Firstly, I have been involved in a project here for American Express, their Room For Thought project, here we created an area like no other, you could experience a pop-up restaurant in the first week, a fashion boutique of bike helmets and currently we have live gigs from Australian bands simultaneously being streamed to your living room through Facebook.
Here is a link to where you can find out all the information on it: http://www.facebook.com/#!/americanexpressaustralia
Although not directly one of my projects I have been trying to help out where I can, and it's been great fun. The best bit is actually getting to go to the events. Two weeks ago a group of us went along to The Drummer Restaurant (the first event). The idea of this was that it was run by refugees from Sudan and Burma, with a floor being dedicated to each culture. We were on the Burmese floor and the food was fantastic! I started with Beef Koftas and then Goat's Stew.
The Burmese part of the Drummer Restaurant:
My starter of Beef Kofta's:
I even managed to persuade a group of colleagues to come and help me support Scotland against Georgia before we went along to the game. I don't think they were that interested but I appreciate them coming along none the less!
Last week we had the very successful fashion event at RFT, although I didn't manage to make it along to any of the days. Although, I hear it was a great success.
However, this week has been The Living Room, which intends to create an atmosphere as if in your own living room watching a gig and it certainly achieves this. This has been my personal favourite of the 3 events. Lot's of unsigned Australian acts, even some you might have heard off all being mentored for the day by the writer/producer/performer Paul Mac. I went along on Wednesday night to work at the event, looking after the performers and helping set up the stage between acts. It was great fun and I got to listen to some great music too. It was so good I decided to go back last night too, to see Dappled cities playing, a fantastic young Aussie band. I also even managed to get a private guitar lesson of an old cowboy from Nashville, Tennessee. That was great, and made even better when he started playing Loch Lomond and I couldn't help but to start singing along. There are pictures of this, when I get a hold of them I will post them up here.
If you read this quickly enough you will be able to watch the last couple of acts of the week playing live on facebook through this link:http://www.facebook.com/americanexpressaustralia?sk=app_263461633663964#!/americanexpressaustralia?sk=app_263461633663964
I will be at the final performance to see Tim Freedman playing at 11:30am UK time, 8:30pm here, so look out for me in the audience!
