Tag: concert

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Hubert von Goisern, Black Sea to North Sea

Hubert von Goisern “… is considered as one of the most influential heads of the “Neue Volksmusik” …” (last.fm) and of of his specialities is to incorporate folkmusic from various places around the world into his austrian based style. On his latest tour from the Black Sea to the North Sea he and his whole crew are travelling on a barque, which also is the base for the stage. Every now and then they stop at some town along the rivers they travel and stage a concert. At each of these shows they also include local artists with their distinct styles.
After my parents and me spent a day together in Darmstadt, we went down to Hirschhorn near Heidelberg to see one of these shows. Though the forecast predicted rain, we were lucky and enjoyed a great open air concert.

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back home

Yea I know … it’s been a while since my last post.

Local Culture

I made it home well, right in time for quite a few late summer / autumn festivals. The first and biggest was the traditional Wasen, a few weeks later I visited the Fellbacher Herbst for the first time. A pretty nice wine festival in the heart of, you guessed it, Fellbach with live music and many booths selling local wine and food. The last local festival in that row was the Krautfest, a festival around Filderkraut, which is typical for the Filder region and only produced here.

Good old Friends

Two weeks after I returned back home some good friends from highschool times and I went to Switzerland. The first day and evening we spent in Basel, joining with one of our friends who had worked there for his studies. After we finally decided on a restaurant I had a really nice wild boar roast which I won’t forget for quite a while.
The second day we drove to Luzern and started hiking up the Pilatus with fog all around us, one could barely see 50m. Overall the elevation difference would have been 1600m in one day, but in my corrent condition I gave up at about 1000m and took the cable car to the top. There we had a reservation for the hotel and enjoyed a relaxed evening (the others were totally tired as the last 600m were the toughest part).
Sunday the fog had cleared and the view was really marvellous. After a brief sunbath we took the cable car back to the lower station where we had parked the car and spend the rest of the day browsing around the inner city of Luzern.

panoramic view from Pilatus

The Studymates

The last weekend of October my group of best friends from the aerospace studies in Stuttgart gathered in Hamburg. The first day had a bar crawl through the Schanzenviertel and along the Reeperbahn.
After everyone had recovered from the night before, we went down to the pier (Landungsbrücken) and took a boat trip around the warehouse district (Speicherstadt) and the harbour. After that we just walked around downtown a bit and found a really nice and small mexican restaurant where we managed to get a table for the nine of us. After a good meal and some Tequila we retreated to Oli’s place where most of us stayed and had a rather calm last evening.

My Grandma’s 88th Birthday

As we planned the gathering in Hamburg quite a bit ahead, I could arrange that it would be the same weekend as my grandmother’s 88th birthday. So Sunday I got up a bit earlier, took the bus to the main station to get a few fresh flowers and visited her. It is truely amazing how clear her mind is, everytime I really enjoy talking to her. As usual I ate quite a bit more than I had planned, but I guess that’s a universal fact for grandmas all over the world!

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Long due Update

Yeah, I know it’s been a long time since the last post … a tip for the impatient: I update the photo-gallery more regularly.
As quite a lot has happened in the meantime, I’ll just start in the past, working my way to the present, sipping on my icecold sweet tea.

Victor Wooten Concert
Ben and Zach had been telling me about Victor for quite a while, claiming he is one of the best bass-players ever! As always I was a bit skeptical.
Arriving at the Variety Playhouse in Little Five Points, Ben first went to the Turkish place next door for some falaffel. Sitting in front of the snack bar, we started chatting with the owner, who told us that they just opened that weekend. A little into the talk he realised where I was from and started talking German! He and a few more of his staff had spent a few year in Germany before coming over to the US. Being a really nice guy, he offered me a free falaffel, which I couldn’t refuse, and it indeed was very good!

With some food in our bellies we went back to the Variety Playhouse to see the concert. And I must say Ben and Zach were SO right with their raving! Victor Wooten really is one of the best, if not the best, bass-player I have ever seen performing! Toghether with a really amazing band they just blew my mind away! Every single musician was so good and as they seemed to be playing just for the fun of it, the whole concert felt more like a jam in some friends livingroom.
You can find the photos i took right here in the gallery.

