Friday, August 9, 2013
Busking in dusseldorf
On the road to munster I decided to stop in dusseldorf to try out a littlr bit of busking inthe altstadt. It fell a Monday so I wasn't expectng much,but still it was the holidays and there are always people in thr streets. In the early afternoon I found a nice busking spot at the intersection of the two main shopping street. And things started out prrtty well: the location was good because people could see me well, and I ve found that to be pretty important with the one girl band thing because it is also a goodvisual act. There were benches too close buy and people started sitting down around to li st en in. I got a request to do Mrs Robinson by Simon and Garfunkel, and so I improvised something and the chap who had requested it seemed very pleased. Then as I was talking to some people two women from the city council street surveillance service or whatever came and say hi. They explained the rules for busking in the city, which I already new, as I had now learned that the half hour busking rule applied to many pla ce s in germany.like in Koln you can busk bf from every half hour till half past, thrn you have to stop and look for another busking spot 200m away at least, and you can start busking again nth at the start of the next hour. As it turned out they had bf fallen on me at a timr when I was allowd to busk so all was good, I was respecting the rule and all. But they were sort of aggressive about it, repeating like the three times that If they caught me la ter on at that same spot or playin the other half hour or smtg they would confiscate the guitar. It was kind of harsh and it didn't feel very welcomingy! Even the people who were sitting and listening in were ki nd of shocked and took my defense,saying like "yeah ok it s cool she got it you know, she won't play when she sh ouldn't and all" :-) so that was kind of nice! Anyways the problem was th at this spot turned out to be the only good one for me that day, as the others didn t work as well, but I definrtely couldn t take therisk of going back to it after that, although the rule isn't quite clear on whether you can come back to it later on in the day... The thing is I realised lat er that day that local buskers didn't respect these rules at all, so I don't know either it was just bad luck or th ey we re ju st bluffing because hey knew I wasn't from that town! So in the end busking wise dusseldorf was average for me, but the ci ty itself was nice enough and definrtely worth thr stop for a day ;-)
Labels:
busking,
Folk Vagabond,
one girl band tour
Location:
Düsseldorf, Allemagne
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Were you allowed to use an amp ? THank you, Andreas
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