Ok Ok Ok let's get this over with as quickly as possible. I have about a hundred more pics, but I think these are the best. I started writing an epic text-only story about the whole trip, while I was still there...but that cannot be published in this context. Maybe snippets will make it into this plog entry. I hade hoped to minimize the work involved here but it looks like I'm rewriting the whole story for you ingrates! To whom I promised nothing....

Seriously though, it was amazing and amusing. Berlin, Amsterdam, Dublin, then somewhere outside of Belfast for the outdoor festival part, then Limavady in the very north of Ireland. That place was wild.

Acutally here's what I wrote on the plane on the way there. No pics from this entry. But listen to me, what a bitch. I'm including it though because I think it's funny.



Welcome to Blighty
Waiting now in the central station attached to London's Heathrow Airport for the shuttle bus to Stanstead, the airport I am flying out of to get to Berlin. It's 08:45 local time. As soon as I got off the plane I started seeing some serious British faces. The big bloke behind one of the customs desks wearing a black suit with bright orange dress shirt underneath (no tie), laddish grin and blond mop cut. "Next, pluease!". When the family from Bangladesh or whereever didn't hear him he yelled it again louder and I laughed. He was talking loud during that family's entire turn at his desk. "Where are you gaeing next, after england?" Question met with stunned looks, I can only guess, since the family's back was to me. "England.......then? France?" He drew a line with his finger on the desk, indicating transit. It seems like the mother said yes just to get on to the next question. They finished up and Big Bloke closed his station and walked off in a british way. End of.

At the ticket counter in this bus station, I purchased a ticket to Stanstead for 20.50 pounds. While the lady counted my change I asked her how long the bus ride to the other airport is. "One minute," she said, couting the heavy coins. "One minute?? Wow that's pretty short eh?" I grinned. "No sir, I mean, I am counting your change. I do not want to make a mistake with your change." "I know, I know" I replied, still smiling, and she smiled back, so at least I know she got me. "It couldn't just be 20 pounds flat, eh? Cos then I wouldn't be getting all these heavy coins back from you to spend at the shops here in the terminal, eh?" I asked, trying to expose the evil financial machnations of the place. She said nothing but her look implied agreeance. Welcome to Blighty.

Well when in Rome, eh? I "queued" up at the Coffee place. "Caffe Nero - The Italina Coffee Co.". Inside they had some pretty weird sarnies, I tell youse. Strange varieties of paninis like "spicy chicken with creme fraiche and cilantro" and "Herbed Ham and Smoked Mozzarella". What is exactly is "Herbed" (re-reading this over now, weeks later, it seems fairly obvious - ed), I'd love to know?! There are people with weird dyed hair in here. Dudes looking like they were in the band Human League. It's a kind of faggy punk look, basically. The brits own this shit. I also see a total Richard E. Grant / Steve Howe from Yes hybrid sitting nearby right now. I wish you could see him. So British! I'll try to take a covert piccy, but it's highly unlikely as there are bobbys about, fuck, there was just a terror plot foiled here last week. The people working here are wary, as they should be.

ok here - you can barely just see his face in the bottom left corner.

This is the other airport in London that I was at, Stanstead. Where all the riffraff fly out of. Seriously. The place is a giant shitty mall, with some airplanes thrown in for good measure. The guy in front of me here, with the black jacket and his back to us, well, he looked like he woke up in a gutter, had a severe limp, and he had a little buddy with him and they looked freaking scary. Yet, he was sporting one of those new phones that are just a clip on to the ear affair. It looked weird! It was hard to get a clear shot of the guy, ok? Should I even bother continuing here?


Those bawdy brits!


After I checked in, I had many hours to kill. My laptop was already out of batteries, which left me with little to do. I had my euro power adapter, but of course I forgot there is a special one for UK. I bought just the one I needed from WH Smith and the fucker didn't fit on my AC adaptor. I'll spare you the rest of the details but I returned the thing, sans receipt or packaging...they gave me good customer service. I was bored to tears at this point with still hours to go, and to make things worse, there's a gross apple in a bag at a table near me! Thanks!


Here's what passes for a legitimate men's mag in old Blighty. 13 topless babes, on a bouncy castle no less! How barbaric!


And look at this piece of shit. Thanks Tom Hanks. Yeah, some secretary is going to "unravel the conspiracy". Yeah THAT'LL HAPPEN! I'm BORED!


Shit was fucking up left right and center up at Stanstead that day.


This phone is pwned. That's the BIOS screen. What the hell?


With my laptop out of commish, I was forced to write down words on paper! It hurt the wrist! Here's an excerpt:

"later....several developments later.....I went into "Dixon's Tax Free" and espied a FUJI brand universal AC adaptor -type device that looks like it would suit my needs. But it was &15.99. Too much. I'll be in EU soon and I actually kind of like this pen-writing business. People used to do this all the time, I'm told! It hurts the old hand though, boy!"

Etc. how boring can you get? I'm obsessed with power converters.


Hours later I'm on the flight to Berlin. You can tell because of the "german weird" safety signs. I love German Weird.


"I was eyeing the stocky and functionally hot German stewaress who brought me an efficient german meat sandwitch on hearty bread. It looked gross and slim though, it its little plastic bag, so I put it in my laptop case pocket, and that's where it remained. My head nodded and basically, I woke up and we were in Berlin."


That's it; that's Berlin, the city I was just talking about.


This is Ruairi Lazers. He is a major character in this story. He recognized me at Stanstead just before we got on the flight to Berlin. When we arrived, my bag didn't come out the baggage claim. I was bummed.

"Out to the baggage claim and right away it was "nein danke, Sloan Peterson". Ruairi had found his huge bass drum case and other suitcase and was waiting for me because I had had to go take a slash pretty badly when I got off the plane. But my blue adidas bag didn't come out the damn carriage. Finally all the people from the flight were leaving the area because everybody had their bags, except me! Well this is just great! I was surprisingly chill about it, as I had my laptop with everything I really really needed on the trip. The bag was just clothes. And my minidisk. And oh yeah, my headphones which I needed in order to play. And my house keys! SHIT! This was the first bad thing that had happened to me and it sort of killed my buzz about being in Berlin...

