing in the fountains near the park, giving up all hope of staying dry and getting soaked by both the rain torrents from above, and the fountain water. strong streams of rain water were flowing underneath our feet (very unhygienic :) ), and this completely soaking wet crowd of happy, young people was squeezing their way towards the bus stop.

after some difficulty (the bus drivers here are incredibly stubborn and will not pick you up, in pouring rain, 3 meters away from the bus stop, when you’re next bus is 15 minutes away. bastard.), we got on the bus, which was full of aforementioned young happy wet people. and here perhaps the most awesome scene of the entire day occured – the back of the bus started to sing.

first the singing was repetitive bon jovi “oooh we’re half way theeeeere, oooo–oohhh, living on a prayer…” after a few times of repeating that cuplet along with some more words, the crowd got a bit tired. a few minutes later a voice called out from the back – “thank you everyone, the back of the bus will be here until thursday!”. i was thinking all this time that they should sing something like a *whole* song, so i called out “do you take requests?”. some laughter followed, and a random hidden voice called out from the back “what did you have in mind?”. “queen!”

a pause followed, and then a very awesome thing happened.

they, and then i, and then the rest of the bus started singing the bohemian rhapsody. if you know the song (and you should), it is sung in multiple voices, which made this all the more awesome as the different voices all were acted out by different people in proper succession. we sung the entire song, and incredibly in tune (for a bus, it was magnificent). we finished exactly as our party was exiting the bus, and i shouted out “thank you!”, to which i got a reply of “we’ve got our first fan!”

the entire experience was reminicent of the fish scene in finding nemo (hmm okay should be more specific with regards to which fish scene – the one with many fish forming signs and symbols for dora and nemo’s dad to follow), where a conversation was held between an individual and a single entity composed of many singular units.

i think that a singing bus should be mandatory. once a week, have people gather at a pub, and then depart on a certain route, prepared to sing songs together.