Antwerpen, Paris & idiots

On the bus to Lyon at noon. Yesterday we played in La Loco, Paris. The venue is located right next to Moulin Rouge so it's right in the heart of Parisian tourism. Which is nice. The downside of that is that there are no parking places for tour buses so once we got there at 11:30 or so we had to get all our stuff that we would be needing from the bus to the backstage. Once all the stuff was in the the venue the buses left and arrived to pick up us and the gear again at 3 in the morning.

We had a really long day to spend in Paris since it was a late show and our show time was at 1. Which by the way sucked since those who live outside the metropolitan area had to leave before our show time or even Unleashed's show time to get home by last trains. We had a great audience anyway so in the end it didn't suck so much for us but I feel sad for the people who payed 30€ to see us and managed to see only the first 4 bands.

Anyway, the day was for tourism. Me and Matson spent 5 hours around the town once I managed to get us subway tickets from "French only" machine. We went to Notre Dame cathedral. Surprisingly, the lightning didn't strike a pagan so we survived. Next stop was the latin quarters where we found an Irish pub that had Strongbow on tap. Nice. Then we went to check if there's a huge waiting time to Eiffel tower. It didn't look so bad so we decided to go there. I've been there before but only at the second floor since the top was closed for some reason then. We ended up waiting for a fucking half an hour down there to get to the second floor and another fucking half an hour to the top from there. Then we spend 5 minutes at the top and another 30 minutes to get back down. What a fucking waste of time. Korpiklaani Travel Agency does not recommend. Ok, the structure is nice. Really nice. With a degree from civil engineering I can appreciate that. But in the end it's just a fucking observation tower and definitely not worth the two hour waiting.

At one point we decided to head back to the venue since we thought it would be a dinner time. There we realized that it was a buy out day and got 15€ for food. Didn't go to eat though. We sat a while at the venue and had a couple local beers. 25cl bottles, with 4,2% alcohol. You can drink a case of them and not get drunk. Doors opened and the people started getting in. Once they realized that it indeed was us we had to leave since our table turned into a signing and photo session. Matson was keen to see Pére Lachaisse cemetery. I had been there before but I can always go there again to say "hello" to Edith. Swashbuckle was already on stage when we left and travelled in a sweaty fully packed subway something like 13 or 14 stations there only to see that in France they close their cemeteries at 18:00. I didn't know they did that. So we just got back to venue and spent the long night there and at the Corcoran Irish pub next to it.

The show was pretty damn good. The audience was crazy. And just to make things more difficult to Andreas the light tech we keep changing the set every night. We've mostly been closing with Ii Lea Voibmi but yesterday we closed with Hunting Song. We have mostly been switching between Huppiaan aarre and Tuli kokko. Yesterday we did both. To keep things interesting or something.

The German merchandiser doing us, Unleashed and Reiter is an idiot. I'll get back to that later. Now we're at the venue and WE have to start counting our merch. Bollocks.

Ok, the merch is counted. And the merch guy now knows that we think that he's an idiot. Which I think is not unfair since all the other bands think the same. Including Reiter, his own band. The idiot is not keeping any track of what he's sold. And someone even bigger idiot booked him to do an international tour when he doesn't speak any real language.

Back to Antwerpen for a moment. I wached the entire Moonsorrow set again. They did the same as in Dortmund. 45 minutes, 2 songs. That's musical brilliance. I think they were even better than the day before. In Dortmund I remember telling Reiter vocalist Fuchs that Moonsorrow is the best band on the tour and he was watching them as well and seemed to enjoy that a lot. When the show was over I noticed that their guitarist had been watching the end of the show too. He came to me and asked "they are coming to do a third show as well, right" so I think he was hooked as well.

But we kicked some serious ass their as well. I guess I can clearly say that it was our night. It's been difficult to match Reiter in Germany and Antwerpen was the first that I can honestly that it was our show.