I went to the Air Berlin lost & found area and talked to a dude. He took down infos and said they would search for it. I was sure it was still in england because I had checked the bag like 6 hours before the flight and you could see why it wouldn't have gotten put on the correct airplane. I gave him Anna's address and phone number; he said they would call when they had it and bring it her place. Well, that would be great if it happened during our short two day stay. I went back to the baggage check to see if maybe somehow I had missed it but was denied re-entry by a security guy. He was talking in german to me and I started busting out some phrases and I fairly surprised myself to be quite honest! I talked to another lady who sent me to some lost luggage area, as a last resort attempt to get the fucking thing, even though it couldn't have really been there. I was busting out tons of german, it was all flooding back to me, it was totally awesome. "Mein Tasche war blau, mit ein adidas logo". It's the exact same language as english, basically. They understood what I was trying to say. Ruairi was impressed like "I can't beleive you can speak German!". But no bag of course."

At this point we're on the Berlin subway on the way to Anna's house


This was taking me back to German class text book hilarity in high school. Bananen Nudlen mit Kurry Catchup, anyone?


We lugged Ruairi's stuff onto the bus and I mean fucking LUGGED. His drum case was particularly heavy and awkward. We were sweating our asses off. We took the bus to the Zoolischer Gartens subway stop, lugged the stuff down some stairs onto a platform, realized it was the wrong platform, did more lugging, and found the correct train and platform. We were on route to Anna's house, as per the printed out email directions. Fortuantely it was pretty easy.

Even though everything was going great, something terrible happened on that subway car while me and Ruairi were riding towards our destination. I heard somebody go "NO!" and I looked back and this family that was sitting in a 4 seat area were all in various stages of uproar because the baby that was being held in the arms of one of the guys had puked, and the guy sitting next to the guy holding the baby definitely had some serious puke and spittle on his shirt, and I unfortunately saw with my eyes: the guy holding the actual baby had himself a cupped handful of baby puke, and it was pinkish/beige fluid, and it was fucking chock full of totally intact cuboid pieces of ham. Disgusting. All the Germans that were sitting facing the baby-puke family all had this same look on their faces: "eww and thank fuck it's not me but since it's not it's kind of funny, but only in a very juvenile scatological sort of way." Yet, there were smiles all around.

We get to the final station, and of course we got out at the wrong side, necessitating further redundant lugging up and down huge flights of stairs. How Ruairi would have done this alone is mind-baffling. He was very apologetic and grateful for my help - I was lugging his suitcase and lifting one side handle of the drum case with my big-strong-man muscles (that's sort of a joke). I told him of course I was gonna help - we're fucking in this together, man! It's not even a thought. Team Panospria, yo! We lugged some more and soon we were at Anna's house!

But they weren't. They - Anna (whom I hadn't met or anyting, but we had emailed a tiny bit, she was actually a pretty big Zark Behida fan, which in itself is ridiculous and awesome) and her boyfriend whom she lived with, Jean-Hug, and Kh4n who had arrived earlier. They had gone to the venue already, and left directions on how to get there. The building looked like a squat of sorts, all heavily bombed out with graf. The lights in the lobby of the place kept randomly going off as well, freaking out me and mr lazers. It was all so strange and foreign and we had worked our asses off to get there only to not get our little bit of respite. More work was needed to meet up with our crew.

So, a lady cabby came along and we loaded in all the heavy stuff and we tried to explain to her what Anna's directions and map were saying, and after some confusion we got to the address. But there was nothing at the address. Just a deserted street, really. It was me and Ruairi and the gear, and we had nothing to go on, basically. But the note they left us said something about passing a Thai restaurant and then entering "the bush" and walking along the river until the path ended and that was apparently where this place was. I left Lazers with the gear and walked around aimlessly. I found some bridge over a river and there were a couple Asian restaurants and sure enough there was a sort of path, which I followed, indeed walking through some "bush", and sure enough, it led along the river, and then I heard music, and then I saw dudes, and red light, and finally I got to an area where dudes were sitting outside playing Go, some on powerbooks using german wireless, people drinking beers and smoking rolled cigarettes, and I entered the place and it was wicked inside, tons of weird technology and grit worked into the decor, if you could even call it that, and they were playing Beep Street by good old Squarepusher, and I was like "This Must Be The Place!" and I saw some people from behind sitting on the couch and one of them looked like Kh4n's head! Things were looking good! One of the heads gets up and sees me and goes "Blake." it was Jean-Hugo whom I had never seen or talked to in any way. Constantine (who = Kh4n, for the record) got up and turned around and I was like What's Up Fuckers!? and Anna was there too. So there we all were. It was great. I told them about everything as we went to get Ruairi, who in fact was right out front of the place and there was a much shorter way of getting there, via a huge vacant lot. We got everything in and scoped out the place....


C-Base is a pretty big open place with a stage area and a bar and tons of people just chilling on wireless intenet powerbooks, with a basement area where all the "members" go about various activities. There are dozens of computers everywhere. We get shown around a bit and there is a music studio area downstairs, where some regular is nonchalantly laying down some tracks in cubase. There are circuit boards sunken into various walls with weird little LED light patterns. There is an ancient green and white computer screen flush with the wall with an ascii display that reads out "c-base" and the date and time. It's amazing, very William Gibson, run-down futuristic...which is no co-inkydink because it is in fact a club of sci-fi technologie enthusiasts who all beleive there is an ancient spacecraft underneath the city in Berlin, specifically beneath the CN tower-ish tower in the center of town (see pic above where I said "that's berlin" -ed). Well, that's up to them if they want to beleive that, as far as I'm concerned. Downstairs there is a sci-fi library, rooms with piles of old technology, banks of oscilloscopes, walls with switches and knobs which do nothing whatsoever (maybe they do do something..I turned a few knobs casually and nothing happened but who even fucking knows??). There was a guy playing some sort of first-person shooter game. Him and the cubase guy didn't even look up when we came into their respective areas. We were all amazed by everything.


