Eurotrip, Part Zwei

To fund our bohemian life we recently set out on another 10 date tour. It happened dizzyingly fast - with long, treacherous stretches of road punctuated by the best highway restrooms in the world. I made notes along the way, but connections and picture uploads weren't always possible so here's some highlights of recent nights.

Our first show of the tour was in Frankfurt - not unlike Ottawa, a big city with that inescapable suburban feel. To be fair, aside from the train station and it environs a few times, the airport and the area around the club, I haven't seen tons of the city, but that's the impression it has left me with. The bill was varied with two post-rock bands made up of kids that looked very young and made me feel very old and one especially lovely Icelandic act know as KiraKira.



We have flouride filtered into our water and they have cute in theirs. She was a little bit noise and a little bit Bjork - how could she not be? Before departing she left a dvd/cd in my hands to deliver to an apparent aquaintance in Moscow when we're there next month. The connection seems dubious, at best, but I'll do what I can.



Prague came and went faster than I would have preferred, but it was snowing so after our awkward radio interview we set out for Wroclaw, Poland where we played a cold, cold, cold, but otherwise very warm squat-turned-semi-legit-arts venue called CRK. (They've posted a few pictures from our show on their site.)



This is a picture of the snowy 'courtyard' from our 'backstage room'. Warm soup and too sweet Hungarian wine helped get us into the mood of the evening. Later, we succumbed a little too much and although I was the only one to throw up, both Aidan and I suffered. Especially as we set off for our 600 km crawl south to Linz, Austria.

In talking small politics with Hubert, the cook and seemingly glue of the establishment, he mentioned something that I took to heart. Communal life in a squat is insular in the same way that artists live with limited contact to the world at large - minimally, however this way also tends to breed political complacency that in turn leads to ignorance and possibly, suddenly finding yourself far flung in more ways than just by your location. Living this sometimes vagabond life in a completely foreign place where the language isn't always clear to me/us, i/we tend to retreat into a hibernating bubble, completely ignorant of what's taking shape in the atmosphere outside. Thankfully, we've only ever so gently felt the effects of the global recession, but otherwise we remain unaffected. I barely even took note of Barak Obama's inaguration - aside from sometimes cynical/hopeful small talk for the future of our world, North American issues record hardly a blip on the cultural radar here. But I digress...

In any case, let me know how you are.