Time to get tatted up

It's once again that time of year in Nova Scotia, the Royal Nova Scotia International Tattoo is in town.

I attended my first tattoo related performance on June 30 in a nearby grocery store parking lot. Perhaps not surprisingly, given the prominence of the location, I was one of the few people who showed up to see the performance of the pipe band scheduled to play. After a few minutes, once it became clear that they were just going to play Scotland the Brave again and again, I made my way back home. This was a less than overwhelming and endearing concert experience.




Today, I decided to take in another performance. This time the performance was scheduled to take place on the Grand Parade and it was to included appearances by the National Band of the Naval Reserve (Canada) and the Paris Fire Brigade. Soon after Jeannette and I arrived on the scene things began to look amiss. The only performers we saw congregating near the performance area were members of the Naval Reserve band, the firefighters were nowhere to be seen. After about 40 minutes of band content it was clear that the firefighters wouldn't be showing up and that performance would consist entirely of the Naval Reserve band. While the band wasn't bad, they really weren't the reason I made my way downtown in the middle of the day.



I was really hoping to see something like this, or at least this kind of strength turned into a performance:



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I am thinking about attending another lunchtime show on Thursday, though now that I have seen two somewhat disappointing performances I am a little worried that the Thursday trip may not be worth my while. In case you are curious, the act drawing me to Thursday's show is the Juliana Bicycle Team, a group from the Netherlands.

Apparently this is the kind of stuff they do at the main tattoo performances:



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Tonight Jeannette and I are hoping to score some last minute 50% off tickets to the main tattoo performance. The only problem with our plan is that we won't know until just before the show is to start if we have tickets or not. If we don't get tickets tonight we will probably try again tomorrow night. I know it is a little sad, but the firefighters and the bicycle team are really two of the main draws to the full-fledged tattoo performance. I hope they are worth it (or at least worth 50% of regular admission).