The Tyne and place

Woke up around eleven on Saturday morning, confused, with a Scotsman stuck to my face. With a newspaper headline printed backwards across my, not inconsiderable, forehead I realised we'd arrived and I had fallen asleep on the train to Newcastle over the table before me.
Ka and myself had got an early train to spend the weekend in Newcastle upon Tyne. We stayed in a rather posh hotel for the night, a Christmas gift from Ka's Mum and Dad, situated just behind the old Castle Keep. Upon arrival Ka and myself were greeted by a pleasant receptionist from which we obtained a map and ventured out towards the Tyne. There was no fog but plenty of cloud as we went out on to the Quayside. Unfortunately we never seen the latest addition to the river, Wilkinson Eyre's Gateshead Millenium Bridge, in rotating action but did have a wander over it to the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art and the bulbous Sage Centre.
In the Baltic we jumped into the glass elevator and went up to check out Damian Hirst's 'Pharmacy', on loan from the Tate, where I'd seen it previously. Boring. Hirst collected loads of cabinets, bottles and prescription drugs and made a big chemist. Hmmm. My sister used to collect yoghurt pots and cereal boxes and made a shop once, and she was seven. We should have phoned Charles Saatchi?!
Afterwards we then checked out the new exhibition by award winning Korean artist, Kimsooja, upstairs. Kimsooja is mostly a video artist who, through her work, poses questions about human nature.
One of her pieces entitled 'A Needle Woman' was basically a giant black room with eight different films projected on to the walls. These displayed the artist with her back to the camera, standing, straight and motionless in the middle of busy streets in eight different world cities. The crowds milled around her, constantly moving, some people staring, some trying to talk to her and most paying little attention at all as they went about their daily lives in a blur of vibrant colour. A project about displaced self, anonymity and alienation that in some ways reminded me of the city shots from the film Koaanisqatsi, as it showed the frantic, crazy life of these eight different cities comparing them with the still, unmoving landscapes of nature, in Kimsooja's case, the artist herself.
Kimsooja's videos would have certainly been interesting if she'd stood in Newcastle's Newgate Street on a Saturday night.
After a great meal in the trendy Rosco's on the 45 degree hill outside the hotel, Ka and myself headed uptown to the Gate, the epicentre of Newcastle's nightlife.
Ka took me along to see the infamous dentist chair, which the then bride to be had discovered with her Hen troops last June. In a rather sleazy bar known as Sam Jacks a dentists chair sits on top of the bar where blokes, usually either pissed, stags or of questionable moral standards, sit up to be served shots by various bikinied girls who dance either over, or on, them whilst the chair vibrates frantically underneath.
Moving on from here we headed to Beyond where we annoyed a drunk dancer who spun around us all night because we had the audacity to sit at two empty chairs around her table. Waving her arms, singing loudly and performing the splits, all the while the majority of her company rolled their eyes behind her back. After doing the splits there was more than a few seconds of panic on the girls face in the split position. I suspect she'd found herself or her pants fastened to the sticky bar floor.
We also passed Craig David in the street on the walk home. Presumably he was looking for 'our kes' as there was no sign of any birds around him.
From only a few hours walking through the bars in the area it is easy to see where Newcastle gets its reputation for wild nightlife and as an ideal location for Hen and Stag nights.
It was a lot calmer the next morning, back down by the river. There was a quiet market closing up shop by the time we got down there and the only noise other than the circling gulls was emanating from a small, foreign looking man on the Gateshead bridge. He seemed to be yodelling in a loud, crackly voice which echoed up the river and as we got closer realised he was jumping out aggressively at passers by with his guitar. As we walked cautiously by we realised he was singing a very disjointed version of the Beatles 'Hey Jude'. Maybe he had taken a wrong turn somewhere and thought he was on the Mersey? When I say disjointed, I mean that the only words he knew were 'na, nananaanaaaaa' and the obligatory 'Hey joooooo-ed!'. He couldn't even get the na's right?!