on new year's day, we enjoyed a peaceful stroll through the nearby forest.

i think today i experienced the coldest temperatures i had outside in my whole life: -23 degrees celsius. well, and i found a reason why wearing glasses suck: if you try to protect your mouth and nose by putting a scarf in front of it, your breath will cloud your glasses and finally, the water on the glasses will freeze so your view is perfectly blocked. didn’t feel as funny as it sounds, but i survived :)

today, i attended fish‘s concert in the z-7. fish was one of the founding members of marillion, a british prog band which happens to be two years older than me, but left them in 1988, after marillion released the clutching at straws album in 1987. in the beginning of fish‘s gig, an intro video was shown, displaying all the 20 years from 1987 to 2007 with a famous scene from that year, with a subtitle relating it to fish in some humouros way. except 2000, when a picture of george w. showed up with the subtitle “what the fuck?!”, and 2004, when another picture of george w. showed up with “again? you assholes!” ;-)
well. the concert was really great; fish was in a great mood and told funny stories between the songs. i basically only knew the albums 13th star and clutching at straws before, but they played a couple of songs from these two, or at least i thought i recognized a few…
i originally planned to buy 13th star at the merchandize booth, but they only had a special edition there which had a way too high price for me… well. besides that, i was pretty tired and exhausted, had problems keeping standing, but survived till the end, had to run for the train, which almost killed me (running uphill while it’s freezing and when you’re exhausted and pretty dehydrated is not a good idea), but i caught the train and even managed to walk the way from the main station to my place in zürich (without running though). and now it’s time to grab some sleep.
good night.

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.