There was a drumkit set up and there was an impromptu jam with Ruairi on drums, Kh4n and Jean-Hug on laptops, and a French chick living in Munich named Sophie who is in fact playing a mic'd and effected bassoon. She was friends with our hosts and does some music project with JH. I opted out of jamming because I had nothing really in mind about how I could join in in a meaningful way. I mean, generally, I tend to work alone. I didn't have any "instrument" I could think of setting up. I didn't bring a MIDI controller or anything. I could have MSP'd it but you know, we'd been lugging all day and I was pretty wiped. I also hadn't gotten to a bank yet to get Euros so I couldn't buy the beers and smokes I wanted right fucking now. Luckily we got a few tickets each....I bummed a couple smokes, rolled, off kickin dudes, all of whom spoke english. I tried speaking in Deutch to them and they generally answered me in English, but it wasn't like how the french do that in quebec. They at least seemed to appreciate the effort. Anyways, I played a bit later solo, busting out obscure tunes of mine, some of the Miles stuff, there were some bad mixes due to the no headphones sitch, but a couple weirdos danced. And when I say weirdos, remember I'm in Germany now, they invented weird. Sure enough, later when me and kh4n were just casually DJing tracks off laptop and ipod, chatting with our wicked hosts and new best friends, a guy came walking in adorned with some gold chains, a weird purple hat, and nothing else. Meaning i.e. his flaccid cock was hanging out and everything. I pointed directly at him, mouth agog. Kh4n was speachless. The guy sat next to some chick on a couch and they chatted. Who is gonna sit on that couch afterwards? There was a big human gyroscope type ride outside that people were strapped into, spinning around in 3 dimensions. And at one point there were a bunch of people gathered around it when the naked man approached. It was JH that told us this. All he saw was the naked guy heading towards the gyroscope, going around the corner to where it was located, then like 9 people calmly but quickly come walking out of there. Which at least proves they're humans because really! How comfortable can you be with naked flaccid cocks walking around? Hard cocks maybe, but flaccid? Honestly!


We left that place, it had been super fucking eye-opening and neat, a chill gig, no real pressure, the place is very laid-back. Nobody would be surprised to see any sort of thing happening there at any given time, was my impression. There are a couple hundred members apparently, who all pay towards the monthly rent. Pretty fucking cool... for Montreal people, imagine a sort of post-apocalyptic SAT, run by the cool tech people that survived the nukes. We went back to Anna and JH's place, I got some more beers at a Kebab place near them (the bars here have no curfew and you can go buy beers at any hour; you can even get a fucking bottle of vodka at 5 in the morning. that would be dangerous if I lived here) and we stayed up a bit and chatted, smoked some nice big tobacco-y joints. Anna is a blonde Bulgarian/German noisemusik girl that Constantine had met the year before when he came to Germany to play at an ambient festival of some sort. Apparently they had chatted for a about 5 minutes and that was the extent of their being friends. They had kept in touch via email etc. And now she was putting the three of us up in what turned out to be a massive gorgeous place with many rooms. The kitchen had a typical German smell, I gotta say. Walking in there brought me back to Kulmbach, 14 years ago. Jean-Hugo comes from paris I believe, is skinny with long hair and makes some breakcore as well as some ambient noise stuff. Super cool, both of them. So on point, we all agreed. They knew about everything we talked about, from obscure music labels to software, to anything cool, basically. Apparently they met by chatting on Soulseek (the irony of this music-sharing software being called that, noted by Ruairi) presumably because they saw each other's mp3 collection and saw things they liked in common. Now they've been together for three years. They both speak perfect english and other languages, french, german. When I had played the night before at C-Base, afterwards, Anna came up and said she like what I played, but I was sheepish, stating "those were just some old rare obscure tracks that I never usually play out..just trying out some different stuff tonight..." and she goes "ahh I see...files from the depths of your haard drive...". On point, eh?




The next day we slept in way late like until 3pm - muchly needed - , then got up and ate some food that the two of them had hooked up for us. I felt bad not really eating much of the stuff...some fruit-topped toasted bread type thing that Anna had actually made, some hard boiled eggs, there was some ham and some cheese pieces, cantaloupe slices, hearty german bread....I picked at some of it and felt bad for not eating more. But I was still stressed about my bag. I tried calling the Air Berlin number they had given me, and it was busy. I tried about 10 times that day before we left to go out. Meanwhile I had no way of practicing any sort of legitimiate oral hygiene, and only had the clothes on my back, which I had sweated the shit out of during all the travails the day before. Not good. Kh4n had to lend me his Rephlex Records Braindance shirt and some socks! Thanks bro.

So we got out and walked around mit JH. Anna had to stay behind and finish some track she was submitting for a compilation. We took the train to some area with shopping streets and curio shops and just strolled around soaking it in. What a sick city. So bombed out - literally and figuratively - but everywhere there are just people going about their uber cool business, but there is no pretention, they are all over it, there are no fashionistas, just cool guy punters and gal punters. We walked right into several squat sort of areas, where people were going about various intersting activities, oblivious to our interloping. We went to a mad-max looking playground for littel Berliners, a record shop where I found an old Lotte Lenya sings Kurt Weill but it was too much - 25 euros - and I don't want to cart around fragile records in my duffel bag. We went and got authentiche kurry-wurst from a mobile wurst stand. It was great. There were some fussball fans all eating and drinking big bottles of beers around there, getting a tiny bit rowdy, then some Polizei came along and sort of broke it all up. I saw some great-looking girls I gotta say, all very practical looking beauty, nothing too ostentatious. Functional design. I did see a couple Anna Malle - looking super-beauties as well though, it must be noted. All the people walking around...the very looks on their faces. It was hitting me hard in a certain gene-memory and cultural affinity kind of way. Whether that's just perceived or otherwise, who knows. My last name is German and although I have no actual german relatives extant, I felt some amount of "these are my people". I felt like I was sort of in my homeland. I felt sentimental about the whole thing, and I saw some german faces on some people in the streets that practically broke my heart, the germanness of it all. My People! Why hadn't I come here to check it out sooner? I pledged then to come back some day and possibly try to live there for half a year or something. The place had montreal beat, in certain ways, I gotta admit. I could live there. People there appreciate my kind of musik a lot more than in Monty too, it's gotta be said. So yeah, currywurst and the polizei. Meanwhile we were getting pumped for that night's gig at Zantrale Radlange. Proper sets by all of us: Kh4n, JH, Ruairi and yours truly. At the club that has a lot of the breakcore shows in that town. People were gonna be there! It was gonna rock! Jean-Hug talked to Anna on the phone and we were to meet her somewhere in town, and he gave me news that while we were out, the Air Berlin luggage dudes had called and said they would bring over my bag between 8-10! Amazing. We would be at the show by then but I figured I would stay until the bag came and meet them there later, if necessary, beacuse I wanted to get on a fresh T shirt (the g25 one preferrably) and brush my damn teeth, and bring some cds to the show for merch.

