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posts about mannheim.

yesterday, i attended a concert of die toten hosen, a german punk band. the opening band was something from norwegen, and i didn’t really like it. but, opposed to that, the concert by the hosen was good, even though i didn’t knew most of the newer songs. they played a lot of classics, like alles aus liebe, bonny & clyde, eisgekühlter bommerlunder, liebesspieler, schön sein, pushed again, wünsch dir was, zehn kleine jägermeister and hier kommt alex.
the technical gadgets were pretty nice. every band member (except the drummer) had his personal light man, who operated a spotlight aimed on that person. moreover, a set of led arrays hang down above the stage, forming a “broken” monitor, sometimes showing the waveform of the music, or animations fitting to the music.
we got three encores (most of the classic songs were played in the encores), one of them featuring a side blow to berlin, saying that now they’ll play real “jazz” (pronounced as jatz in german), featuring the beginning of eisgekühlter bommerlunder while mimicing jazz.
actually, the concert also had two bad sides. first, as so often, there were some assholes who thought that the smoking ban does not affects them. unfortunately, a common problem :(
the second thing was the great connection of the sap arena to public transportion. there’s a train station very near, the mannheim rangierbahnhof. featuring two wooden (!) platforms and no (!) ticket machine, a huge crowd was squeezed into short fast trains. well, even if there would have been a ticket machine inside the trains (which apparently wasn’t, as it turned out later), it was by no mean possible to reach it. whatever. we were pretty happy as after maybe half an hour the train emptied considerably, allowing us to finally sit down.