Monday: Snow and all that Jazz

The first snow in Edinburgh this winter!

One reason why I like snow is because it gives the entire landscape an added look of winter melancholy. Bleak, desolate but aesthetic nevertheless.



Yet as always, my liking of it declines once I leave my doorstep. Snow for me, is best appreciated indoors with a mug of hot chocolate in hand, curled up on a sofa. Or, (my favourite), when soaking in an open-air hot spring with your body immersed in warm water, and your face exposed to the delicious, tingly cold. Yum.

Snow is however, hardly pleasant when you're in the thick of it, at least for me. And certainly not so when its systematically soaking you to the bone, and splattering across your glasses during a 20 minute walk to school which balloons into a half hour journey because of the slippery ground. Eek.

But snow is snow, and coming from Singapore, it is an event to be taken note of.

On that same evening, we went down to The Jazz Bar on Chambers Street which apparently, is pretty well-known around this area. It's located in the basement and is a little subterranean gem of a place! Junwen, if you were here, it's like Jazz@Southbridge but better I think!

Listened to a 17-piece Big Band over a bottle of Corona, which was really quite a lovely, relaxing end to the day. I took a truncated video of the place - truncated because this (believe it or not) was the first time I was using the video function of my camera! Apologies for the amateurishness of the video and its brevity.





But sharp viewers might've gleaned the general demographic of the bar from my video. We were possibly the youngest patrons there amongst the white-haired oldtimers and middle-aged working adults! However as we left, we did spot a younger set of people filling in, probably to catch the subsequent funk and soul outfit. Oh, and possibly taking advantage of the free entry after 10.30pm.

But going back again; After the excellent performance, we chatted with James one of the trumpeters who was kind enough to give us a little musical demonstration about the different sounds and tones of a trumpet! Here he is below, in one of the only pictures he deigned to appear in (camera shy).



All in all, a pretty interesting day. Back in Pollock, the residual strains of music in my mind quickly lulled me to sleep.