RIVS TOUR, FEB 12 08: Don Benito


Breakfast in Spain. Can you guess what is missing? Yup... food.

I will do a quick recap of the first ten days of tour. Siesta starts in fifteen minutes, so I'll have to be brief.


02.02.2008 GER, Bremen, Spedition
No time for sleep (althought I did sleep in the car, I must confess), we go from the airport in Amsterdam to the venue in Germany. With Grimm with us, it is nice to hang out with him and be back in Bremen. The venue was great, the people running it were super nice... the lighting in the venue was amazing (see Flickr page for proof)... great vegan food... hung out with Michael from Twisted Knister (and he owes me two CDs from his awesome experimental vending machine which didn't work)... nice private room at the venue... stay up late and sleep and avoid jetlag.



03.02.2008 NL, Haarlem, Patronaat
Drive back the way we just came, past Amsterdam and on to Haarlem. It is nice to go to a venue we've played before, as the surroundings are familiar and comfortable. Dijk and the bartenders were all super nice... Roy S came, which was great to see him. Ate typical dutch food and violated Elmo in numerous ways... the show was AMAZING, really. Best rivs show I've seen in a long time. Drove to kind of shit hostel on outskirts of town. Snuck in to breakfast, which was surprisingly good.



04.02.2008 GER, Dortmund, filmshoot
05.02.2008 GER, Dortmund, Qbar
Well, wow... these two days were very surreal and cool. Two of Nathan's songs are being used in this documentary about a soon to be reclaimed lake in Dortmund, Germany. In old times, before the industrial age, the land was a marsh. When the steel plants came in, they pumped the marshes dry to get the coal beneath. Now that the steel industry is dried up, there is no need to keep the pumps going, so they are finishing up and evening out the land, and then they will turn the pumps off... the whole are will fill back up with water naturally. It will be great.

SO, they were interviewing Nathan about his thoughts on ecology and all that sort of thing, showing us the place where the lake will be (it's a big quarry like hole right now). We got in and settled into a really nice hotel; each with our own room. The crew showed up and took us around and such... it was FREEZING rain out and Nathan got sick... not good for so early on in the tour...

Then we went to a river and ate some intensely good Italian food (I had gnocci with a cream sauce of some sort... so good!)... the crew were so incredibly nice to us, and really fun to hang out with, too. all very interesting and friendly. I spent a lot of time sitting about doing nothing. They even got me a laptop to use, so I could upload photos while they filmed!

Um... this entry is getting long... sorry...

So, after dinner and some more filming by the river, we went back to the hotel to sleep. Internet was 8 euro an hour at the hotel, so fuck that. I watched some weird German TV, and slept. I had a crazy dream about Doctor Who, in which I came across a secret meeting of five of the ten Doctors... then, I ran into Rick Cooley at an airport somewhere... weird dream. Where are you anyway, Rick Cooley?

Woke up, and had breakfst in the hotel. The breakfast at the hostel was a lot better... Met up with the crew and did some more shooting... oh, first we went to a posh restaurant and had a five or seven course meal of nouveaux cuisine... it was insanely good....

More shooting up on top of a Space Needle like tower thing... Britta and I stayed on the ground floor because it was a big scary and made me motion sick.

Then QBar... a nice little shotgun cocktail bar... nice show, if a bit weird with Nathan being sick and the filming and stuff... but, you know... still very nice people, great drinks and food.

After the show, we drove to Koln to stay the night at Felix and Britta's flat (different Britta) and get a jump on the drive to Paris the next morning. Got to call home, as Felix has a really good phone plan.

Well, siesta is upon us... I will finish the recap tomorrow.