Day 10 - Garaje, Murcia, Spain

And we thought Madrid was sunny and hot.

When I peeked out of the window this morning I was fooled by the shadow provided by the venue in which the bus had come to a stop. I thought to myself "oh well, at least we had some sun yesterday". I was definitely surprised when I went outside to find the weather to be way warmer than yesterday even with a warm breeze, which is the main thing that differs from Madrid where the wind was nippy.

Murcia is located pretty far south in Spain not too far from Alicante. The venue had a major roof balcony where we spent a few hours after loading in our gear. Bjørn and Isak got sunburned and Isak had to spend some time inside the backstage area to fully recover from the blistering sun.
The sun roof was also a perfect chance to dry clothes, so a few hours was also spent trying to wash clothes by hand in the sink. They end up smelling slightly better than before washing, but beggars (traveling artists in this case) can't be choosers.

Today is also Ulriks birthday. Isak made sure the audience knew and he was greeted and applauded properly on stage and after the show several people approached him wishing him happy birthday.

Birthday boy in sandals.

Disregard pirate. Isak had just cut his hair short again and needed protection as his pale Norwegian skin was not prepared for the beating handed out by the Spanish October-sun.

Yes, for you beer knowers. We were indeed drinking Budweiser. And we loved every second of it.

The drying of clothes.

The venue before gear is applied.

We did not spend too much time scouting out the area as it didn't seem to be much happening around this part of town, except from our show of course.

The venue in itself was pretty decent and the show went off without a hitch.

Day 9 - Caracol, Madrid, Spain

Everybody went to sleep early last night and slept until we suddenly had arrived and the load-in was supposed to commence.
Another sunny day in west-Europe. The sun was unforgiving to eyes only accustomed to the dim bunk beds.

Bjørn greeting the sun-god with a banana and a red bull. As is tradition.

The venue is looking very nice and the load-in went great. The stage is very high above the crowd. Could make for some great stage-diving. 

Looking forward to a sunny day, happy people and a good show to top it off. See you in Murica'... No wait, Murcia!

Day 8 - RCA club, Lisbon, Portugal

The weather in Burgos was cold so it was a delight to arrive in Lisbon, Portugal with a temperature of  25C and splendid sunshine.
We all changed out our jeans in the favor of shorts and after the load-in, we went for a stroll to have a look at the neighborhood.
The venue is located in a calm part of the city with only a few restaurants nearby. We found the backstage which was located in the backyard of the venue. The bus driver provided us with a wire we could use to sun-dry the clothes after washing them in the sink.




The stage was deep with decent space and just like in Paris, it had a gallery where people could stand to overlook the stage only to get blinded every once in a while by the moving lights that has the force of 1000 exploding suns.



The show in itself went great and the audience seemed to be enjoying the show.

Leprous doing a soundcheck.

We would like to take a moment to thank the local crew of RCA Club. We've never seen such an effective workforce. Thank you so much for making the stay so much more enjoyable!

Tomorrow we're back in Spain, this time Madrid.

Day 7 - Day off, Burgos, Spain

Yesterday was the day of food.

Ironically today was the day of lack of food. Or lack of eatable food rather.

We woke up to a sunny day in the cold city of Burgos, which is located in the middle of north-Spain. We wanted out of the bus as soon as possible as a plate of french cheese was going rancid in the fridge rendering the bus inhabitable.

The bus driver had been driving too long and had to sleep until 2AM leaving us to the mercy of the Spanish hospitality.
After looking for landmarks we spotted the towers of the Burgos cathedral which is known for its vast size and incredible architecture. 

Getting closer to the cathedral, we started to get hungry and figured that the restaurant close to the cathedral looked tempting. At this point we didn't think too much about the fact that there were nobody eating anything at the restaurant and we all ordered a plate of lamb-chops, except from Øystein, he ordered an entrecôte. The food arrived after about 30 minutes and left us in shock at the immense lack of meat. The meal cost 17 euros...

Note: This is not intended to be a food-blog or anything, but we feel like this was kind of ridiculous, so please bear with us.

 I had not eaten any of the food at the point of the picture.

We quickly asked for the bill and left the restaurant without feeling any less hungry. We felt violated, tricked and exploited for our lack of local knowledge. We spent the next four hours tying to find a restaurant with actual food, only to be met with the usual "the kitchen is closed until 8 PM". So we waited until 8 PM and rushed to a restaurant we had scouted out earlier. It looked promising and they had a pretty good looking menu, we ordered the most expensive dish and told the waiter that we wanted the meat cooked well done. After an hour of waiting we finally received the much anticipated food and was again in shock. How is it possible that two different restaurants manage to let us down on the same day?
The plates were sent back to the kitchen and we left to save ourselves from further disappointment.

Well done meat... Yeah right!

Now, I don't want this entire post to be about us whining, so lets get to the good stuff. We found a burger joint and we all bought the safest sounding burger. They also had a burger with octopus, but after the day's happenings, we were smarter than that.

"I told you we should've gotten a burger" - Marius Strand.

A burger in Burgos.

Day 6 - Le Ferrailleur, Nantes, France

This was our best day so far. We had a lot of time to prepare, adjust the monitoring, eat and relax. And boy, did we eat!

The backstage was filled to the brim with food, drinks and snacks and just when we thought we'd tasted everything another plate of some french delicacy was brought out.

Marius flabbergasted by the amount of food.

The venue in itself was very nice and it had a huge metal fan (lol) in the ceiling pushing fresh air through the crowd.
Just like Paris, the venue was more or less packed with people on this Tuesday night. The French are truly lovers of live music.

Tomorrow is a day off, the last day off before 13 days of concerts. The bus left Nantes around 3AM and after a few hours of driving we stopped at a gas station where we met this tiger-friendly trucker.

Lampe Daniel. Possibly slightly funny in Norwegian.

Day 5 - Le Divan Du Monde, Paris, France

This was a very stressful day! We arrived in good time, but our equipment did not. It's hard to play a concert without instruments and when the doors were supposed to open we were still waiting for the equipment to arrive. This lead to a bit delay and limited sound checks. Anyway, we feel we did a good job and after a few songs, some metalheads forced their way to the front and started headbanging.

Rigging rigging rigging.

While waiting for our equipment we scouted the area for music shops and there were hundreds of them! But for some reason all of them were closed. We found one, though, that was open because some people were filming some tv-report inside the shop. We went in only to find that the shop was filled with vintage guitars and amps.

Check out the strange leather-guitar behind Ulrik.

We went back to the venue as the truck with our equipment was supposed to arrive shortly, but the driver was stuck in traffic due to an accident and was therefore stuck in the Paris traffic 6 kilometers away.

Ulrik, Bjørn and Isak then went for some sightseeing at the beautiful Sacre Coeur cathedral.

Bjørn and Ulrik after the 300 steps

Random picture of tower

... aaand it was raining.

The venue was big and had a gallery overlooking the scene. Both the gallery and the floor were packed with people, the venue was close to sold out!

Day 4 - Progpower, Baarlo, Netherlands

We woke up to a fantastic sunny day here in beautiful Baarlo. The bus drive was only about 90 km from Cologne so the night was very quiet until the sound of church bells at 9 am forced us to get up from bed.

Today is a day off for us so we have the whole day to explore the tiny town and drink coffee on the little cafe located 20 meters from the bus.

We are very excited about tomorrow as we'll be playing in Paris and last I heard it was close to being sold out. Besides, the French are supposed to be a crazy crowd, in a good way of course.