In the meantime I switched from sweet tea to Pilsner Urquell, but lets just go on …

Graduation Day in Columbia
Three weeks later Zach and I drove over to Columbia for a weekend, as it was Mitul’s graduation day.
This being the second trip to Columbia (we went there for St. Patrick’s Day as well) I must say I really like this city with its central bar district and pretty much all of Ben’s and Zach’s friends living really close to the downtown area. One funny thing that evening, highlighting the absurdity of some of the regulations over here, was that we got refused to enter a bar because Zach and Steven were wearing “Gang Style”! Yeah! Those two guys really look dangerous! 😉

Everybody being a bit tired from the night before (hanging out at Chubby’s) we just went to a nice spot at the river and relaxed there, playing with Jerry, Janna’s crazy dog. In the evening we went to a nice restaurant where they were brewing their own beer and got some nice southern food.

Plum Hollow Bluegrass Festival
Steven, who I just got to know on our recent visit to Columbia, told me about this Bluegrass and Moonshiners Festival in northern South Carolina and that he planned to go there. As I always liked small festivals and Bluegrass we planned to meet there and camp out for the weekend.
After a relaxed ride north to Spartanburg on the interstate 85, I arrived in the area around noon and soon realised that this is as cliche as it gets! When I had to ask for directions I could barely understand the heavy southern accent. The whole town was decorated with US flags and on the roads you could only see pickup trucks. After a few extra turns I made it to the Plum Hollow farm, where Steven was already setting up his special campsite. A nice hidden spot, with quick access to the whole festival.

As I expected sitting around a campfire at night, i had prepared some stick-bread, which is mostly unknown in what the Americans call the world and the rest of the world calls the Unites States (sorry i couldn’t resist 😀 ). So the first evening Steven and I were wandering around the campsite, joining different groups around their fires, spreading stick-bread and trying moonshine people brought along. Soon I was known as “The German with the stick-bread” all over the festival (around 200-300 people I would guess).
The stage was set up nicely right in front of the forest with a well needed tin roof providing some shade for the listeners. So bluegrass bands were playing pretty much all the time till around midnight, when people would move to their campfires and start playing their own music, jamming with others.
I managed to record two songs with my camera and converted them to mp3-format:

the first two pictures below show that scene at about 2am around a pavillion.


Overall I must say this was all I hoped it would be! I really enjoyed spending the weekend with these friendly and down-to-earth people sharing food (thanks for the fresh-hunted deer burgers) and a great time!Well … that’s about it … hail to those who made it all through this long post, I know how short the average attention span these days is.
Hope I manage to get my lazy bum up and write more often, so I don’t end up with these almost “half-year-reviews”.

To cite Tony Blair: “That is that, the end.”

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busy Germany/amazing KL

Two weeks compressed Germany
After 26hrs from door to door, I arrived back home on my fathers 60th birthday! Feeling a little weird in my own room after 4 months, I unpacked and made myself comfy. The day we had a really nice relaxed family birthday, joining around the presents. The next weeks should be busier!
Briefly: Do:concert in Stuggi, two great local musicians (Stefan Hiss & Ralf Groher) Fr: Drehbar with Holger & GF and John, afterwards big party at the Tennishouse, meeting LOTs of friends. got home around 6. Sa: hangover, leaving for Esslingen, where the big BD-party will take place, ppl show up around 1900, taking fotos, telling my stories a thousand times, getting amazed by the great plays. A really busy evening. My dad, mum and friends danced mith live music till 2! So: brunch with the guests from further away, preparing my stuff for Hamburg in the afternoon, jumping on my plane in the evening, resting in the jouthhostel in Hamburg. Mo: Spent all the day with my granny! Talking all the time, just with short breaks for lots of good food(porree-pampe 😉 thumb-up!)! It’s so nice every time again! In the evening I met Chryschdl and Tilli at the Reeperbahn, where we had some beers and good engineering talks 🙂 Tu: Walking around Hamurg inner city, working on BETPAT a couple of hours in a nice cafe. Meeting Chryschdl again in the evening. After some confusion we ended up at some liveconcert with more experimental ambient music, really weird stuff. We: leaving for Stuggi. Feeling a little ill, I stayed home the next days. Sa: Vienna, walking around the city in my typical chaotic way, enjoying nice cafes. Little tired in the evening I stayed in the Hotel and got me some Club-Sandwich by the roomservice. Su: Flight to Kuala Lumpur
Kuala Lumpur
Arriving in KL at 6 in the morning I got me a cheap cab to the hostel where I had a reservation for a room. Surviving the crazy cab-ride, I faced some confusion about my e-mail reservation. But everything went out well and I got a nice single room for about 6 EUR a night! Sleeping all day. In the evening a walked through chinatown around the corner. Coming home I just asked some guy (Owen from Melbourne) sitting in the lobby where he got his power adaptor. Beeing openminded travellers we ended up drinking way to much beer till 5 in the morning 😉 He was working on a malaysian cookbook, with lots of nice pictures and an attached CD with the sounds of the country. Nice idea!
The next day I spent the evening with another group in the backpacker, as Owen was still working on his hangover ;-). Sitting in the comfy lobby we watched some musicviedos from the laptop. Afterwards Kristi (a photographer) asked to have some walk outside, so four of us went to the reggae bar I discovered the day before. Arriving at there three were left and after another hlf an hour only me and Kristi were left. We talked till the bar closed, talked on in the lobby till late …
The next days we sticked together, doing some touristy stuff like visiting the twintowers, having a view from the TV/Radio tower, went to the zoo and some nice temples. The evenings we spent with the crowd in the lobby, going out for some beer, a indian show-dance or a transvestite show.
In the end it was kinda hard to leave, but we had more like opposite directions. She just left Sydney (after living there for 4 years, so we lived some months aside each other without knowing!), taking the long way home to Atlanta.

