Tour with the Swiss, Part 1

October 7, on board of Air Berlin.

So the tour is starting. I am definitely looking forward to it. It'll be our first tour with Eluveitie for a long time. We've known them for a long time. They were supporting us in Switzerland on our first ever European tour in August 2005. Since then we've met them so many times that I've lost count years ago. And they've lost so many members during that time that I've lost count on that too. If I remember correctly they had 11 member when we first met them. Now they are down to eight.

Anyway, this should a nice tour. The week and a half tour we did in May this year was a nice change since we toured in places that we haven't been that often and this tour seems to continue from there. We're starting with three shows in Poland and from there we continue south to Bulgaria, Croatia, Hungary and then to Spain through Italy and France. Spain will be interesting. We've had a few nice festival shows there but the only club shows we did there didn't go down so well. Well, Madrid did, but the others sucked. Although that tour was so badly organized anyway so I am quite confident that this time it will be better. With southern France it is actually quite the same situation. We'll see.

October 8, on tour bus somewhere in Poland, 7:45.

I already spent the last few hours awake in the bunk so once the bus seemed to stop I was already ready to get up anyway. We are parked in front of a small gas station in Poland. No idea where. I could check with my phone GPS though but that would require me climbing back upstairs and I am too lazy to do that. And I just put Leonard Cohen on so I really can't leave this seat now.

What did we do yesterday? Well, we landed at Tegel, Berlin a bit after 14 and the tour bus finally arrived at 23:30 so we indeed had to do something in between. I actually had agreed to take care of the support bands business. The band is called godnr.universe or something like that. It is actually a band of the two Eluveitie chicks so we don't really have any extra persons on tour because of the support bands. The chicks had thought that they'd be in Berlin and have time to pick up their CDs from there but since in the end they didn't have time to do that they asked me to pick them up. I did that. What else?

We had to buy new speaker system. We've had different active speaker systems with us on tour and festivals for 3 years or so. We need them to play Topi Sorsakoski & Agents and Popeda everywhere. We jumped on the bus and drove to the city. Went to take care of the speakers first at Saturn. Saturn is a great store for many reasons. One of them is the fact that you can test all the speaker system. There's a "Play" button next to each set. We followed the cables, unplugged them and plugged in my phone and tested them all with Popeda's "Elän itselleni". Lovely! We got ourselves a new set now.

Alexanderplatz was full of beer huts. Seemed like some sort of Oktoberfest thing. So we sat there for a while, changed to a more convenient location, went to eat Chinese, went back for a beer and finally took a cab back to Tegel. We were trying to take a bus back too but the wanker just pulled off in front of us. We were standing next to the bus when the driver arrived. He stepped in, started the bus, but didn't allow us in. He just drove it forward maybe 50m to another bus stop, waited there 3 seconds, left again, stopped at the red lights 10m away where we caught the bus and tried to get on board. The wanker didn't allow us in. Germans. "I hate Illinois nazis."

October 8, on tour bus somewhere in Poland, 9:55

We're still in the middle of nowhere. Where the hell are we going to?