i haven’t felt so young on a metal concert for a pretty long time now, as on today’s dream theater show in winterthur. on the outside, i really felt dressed strangely, as the number of metal t-shirts was pretty small and most people looked pretty normal. inside, the situation looked a bit different, probably the metalheads were a bit earlier :-)
another pretty strange thing was that the wardrobe was located 100 m outside from the entrance. that means, you have to give away your jacket, queue up in the line for the entrance and stay there, freezing, just wearing a t-shirt. but at least it was not raining…
well. besides all these strange things, and also besides the insane pricing of the tickets, the concert was great. even though symphony x had just around 40 minutes to play. at least, the break for cleaning up the stange was pretty short (around 20 minutes), so one had no chance to fall asleep in between… (i remember some breaks which came near to one hour…) the stage was decorated with giant ant puppets, although i couldn’t see them, too many heads in my way… another gimmick was a traffic light hanging above the stage, which showed red, then turned to yellow when the intro music started, and changed to green when the band began to play.
well. dream theater played for almost two hours and, as usual, produced a really good show. they played a lot from their current album, systematic chaos, some other songs and, as an encore, a long medley, going through different epoches of dream theater.

as promised, some panoramas from our trip to monte generoso on last weekend.

today i’ve been attending a festival in dietikon, eight bands playing in 9 1/2 hours. out of these eight bands, two were crap, and five were pretty good (finsterforst, trimonium, kivimetsan druidi, korpiklaani and moonsorrow), which made this festival quite a success. my two absolute favorites today were korpiklaani and moonsorrow, two finnish bands which were the main reason for me to show up at the festival after all.

the finnish humppa metallers korpiklaani entered the stage as the seventh band. as they started playing, the crowd basically went wild, everyone starting to move, to dance. it was simply amazing. the idea to combine humppa with metal is simply great. and they also played happy little boozer, to which a friend of mine once wants to dance drunken on a table (if you’re reading this: you missed a great concert!). unfortunately, korpiklaani had to leave the stage after one hour… i really want to see them again, and then a bit longer…

finally, as the eight band, moonsorrow—one of my favorite bands—appeared on stage. for 80 minutes. and even after the crowd has already been active for around eight hours of concerts (my bones were hurting, my neck aching, my brain complaining, my feet weary), people still managed to adequately honour the great music and stage performance by banging like crazy, by dancing to the great tunes. it was simply fantastic. unfortunately, it was over at some point. too bad.

conclusions:

• one should kick the sucking bands out of the schedule and increase the playing time of the best ones.
• one should replace the mixer by someone who more successfully tries to compensate the bad accoustics of the hall and does not simply makes it worse by fucking up the mixing…
• humppa rocks.
• moonsorrow rocks even more. (regardless what the bavarian guy is saying.)

and now, it’s time to grab some sleep. thank you and good night.

on saturday, we hiked the monte generoso, located next to the city of mendrisio in the ticino. here are some pictures from our trip.

first, some pictures from the cogwheel train ride up to bellavista:

then, some pictures from our walk from bellavista up to the top of the mountain:

and that’s me on the top of the mountain, one step from the abyss:

a picture of the village mendrisio:

finally, some pictures from my train ride to northern germany on sunday:

after returning from bordeaux, the return having been quite adventurous, i traveled trough the alps into the ticino, to the monte generoso. here are some photos from the train ride.

as promised, some pictures from bordeaux. some panoramas may come later.

a few days ago i wrote about my small hotel room. well, it’s about time to add something. first, inside bordeaux’ trams people get packed together like sardins. and in paris’ metro, it’s even worse. in particular if it stops in the middle of the tunnel while one is compressed by an enormous amount of people around oneself. i’m really happy that this is over.

how small a hotel room can be? by induction on the ones i’ve been in, and in particular the one i’m in right now, probably infinitely small. well. it could be much better, if someone (from here on known as the interior designer™) wouldn’t have messed it up and arranged the things inside here a bit more clever, i wouldn’t feel like being in a puppet house, without space to move…

i’ve been there, though just briefly. expect some more pictures (and panoramas) next week.

if you’ve ever seen the cover of opeth‘s fifth masterpiece blackwater park, you’ll know what i mean with opethesque (if you haven’t, look here). i took some similar shots this morning throu the train’s window:

unfortunately i missed to catch some more impressions which were even more opethesque… well, maybe next time.