The first are totally not in my top ten anymore...

Sorry I haven't blogged recently after the rather frantic pace of blogging over the last week or so... In the last week I have:

• dyed parts of my hair blue. This has been covered but I still find it super-exciting!
• been at the zoo at 5am setting up vivariums
• been at an official zoo-section opening with all the ambassadors and dignitaries while still...
• not cracking an invite to the official "we set up a display!" party
• force-fed venemous snakes (not a first, but totally awesome!)
• been yelled at for being late at the zoo
• Sent volunteers to their doom - babysitting Thandi isn't a walk in the park anymore! It's more like a sprint through the zoo chasing the psycho monkey - literally!

as well as numerous other things I won't mention! It's been mildly hectic!

Last night I went off to Billy's in fourways to watch first project perform. It brought back a lot of memories, about 8 years ago I was a total First Project groupie! They're a lot like those blue guys in Las Vegas, where it's a bunch of guys on drums, and they're really amazing and they don't need anything else. The drums (and random bits of metal, like STOP signs) are all that they needed and they were really incerdible. To add to the fantasticness the performers are all relatively good lokoing guys who perform without any shirts on.

That may explain why Billy's started filling up with rather a lot of girls last night... by 'girls' I eman everything from the 16-year-olds who had snuck in at about 6pm to avoid the bouncers to 40 and 50-somethings who tended to behave a lot like the 16-year-olds, but with elss dignity as they couldn't be kicked out for being underage. One such aldy was dancing on the bar by about 8pm, and not getting the attention that she felt she deserved - an image that I would far rather remove from my brain!

So anyway after a few drinks from a fantastic waiter with an unintelligible accent that had us falling around laughing (seriously, we were drinking Coke for the first part of the evening and it was still funny!) and a few fantastic conversations, some of which were centred aroud Lara's fantastic chest-hair (for the record, she doesn't have any, but if she did, we would totally make it super-stylish!) we went off o the dance-floor stage area to grab a good spot close to the stage. We got one that was slightly too close - during the performance I was about a foot away frmo one of the performers, and my ears are still sore! Then we waited, and waited, even dancing to the rather awful remixes of Britney Spears and the Black-Eyed Peas, and nearly starting a fist-fight with some dodgy old guy who seemed to think he was destined to be a pirate, and who got a little bit too close to Nicola and me. While I was content to shove my elbow into his ribs and give him a look that would have melted glass, Nicola found it a little bit more difficult to find her 'happy place' and the guy was only saved by our reshuffling the group to move her away from him once he decided that it was funny to push past us every 5 minutes.

We spotted the performers about 10 minutes before they weer due to go onstage. So they have no excuse of waiting for traffic or any such rubbish, but they kept us waiting for almost an hour and a half, and when tehy went on there were only 3 guys, rather than the usual 5 or so that I remembered. Plus, they had backing music with vocals and stuff, which took away all the magic of the whole thing. It was still cool and I had fun, but I found myself wishing that I was 16 again, listening to the original stuff they used to do.

It also got me thinking, as I was stumbling around the zoo this morning cleaning out frogs and geckos and chatting to one of the volunteers, that I'm getting old. Or rather, behaving old. I used to be out every weekend listening to new south african artists and going to music festivals and all that sort of thing. Now I go out just as regularly, but by about 11pm I'm tired and I want to go home. And I've hardly seen any new south african artists in the alst few years - except the couple that were at MyCokeFest alst eyar. And even those weren't new, I remember hearing the Parlotones singing "Staring at the Sun" when I was about 16, so they're hardly anything new!

It is very sad indeed. So now for some nostalgia: does anyone remember Sarongas (before they became Seether), Just Jinger (before they moved overseas), Nemesis, Tweak, Cucumber Zoo and all those awesome bands we used to go and listen to? what happened to them? And who's around now that's worth going to listen to?

I won't be posting for a few days as I'm off to Kruger with an Australian tomorrow, wish me luck!