We got to their place at like 20:05, and I was pretty seriously pre-occupied with my bag at this point. I thought I saw a guy driving along their street in a min-truck as we were walking along, almost there, and I imagined that I saw a blue bag in the front seat of his truck, and that he was looking along the street to scope out address numbers, and I was sort of thinking that was my guy right there. Totally preoccupied. There was stuff in the bag I really wanted to have for the show, as I mentioned. It would have put a bit of the damper to go to the venue, ohne mein tasche. Then we got in their place and I was sitting on their balcony sort of scanning the cars going by. Ruairi was getting his drums together. We were waiting for Anna too, with the weeds, and it was getting pretty damn close to when we were supposed to be at the venue. I spied a white van stop around the corner of the front door of the building, within view of the balcony. I saw a guy get out and go around the side. I was tense. If he comes back around the van holding mein blau-adidas-tasche, then I'd be fucking super happ....There he was carrying it!! "MY BAG!" I cried, and everyone was happy and releived too, and I went running down to greet him at the front door, and as I ran out, there was Anna at the front door of the apartment, which was also great. I ran down and signed for my bag, practically hugging the guy. Everything was totally sorted now. It occurred to me that that would be a great job - returning lost luggage. Everywhere you go you're bringing people back their possessions and they're fucking grateful for it. You become the person they want to see the very most in the world right now. There must be good tips in it - when the customers involved aren't budget-ass laptop musicians touring on a shoe-string. Maybe not though, because people are still pissed about the bags being lost in the first place? Who knows and who cares, really. I had my bag back.

I brushed the teeths, put on some Gilette product on my armpit areas, put on the g25 shirt, gave Anna and JH all my music as thanks - Sabres High CD, Zark Behida CD, and even the new 3" CD on Spunktronics. They were fucking chuffed! They knew all about g25 and Trotch. It's crazy. The we got a cab and headed towards the venue......


We got to the club and we were late. Really late, as the proprietor Rene and his partner Zenia told us. "It's almost OK...but the floyer says that the doors are for 9 - the floyer you made!", he scolded Jeah-Hug. It was exactly 9 and we still had some serious set up and sound check to do. But we could tell he wasn't that pissed.... The place was pretty sweet inside with lots of neat deco. Right away we got to work setting up our laptops and Ruairi's drums. They had a nice table for us; a laptop level table so that we wouldn't have to hunch over like every time at every other place. These dudes do shows like this all the time. I was seeing posters for other shows they had done there, featuring artists like Enduser, Mothboy, Society Suckers, Noize Creator, you name it, all the breakcore peeps. I chatted a bit with the hulking Rene about that musik scene, he was well into it, and he played some music off the computer which was set up by the soundboard, and played lots of "good jungle" and dnb. DJ Krust and Photek. We talked about the music for a bit and he said that he loved dnb but had grown tired of the boringness which had plagued it in recent years. I promised him that later on he was gonna hear some "interesting jungle". He smiled. I knew I would like this guy.




I did a soundcheck first for about 10 minutes, and everything seemed cool. I left to go outside for some air and let the drums get sound checked for Ruairi. I strolled accross the street to a "dep" and got a large bottle of Becks. When I came back there were a couple of girls waiting to get in and the door was locked. So I just chilled out there on a piknik table. Soon Anna was there and we chilled for a bit. Sophie the bassoonist showed up.


We got back in the place and it was open and Kh4n was ready to start. There was a visuals guy who was friends of JH. He had prepared some half-life mods to use as visual material. For the uninitiated, Half Life is a multiplayer online game like Dune, where you scroll around in these worlds, and you can make your own worlds with all the levels and backgrounds and charaters. You can basically create your own universes and it's not meant to be used as live visuals but in fact it's fucking awesome for just that purpose. While Kh4n played, there was wild artic tundra-scapes, and other awesome-looking landscapes and virtual spaces, that the visuals guy was scrolling around in, making for a virtual-reality vibe to the whole thing. It's hard to explain, see pics, but we all totally agreed that it was actually the coolest live visuals we had ever seen. Especially during Ruairi's set, about which, more later. Kh4n played some wicked sounding ambient noise stuff. It went so well with the visuals. There weren't actually that many people there at this point. I was hoping more would keep showing up later. But the fact of that matter is that until late in my set, only the 15-20 deutchlanders that were there from the beginning were the ones at the show. This sunk in when Ruairi started playing. Sometimes at a show there is a moment where you realize that "this is gonna be all the ppl that are coming tonight". Still, it was great. JH went on after kh4n and played some ambient material with occasional outbursts of breakcore. We yelled enthusiastically when this happened. He was using Buzz Tracker, a modular music software which is baffling to me. It was good times all around, rest assured.




The great Ruairi Lazers took the stage and pressed play on his cute little 12" ibook. Some nice chords and basslines were heard, and then he tore into some seriously fierce breakbeat activity on the drumkit. Mouths were agog. It was phenomenal, and forceful. It definitely brought back some memories of Dr Noh. He was playing in a very similar style to my brothers in my old band. It was totally awesome. Me and Kh4n were yelling out at the heavy bits. Everyone present was clearly impressed. I was starting to get pumped about my set, and in my slightly drunk and high mind, I started mapping out what tunes I would play. I resolved to play my best tunes first, anticipating that people would leave and I didn't want to save the best for last when nobody was there. Ruairi ended and I wanted to keep things moving along, not have too much down time between acts; it was after 2am at this point. Rene played some mp3 and I gave him the signal. I launched into the first tune. The sound was great; I could totally feel the bass through the floor. I played a couple more songs, unselfconcious, I didn't care that it wasn't packed; the crowd there was clearly listening. A few songs later I noticed a couple chicks were actually dancing, always encouraging. Then slowly but surely, more peeps started showing up, it's like almost 0300 at this point, and I guess this was a bar that was still open, so little crews were showing up, already trashed, and they all were getting into it. It started getting really good and I started choosing tunes that were more dancy....and it was going off really well. Kh4n came up on the stage and said to me, "Never Stop!". I'd already been playing like 45 minutes at this point. I was fairly wasted. I started loading in all these other tracks....