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Living in Sydney …

Visitor from Germany!
Last week Eric & Melli visited me, after 8 weeks of driving through Australia. I tried to show them what Sydney culture is about, so the first night we went to a jazzy, funky jam session at the Townhall in Newton.
After walking the city the whoe day, they where pretty tired the next evening, so I just went to the usual wednesday-evening-trivi-night at the pub around the corner.
Thursday night Tom (from Czech moved to Aussi in ’91) invited us to a Czech restaurant of a friend. The meal was just awsome! Like at home, as the Czech and suthern German cuisine are pretty similar. Nice roasted Pork in lots of yummi fat with Sauerkraut and knedlíky (dumplings) aside! Lots of good Czech beer and Vodka afterwards. A really nice international evening with people from Czech, Italy and Germany at our table.
Saturday we had a bbq with cangaroo and lots of aussi wine (out of these 4l cardboard boxes! ;-)). Leaving on tuesday, Eric & Melli left on sunday for another short trip south of Sydney, returning monday evening after getting rid of their buy-back-car. Another nice evening hanging out in our backyard with some more friends of the house.
Leaving for Thailand, they catched their plane that tuesday afternoon. It’s been really nice to see some known faces again, after leaving Germany in october.
subculture in Sydney
Friday I went to a concert of my favorite local band Rastawookie. 9 people on stage, lots of different instruments (brass, big drums, flutes, …) playing an very interesting mix between reggae, ska, latin, and some eastern-european sounds.
The last weekend they had a nice concert in the pub “Empire of Anandale” with a nice afterparty in their hotelroom, where I took two films of slides the night.
This time things were somehow different. The location more central, bigger advertisement all around Sydney and probably as a result of this long queues in front of the pub. (The earlier gigs were smaller in a rather familiar athmosphere)
But even with lots of people not really connected to that scene (lots of overdressed girls!) the party lasted till two or three in the morning.
A view days ago, Seani, a friend of Madelaine, invited me for some weird funny movie at an really interesting venue. It looked like an old storage building, with a huge archive of movies and some chairs arranged like in a cinema. The movie was pretty weird, about some conspiracy in the american upperclass. Seemed more like a good laugh to me. But the people were really nice, and asked us if we wanted coffe or tea while watching the movie.
There are so many small nice things to discover in Sydney!

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I made it to 2004!

Had some nice parties in the meantime,
new years eve I spent in Pubs in Newtown, together with Ishtar, Helen and Amina. Got home around 6 in the morning.
Just yesterday there was a really nice housewarming party at the house of some ska/reggae ppl I met on an internet ska/reggae forum. (Big thanks to Glen, Andy and Jo!!)
Today i spent reading the newspapers of the last few days.