Stuttgart & Zlin

8:20 on the bus somewhere in Czech Republic. We're just driving through a city centre but since I just woke up I have no idea what city it is. I asked John, the bus driver and he said that this is Prague. I couldn't understand why we're driving through Prague but he's actually taking the second driver to the railway station so that he can get home. Time to keep my eyes open for a while and do some sight seeing then!

As the clever ones already noticed I am up quite early. There is a simple reason for that. I went to be really early. The venue had a strict curfew at 22.10 so the event started really early and our set was also 2 hours earlier than usually on this tour. The bus call was at 23.58 which of course is a reference to Iron Maiden. I was in my bed in a minutes after that. So after almost 8 hours of sleep I am up at 8 and feel great. Regardless of the fact that I had one of my strangest dreams for some time. This one included my little sister as a really small girl, my mother, myself, our old house where my sister has never lived, a haunted book that kept changing it's contents and it's writer who was living as a ghost inside the walls of that house. "Dude, that's weird" as Pat from Swashbuckle would say.

Yesterday was a boring day. The highlights were Moonsorrow as usual and our own show which always hits you with a dose of adrenaline. Moonsorrow did again the already familiar two-song set. Their epicness itself is already epic. I tried to watch Einherjer too but I couldn't really get into their world that easily. Still I think that both bands would have been a good addition on this tour. They would have taken this tour closer to what the first Paganfest was. This one is quite far from that. Then all the bands were easy to label under the word pagan and also under the label folk metal. Now we have The Four Riders of the Apocalypse which I believe is directly from the bible, Romans who were the first state to adopt christianity as their official religion really early like 200-something or so, two bands are pirates from the seven seas who all probably believed that they will burn in hell because of all their sins and only Unleashed, the vikings and us are really going for the pagan traditions. And even vikings adopted christianity quite early...

I am not saying this to put he bands down in anyway. Nice people, cool bands all in their own right. I am just saying that the Paganfest title doesn't seem that suitable as it did the first time. My personal opinion, that is.

We used to write set lists during the first few shows. Nowadays we just have a list of 23 songs on stage. Of course we usually start and finish the show the same way but the middle part keeps changing. Yesterday, we for example played Metsämies which I can't remember being played on this tour before. Maybe once. However, Matti and Juho started Paljon on koskessa kiviä. That was funny. In Eindhoven we actually played Palovana that is not even included on the 23-song list!