FF another hour and I'm still "knee deep in breakbeats", playing everything even remotely playable. All of ZB, plenty of Sabres High, much of Sweat Equity even. It was totally awsome. Handfuls of drunk berliners dancing and getting totally into it. Rene even got in on the action but manning the house mixer and doing a couple fast fadeout and cut-out type maneouvres on the fader. I caused me some confusion, thinking my sound was cutting out, but it was all in good fun - he was so into what was going on that he wanted to play along too (fuck him though -ed). I made a crucial decision to mix in the Anti-Man ragga tunes at some point, which I hadn't planned on doing because I thought Berlin wanted arty dnb not ragga mashup business (so 4 years ago) but as soon as those reggae chords started coming through, niggas straight up lost it and they were fucking getting down like nobody's business. I played all the ragga tracks and Rene came up at one point and was like "Sooo Haardcorre!", all German. I played about 2.5 hours in total, dropping essentially all my tunes. Anna, Sophie, everyone was smiling and getting down. I finished with some of the ambient synthy tracks off Isis and then Rene put on more good drum n' bass music. At this point, Rene and Zenia whom had been a bit pissy earlier about out late arrival and the lack of turnout were both gushing to me about my set. Not trying to brag here, but the tone had shifted from a poorly attended show, to an all out party. People were still dancing. I gave them both of my CDs as thanks. Zenia was gushing to me about something. Rene said "we want to have YOU back for sure". "You better fucking beleive it".



I felt compelled to do some espionnage on the visuals guy's stuff




We were in great shape to then stay up a bit more drinking and then go to the airport to fly to A-dam. Too soon! we loved Berlin! We wanted to stay longer but it wasn't possible with our itinerary.


Oh god, the airport. What a mess we were. We gave heartfelt goodbys all around to our awesome hosts and Sophie. So we get there and we're a mess. We check in and get through to the gate no problem. It's like 6 something AM. Ruairi has some problems checking his huge luggage and me and Kh4n are a bit concerned that he's not with his while all these other people file through. There is a black lady with two cute little kids, one of whom is basically just rolling around on the floor, without a care in the world. The mom doesn't give a shit either. I take a pic and state for the record that I wish I was that kid at that moment. Ruairi comes through and we eventually board the plane; we are all seated in the same row. I immediatly put the red blanket completely over my head, no air hole this time, just straight up burka style and you can see a funny pic of same (kh4n has it...i'll dig it up later -ed). A stewardess came along and asked if I was OK, and I just said "yeah" through the blanket.


We got out in Amsterdam at Schipol and got our stuff, which involved going to a different large luggage room to get Ruairi's stuff, but it all went pretty much fine, and then we cabbed it towards Kh4n's friend's house where we were going to leave the big stuff, then go find a hostel to stay at. We were booked to DJ at a club later as well but we were coming down off the Berlin drunken last night and things were getting surreal. We get out of the cab at Afrikannerplatz which was a nice little park accross the street from Kh4n's friend's place. He wasn't home of course, it was 8am and he worked that day until 5, we later learned. So we crashed in the park in full view of all the Afrikanners hanging out outside a restaurant or store of some sort, at one point blasting Sim Simma (who's got the keys to my beamer??). We slept all day in that park like a bunch of junkies. We were no longer in Germany, but Holland, where the language is different and alien sounding to me. The guy shows up and he's sort of a Dutch bearded fat-bum nerd guy (sorry). He was nice but his booewming voice talking loud about his favorite new ambient albums and we were groggy from that park. He also dissed breakcore and I wasn't having it...I tired of that scene completely and basically we left the drums and got on the train to go into town. There we found lots of people milling about, live bands on stages were unfortunately playing, and there were also robots.


Making Friends in A-Dam

I was feeling more and more sketchy. We needed food, but also a place to put our shit down and where we would sleep that night. We got on the train near buddy's place and soon were on the way to centraal station. Two young lesbians were sitting accross from us, hand in hand. At one point I noticed they both looked at me and giggled and I pointed at them and said "don't talk about me. You were talking about me!". They looked at me askance, and I tried to brush it off but they kept looking at me. Making lots of friends in Holland. Then outside the station, a girl with a clipboard came up to me and spoke some nonsense at me, then I said "I don't speak dutch" and she said "oh ok...." and was ready to leave me alone but I said "I'm glad I don't" and she said "you're glad you don't speak dutch?" to which I replied "well, you were going to ask me a questionnaire or something" and she says "actually I work for a charity for pediatric AIDS..." and I said "I don't have much money..." and she replies "no, you have to have a dutch bank account anyways" and I said "Oh OK! Good!" and that was that. Terrible.

We finally found a hostel but we got kind of ripped by the guy. I don't feel like talking about it right now.

OK, now I'll tell you about it. The guy had this sort of very coy Tyler Brule / Carlos from Interpol vibe with a heavy monobrow. We asked about rooms and rates and he told us a double room was 100 euros, which if we split 3 ways wouldn't be bad, maybe take turns sleeping on the floor. We left to regroup, decided this was probably no better or worse than any other tourist place around here, so we eventually (mind you: after searching and searching for The Flying Pig, the hostel I had stayed at with Tim in December '99, only to find that it was full to capacity) went back to the first place (named "Tourist Hotel Budget" or something equally lucid and descriptive) so we go in and ask buddy once again for a double room and we have the cash out on the table and everything and then he goes "only two people can fit in it though". I asked if there was any way we could just get the double room and he said "no, not really..." all coy. He knew from the beginning that we had intended on getting a fucking double room for the three of us, and he let us believe that it was possible right up until the last moment. Fucking guy. So we opted to sleep in dorms for $35/night ea. and it wasn't that bad but there were others in the room and this place didn't have a nice downstairs coffee shop and bar like the 'Pig, just a sort of formal looking restaurant area minus an actual kitchen. I asked him if there were lockers and he said that yes, there were.

We got into the rooms really at this point just wanting to drop shit off, lock up the bags, and go get some food. There were the cabinets with the cupboard lockers and there was a locking mechanism on the cupboard doors, but no locks. I was livid, of course, and probably embarrassed the others with my juvenile reaction to this situation. I tore down the staircase back to what's-his-fuck at the desk, and "how are we supposed to lock the lockers?". He says: "Oh. Yes, well. (pause) For that you would need a padlock. (pause) As far as that goes, you can either use your own - do you have your own?" "No." (me fuming) "...or you can acquire one here. We sell padlocks for five eur.." "Give me three locks!!", as I threw down the fucking bills. "You could have mentioned something..." I muttered angrily as I put my wallet away and tore back up the stairs to distribute the FUCKING PADLOCKS.......

Feeling somewhat fleeced, we struck out for nourishment. We looked, disoriented in this tourist zone. We had just come from the post apocolyptic ghetto-tek of Berlin to this hemp carnival town where all the tourists are marks because they came here to get high and laid, presumably. We found an Argentinian grill place that had some specials...it looked fine. Anything at this point. It turns out there were lots and lots of Argentinian Grill restaurants in the 'Dam. I wonder what that is all about.

