Street Performers

No, he is probably not actually levitating.  But sitting there with that device up your pant leg for long periods of time still qualifies as "talent."

One of the advantages of traveling in Europe during the spring and summer seasons is seeing a wide variety of street performers.  In major cities, and particularly near major tourist sites (near museums, up and down Las Ramblas in Barcelona, near the Coliseum in Rome, etc.), individuals with an act and a dream set out a cup and start performing.  Some of the performers have actual talent, or least are putting themselves in harm's way, which is what people most like to see.

Accordion player just off of El Plaza Mayor in Madrid.

Artist demonstrating his arts of (1) acrylic painting and (2) inhaling copious amounts of fumes.

Some other street performers, who might not be blessed with actual musical or other form of talent, spend a large amount of time and effort to make themselves up to look like a statue or a clown or whatever, and stand on the street.  When you give them money, they move or do a little dance or whatever.  Some of them are pretty entertaining.

Two guys in make-up who pose as statutes...

Anne loves the cowboy guy.

Two guys in outlandishly colored outfits, who also stand in the same pose for long periods of time for money...

Generally speaking, the performers remained stone-faced and still until a passer-by gave them money, at which point the performer would move slightly or perform a trick.  However, these performers are still people, and it was inevitable that eventually they would break character.

Dude, smoking while covered in paint?  I do not see any way that could go wrong...

A third strategy (besides actual talent and drawing attention with wardrobe and make-up) is blatantly stealing a character from popular culture and ripping it off.  In their travels, Anne, Bren and Mark saw a few examples of this, with varying degrees of accuracy...

Alien in the foreground, flamenco dancer passing by in the background.

The photo above shows a pretty good re-creation of the character from the Alien movies.  The crowds loved it.  The photo below shows a lower quality re-creation of Spiderman.  The crowds found it ... less compelling.

Spidey leaves his post in search of a scone.

There were other strategies as well, but they may have been beyond the understanding of our traveling trio.  For example, this photo contains two street performers:

In the background is Elvis, or an Elvis impersonator.  Either way, that is easy enough to understand.  However, that thing in the foreground is a bit more difficult to understand.  It appears to be a tinsel-covered goat.  After several minutes of observation the goat did not move and appeared to be wildly uninteresting to any of the passers by.  As they say, the passers-by stayed away in droves.  As such, the strategy employed by this goat thing was difficult to comprehend.