Ok, so a few weeks ago founder guitarist and all round English gentleman Gav and his girlfriend Petra set off across Europe and Asia for a few months. While Gav is away we have the bands long time friend and producer Peter Slankster will be stepping in on guitar duties.
From time to time Gav will be posting up small updates from the road. And if you can find him on his trip he'll reward you with a free 20BE Tshirt and CD. So keep checking the myspace and hopfully we can get some sort of travel map set up in the next few weeks so you can hunt him. It will be like the Fugitive, only shitter.And without a one armed man.
From the road Part 1..
Right, I'm going to do a bit of a blog
of my trip round Asia with my girlfriend. This won't be super
regular, but I'll do it from time to time, or when something
interesting happens.
So we Dublin 8 days ago, and it feels
like we've been away for ages already, but that's probably because we
packed in a lot of stuff. Basically we hooned it across Europe, via
car, boat, train, bus then more train as far as Berlin (which is a
great city). We only got to stay one night in Berlin but wer lucky
enough to meet up with our friends Gordo and Tracy who happened to be
there at the same time. So with sore heads and tired in our eyes we
made it onto the train to Moscow. A sleeper train, that was due to
be stopped at the Belarussian border so that we could have our
passports and visas checked. The train stopped at about 3AM and a
number of big scary looking Belarussian border guards got on and
started asking us questions. Obviously had no idea what they were
asking, we just shrugged our shoulders and tried not to look shifty.
They took our passports away, which was pretty worrying, as far as we
knew the boarder guards told us they were going to burn them and that
we were going to be banged into some dodgy prison for the rest of our
lives. We nodded and smiled. Turned out ok as we got our passports
back and headed off on our way to Moscow.
Russia in general is pretty different
to the rest of Europe. For starters the language and alphabet are
totally different. In the rest of Europe you can have a pretty good
stab at what the signs mean using a bit of guesswork. But here
you've got no chance. So lots of pointing, waving etc has got us by
so far. Moscow is a pretty nice city, weird mix of old, communist
and new. Saw someone on the metro with a SOIA tattoo, or was that in
Berlin. Anyway Red Square is the business, very impressive
altogether, but lots of rozzers everywhere, more than usual as Obama
is visiting. We got hooshed on by the Russian Security forces for
loitering outside his hotel, (we had no idea it was his hotel, or
even that it was a hotel). Off to Nizney Novgorod tomorrow, and then
Yerkaterinburg the day after. Who know what's in store in these
places.