The place was good but the steaks were smallish (yet tasty) and they fleeced us more for bread and water - we wanted glasses thereof and they brought little bottles, 2+ euros each. The bread was the same. So we left feeling more ripped off kind of, pining for the simpler times in Berlin where shit was cheap and we were sorted to boot. We now wanted weed, and to chill a bit before going to this bar to spin, about which we really knew nothing. Kh4n had talked to a guy online...it was vague terrain though. We went back and I showered with just water. The shower stall at the hostel was pretty gross; there were slimy shampoo cumshots on the floor of it, and it was just kind of dingy overall. Flipflops would have been a good thing to have here. No matter, we were settled at least. We struck out for weed and the venue.


Kh4n and Ruairi went in this caual looking smoke shop and got hash and weed. They rolled a big one. Ruairi is pretty chronic it turns out. We found the venue and it looked pretty chill - a little mezzanine area where the DJ is set up, some cool looking peeps. Bouncy housy disco stuff playing....we sparked the spliff out front before heading in.....

This stuff floored me, as expected, but it was a really mellow flooring. I still got super-silent right away and couldn't really focus on what Ruairi was saying. Kh4n went in. We followed and went in to where Kh4n was upstairs sitting with a guy. I assumed we had made the connection. I was paranoid, and asked Kh4n what was up, and he turns to me, almost scared looking, and says he doesn't know, and doesn't know who he was just talking to. About ten more minutes go by, and I ask Kh4n if he knows whom we are supposed to talk to and he doesn't. He's baked and para. This was some serious creeping nobodys shit. I didn't feel all red and dehydrated, just psychically buzzed and incapable of discourse. We decide we don't like the disco house music up in the atelier there, and go down to the bar. I sort of feel like I'm not gonna play tonight. I don't feel the vibe at all. We have no idea what we're doing. The tunes are wack too. I ask Kh4n if he cares if I even play and he sort of implies that he's not even that sure about throwing down either. We are a couple of serious lame wads, in my mind. "How was the show in Amsterdam?", they'll ask. "Oh, we didn't play. We were at the bar but were both tired and didn't feel like it." Can you imagine? That doesn't get much lamer. But I'm not feeling it. The weed has made us into zombies. I knew I would be lame on A-dam weed but I was surprised by Kh4n. I thought he was more tolerant, but this stuff was sort of next-level. Not knocking Kh4n's weed handling abilities at all here....

Oh yeah, there was a place next door to the bar named after an old "DJ Jonny X" mix CD I once made. Heh...


There are a dozen or so regulars at this small bar. Some cool looking peeps. It is still early, like just after 9. The bartender is a slim late 40s guy with short cropped fine silver hair, almost in a ceasar cut. Aside from that and his tight red sweater, he looks very similar to, and postures and talks in a manner dead-similar to: Christopher Walken (no pic of this guy, unfortunately! -ed). After a while of distractedly looking at myself in the mirror accross the bar, I get some small glasses of beer served to me by Chris W. They are too small and I demand a pint, if possible. We chat a bit before I go "Are you Christopher Walken?" Ruari chuckles, and the guy immediately launches into his best Walken impression, "You knowww...Igetaskedthatallthetime! . . . Personally for me, I don't see....the resemblance" etc. I'm cracking up going "You're talking Exactly like him, LOL!". We warm up a bit to the local crowd. Some yabbo type is talking to Kh4n about his 16 years experience DJing techno. He buys one of Kh4n's 3"CDs....then soon enough an enthusiastic mid twenties guy with curly dutch hair and a light blue football shirt on comes in, sees us cool dudes and obvious non-regulars, and comes over and is all "Panow-spria??", nodding, smiling. We hook up with dude and get acquainted. He is the one Kh4n had talked to. He's our boy. He sorts up out upstairs, shows us the hard-wired RCA line in jacks that are built into the table with the turntables and mixer, for when people come with laptops. It just shows care being taken. It was sweet. They were all "you guys can play as long as you want....play whatever you want....here are headphones...". I expressed some hesitance to maybe verge into drum n' bass later? They said go nuts, do whatever. It was chill. I'd had some of that smooth dutch beer at this point and was feeling worlds better. But still in my stonedness there at the bar earlier, I was pining and lamenting like mad for Berlin. We had been with the coolest people and scene, and now this, getting gypped and dicked around over locks. And now we had no home base where we could actually chill. I felt grim for a bit there, about our new surroundings.

I tried to bully Kh4n into going first, but he was zombie-like, about it. He mumbled and said that he could conceivably go first, then finally taking a stand and saying that the music they were playing right now was actually kind of akin to Blakkar Noir stuff, and that I should really bust in. I agree. I launch into Sweaty Box and follow with the stream of all the other BN repretoire. Seguing into "Dr Bootygrabber" at one point but the mp3 is bad, there are glitches....so I defly segue again into the dubstep tune, right after Dr Bootygrabber says his first line, "Good afternoon.....". Smooth as fuck.

Kh4n played some great downtempo stuff afterwards, nice chill beats. The locals seemed somewhat nonplussed but definitely enjoying the vibe. This was booked as a DJ gig which is cool cos we are not the center of attention, we are playing some of our own music but not exclusively...there is less pressure. It was a good gig for that night. It was the only gig in Holland; a proper one would have been good, where we all played sets, but Kh4n had had nothing but apologetic dutch promoters telling him via email that that was the holiday season, and not much was happening. Anyways, we played out some good tunes at this bar, and later I did a set of just dB tunes, all the greats...it was pretty good. The other resident, another grizzled 15 year techno veteran, who was very nice, took over as "Etobicoke" faded out, and told us that another girl DJ was about to play some stuff too. It was around midnight. We smoked some more and then got the nerve to get up and get out of there. After the day in the park and then the fucking turmoil and travails of getting room and food, we were done. We went and said goodbye to the grizzled resident and just then there is this kind of stunning short haired blond chick on the decks; whom I think I've maybe talked to online via the Panospria myspace? Damn, in my stoned mind she looked a lot like Avril Lavigne, and also Nat and Teig's friend Shawna. She goes "you are leaving now?" after we had just shook hands with the older guy and said literally "goodbye" but she's looking me in the eye with this question and I feel like a schoolgirl and just go "....I dunno......"....then the three of us immediately turned and descended the steep ladder / stairs going to the mezzanine and we essentially ran out of there, stoned and nervous about nothing! I was like "Kh4n shouldn't we say goodby to buddy with the light blue shirt?" and Kh4n says over his shoulder "only if he's out here on the terrace". We're walking away from the bar at this point and it's like "is he out here on the terrace after all" and I think I even said "don't look back, lets just get out of here!". We were in a condition known as "Pure Para". We scrambled back to the hostel, got lost a tiny bit on the way, but we got there, finally, and then we got into the fucking room with the other snoring animals, fully clothed me, and got my pants off in the bed and fucking crashed hard, dude.

Here is Kh4n during his set


Well, after the day before with sleeping in parks and general hard vibes and an overall lack of smoothness, we slept in well past the cutoff time for the free breakfast, it was 12:30, and we decided to go, me and Kh4n, to get a coffee somewhere. I swear we just wanted coffee. It was drizzling, providing a calm atmosphere. It had rained all night and the sounds and smell of same had given me calm sensations all thought the night. We got to this cool little place but you couldn't just get coffee without a weed purchase. So we bought a pre-rolled hash spleef, and sparked that shit son. There was some shitty hiphop blaring - "he's got a girl on the side with a crib and a ride....telling so many lies....why why why" etc and there was Steve-o's animal kingdom or whatever on the TV. We sat and laughed. We then went back and collected Ruairi. Or we just met him back at the hostel, him emerging from his bed with green felt cap and jacket all hooked up. He and Kh4n were going to go back to the dutch Matt Groening (who himself must be dutch, somewhere back)'s place to hang out, and jam a bit on some noise musik, and I felt like having some Me Time so I stayed behind, setting myself up in the lobby with laptop and AC, and hacked out most of the last three parts of the story.

A funny thing that afternoon was that I became friends with monobrow Carlos D. The lobby PC was on the fritz, and I offered to help take a look, but he told me he was just as well versed in computers and probably more. We discussed what the problem might be. IDE connection, maybe a BIOS setting, maybe try safe mode and look through the registry for fishy looking processes, etc. He watched my laptop for me while I went to the store. Friends: on. It would turn out that he shared even more of our interests than that....

Anyways Con and Rory came back into the lobby around 7pm, sorry they were late, but I was just ready to disengage from the narrative and rejoin reality. They had had a nice jam too, and were somewhat baked. I hadn't smoked all day. We decided to go to this Japanese chain restaurant that the two of them had been raving about. It's called Wagamama and it was fucking good. We had a coupon from the hostel entitling us to a free bottle of wine with the purchase of two meals. Sweet livin'...

That restaurant was friggin' perfect. I had some Miso Ramen and some fried duck dumplings. And some beer, some wine. It was more than enough to eat, and cheap. Lovely. After we walked into the big park in the city and smoked more spliff. It wasn't hitting us as hard by this point. Totally manageable. We walk around, have some ice cream, then find this faux-Irish pub and have some Guinesses. "This tastes great," I offer, while Ruairi shruggs, saying that it's OK at best. Where we're going in Ireland, he sez, they have the best pint of Guinness in the UK. Well, I'm sure everybody thinks that about their local pub, in Ireland. There's really not much else to say about this day. We are grateful to not have to be dragging shit around, and we're getting to know the city and we're enjoying it more and more. There are no more hard feelers about no longer being in Berlin. We are here now and it's cool. I start to feel retarded at the Irish place, we all walk back, have a smoke in the hostel lobby then go up to the beds where we drop like bags full of hammers. We had resolved to get up from breakfast tomorrow, go to the Heineken Brewery Tour, and maybe rent some bikes to tool around on.


























A-dam, day three.

We are up, me and Kh4n, at like 8:30 and we get our hot little hands on some serious brekky, for free, down in the hostel lobby. It's surprisingly wicked. Unlimited coffee, "orange drink", breads to toast and apply nutella or other jams too, hard boiled eggs if you're into that whole scene, ham and cheese slices that you can put between two slices of bread and make a like, grilled pocket type thing with in the sandwitch press! And it's all free and unlimited! I ate like 15 euros worth of food every time we did breakfast down there. Totally worth getting out of bed at 08:30 for. And that's earlier than I get out of bed when I'm in Montreal and have to work. Well, get a fat spread of delicious free food at my apartment in Monty, then we'll talk.

We walked over to the Heineken Brewery to participate in the "Heineken Experience". It really was something else. You hear things like how you get to drink free beer at the end as much as you want but obviously it can't be like that. You pay 10 euros and you get three tickets each redeemable for a glass of beer. Served up with tons of head, Dutch style. You walk your way through all these information areas. There are pics of the affable guy that started the whole brewery. It's pretty whatever. We manage to get some great pics of me and Kh4n "standing in cool light". We really look like rad-looking techno dudes at a well-styled techy photo shoot. Speaking of which, there is a part of the Heineken tour where you're in this room and there's a fake ass sort of DJing console, where you can push buttons and various beats will come in...you can trigger samples and make scratching sounds...i.e. it's lame as hell. What has this got to do with Heineken, I want to know. The best part is that there are really two of these stations separated by a decent sized dancefloor. So two teams of goons can man these stupid "decks" and "battle" each other. There are even VJing buttons. You can really get some teamwork going and fuck up the party. A dorky looking euro-dad and son were frantically manning the one station with all their hands and arms while me and Ruairi and possibly Kh4n battled them over on our side. We kicked their fucking asses. We shamed them. They went back to fucking Denmark or wherever, tails between legs. They should never have fucked with Team Panospria. That's what happens, bitch.









That afternoon we walked around and found a pretty sweet art gallery. I took a bunch of pics of the neato modern business they were rocking in there. The lady asked if we were artists, and I told her about the tour but also admitted that I was a novice visual artist and within a minute, we were looking at my box drawings from flatwax.com on her computer at her desk. I got their card. Will follow up. Imagine getting a "show" at an art gallery in Amsterdam, of my 3D boxes that I printed up at work? That's a serious goal of mine!














Couldn't come here without taking a pic of us in front of "Frens Harringhandel". There is a nearly identical pic of me and Tim Magee in front of the same herring stand when we were in Amsterdam in december of 1999. It's great to see Frens again.




We went into this weird psy-trance shop (total foreshadowing btw) and see some neat stuff and I take a pic and right away it's "hey! no photography!" from the management. Too late suckka. You've been utterly plogged and there's not a DAMN thing you can do about it.


Great signage.


We dined at Wagamama again, another free bottle of wine hooked up via a coupon from "Budget Hotel Tourist Inn" - by now a fine establishment in our estimation. But things were starting to get a tad predictable up in old A-dam. There is not a hell of a lot of diverse things to check out in the touristy city center core. We never did rent bikes and I wish that we had, just to see more outlying areas. That afternoon I held court in the lobby, dominating the ethernet cable again, and I fired up bittorrent to get the latest episode of Deadwood in about 90 minutes. Can you sort of tell we're straining for things to do at this point please? These guys aren't big drinkers either. We don't want to waste money partying every night anyways...this is most expensive leg of the trip, what with the nightly lodging and food fees. So after the meal we came back here and soon, Ruairi (he's a total techy sound man gear guy, and reminds me a lot of Drew in fact...) and I had hooked up my laptop to one of the big flatscreens on the wall of the lobby area. With VGA too, which looked super good. We got the sound going by fashioning a mini-to-mini 1/8" inch cable out of two mini-to-RCA cables, Kh4n providing the crucial piece which was the one with female RCA ends. We were soon in business, playing tunes through the speakers of the flatscreen TV. I played a little set and we're totally including that in our gig list on this tour. Monobrow was still on duty and he fully condonded and facilitated our laptop setup (we had to borrow the VGA cable from the defunct computer, a move he sanctioned) and came over while we watched some funny youtube videos (Yacht Rock, and some of that dutch "jumpstyle" dancing, for those keeping score). I said to him "this is what your countrymen have contributed to the electronic music scene" and he then told us that he too had been spinning techno for 10 years and this was his main passion etc. We told him we were on tour etc. We exchanged websites etc. He even smoked some spleef with us as he was leaving his shift and we were getting ready to watch Deadwood. I forget his name but it was a weird name. I called him “Nestley” for the rest of thr trip but Ruairi later confided that he remembered that the name was in fact “Monir”.

Deadwood season 3 episode 11 was amazing. Not sure if Kh4n and Ruairi dug it, being neophytes, but to me it was a heavy one. Hearst fucking had Ellsworth killed. I was almost in tears. Ellsworth! Ellsworth was one of the few truly good guys. It was in retaliation for Swedgen killing that man of Hearst's in the last episode, in my opinion. Only one episode left and then the two movies! I fucking love Deadwood, but how is it gonna be left at the end of the next ep? It's gonna be a gut-wrenching cliffhanger. I can't take it anymore. I almost want the show to end after next ep. so that it can just be over, with dignity. My concerns for these two "TV Movie" installments next year are manifold: will they drag on too long (normal eps. are 1 hour and last night's in particular seemed to last way longer). Can people sit through 2 hours of this stuff without losing interest? Will historical fact be respected? I know for a fact that the real Al Swearengen dies while trying to jump onto a slow train passing through town, like a common hobo. Drunk and penniless. It's trajic really. And we know Hearst can't get killed. Trixie shot him last night in the shoulder and he fucking walked it off. My concerns about the end of this brilliant series are manifold...... Me and Kh4n stayed up a bit longer listening to tunes and watching the visualizations, which looked fucking amazing on the VGA. I played him some of the Dr Teeth stuff and suggested it get released on Pano. He was into it. It's not like it costs him anything other than a couple of man-hours. There is just the right amount of material for an EP, and the coolest thing is that Kh4n actually really reminds me, personally, of Ben Moss. Both uber chill, quiet, nice, and I'll even say good-looking chaps. No homo....


There's Nestley in the background, wheeling and dealing.


We went to Wagamama again tonight. It was good again. We were chill tonight. The guys and me came back and used the internet cable some more, and we got given some weed by a guy whom I let transfer some pics from his digital camera and burn them on a CD on my laptop, so we rolled that and smoked it outside. Kh4n was looking like a frowny sad animal, but he was really just tired and stoned. We were about to watch some more Yacht Rock on youtube when the night shift guy asked for the ethernet cable back, he had been reinstalling windows all evening and it was now ready to go. Cut short of internet the second before we were going to watch episode three. The defunct windows box that we had been using the resources of, and scavenging for parts, was now fixed and operational. Our era had passed. Later, Amsterdam. It's been a real mental vacation.

Kh4n and Ruairi took it as an obvious clue from the abrupt cutting off of internet services, and went up to crash their sad puppydog faces into their pillows. I stayed up to recount all this, plus I have 2 more tall cans of heineken in the fridge here.
We're leaving tomorrow right after checkout at 11:00. A bus from near here will then take us directly to the Eindoven Airport where we will then have hours to kill until our 7pm flight. But I won't be able to bring those cans on the flight. I guess I'll drink them either right now, or tomorrow. I'm definitely about to get up and go to the fridge and crack one more. As I went to get each can (I finished both that night, who are we kidding?), both times as I was turning away from the fridge, I banged the fleshy part of my front thigh into this fucking evil sharp corner on the countertop opposite said fridge. It fucking hurt like the dickens, believe me, and the then when I went to get the second can the exact same thing happened again! FUCK it hurt. A few days later in Dublin I had a look and jesus I’ve never seen so many colours of the rainbow on a bruise. There are still colours visible there right now.

The next day we took the bus from Amsterdam Central Station to the Eindoven airport, which I think is sort of the Amsterdam equivalent of London's Stanstead complex. IE a place away from the hussle and bussle of city life, where cut-rate airlines can focus on hearding in the lower classes onto their dirty, unkempt jets. We never went anywhere near Eindoven proper, and I imagine, who would want to? We had some hours to kill after checking in. I went strolling around the grounds. There were some neat sculptures. Those Dutch!











Then we went to the upper level to wait some more. This place was much much nicer than Stanstead, that's for damn sure. There was even a children's area with some lego bins, and an X-Box station with Super Mario Kart! Gratis, no less. Me and Kh4n dominated that station playing some heated Battle Mode (having to stack one tiny kiddie stool on top of another just to sit comfortably, the precariousness of which seating arrangement added to the excitement! It could have toppled at any moment!). Soon we were boarding our first Ryanair (The Low Cost Airline!) flight. Can you believe that it's general admission seating on these things? It's totally budget. Well, Ruairi got right in there and was first on board and got the front row for the three of us, which was great. The stewardesses all speak with eastern european accents (why? Isn't it the Irish airline?), you have to pay for any kind of refreshment, but if you do, you might just win the raffle for a round trip ticket at a later date. I think I payed about 60 Euros for that flight while Kh4n payed less than half that cos he booked it earlier. So crazy.





Then we got on the plane to fly to Ireland.

part 2 - Ireland - coming soon