Schlagwort-Archive: USA 2010

21st of March 2010

On the morning of 21st of March we drove up the coast in direction to Savannah. We stopped at an IHOP (first time for me to have pancakes) and then had the next stop at the Georgia Sea Turtle Center, which was more like a turtle hospital. There we were told how each of that poor creatures had turned up there (accident with a boat was the usual reason) and the guide explained to us how they were trying to help them and how the chances would be that they would be released into the ocean. It was very interesting and shocking at the same time. The center is situated on Jekyll Island which has a really nice beach and seemed to be worth a longer visit (maybe next time).

From Jekyll Island we headed further north to Savannah. Savannah is a nice city which for the first time made me feel like I’m in Southern USA.  It has quite an ancient town as well and most of the shops are small little shops that sell art & hand-crafted things so we took a long walk through the city for shopping (nice little stores where they sell self-made silver jewellery). The harbour is definitely worth a visit as well. It seems that Savannah is the home of selfmade toffee and we walked through one of those factories where you can watch how they make it and try some of the products they make. I guess most of our money we spent in a store that was making a lot of different things out of peanuts. I can’t recall the name anymore but they had quite a lot of tasty products!

This might be the place to warn the Europeans that sweets in the States are much more sweeter than in Europe normally!

20th March 2010

In the middle of the night we started to drive down to Florida that morning. I was allowed to choose a destination for the weekend (thanks to Doug & Nina for that again) and so it was supposed to be the sunny south.

The 20th of March we would spend the whole day in St. Augustine, Florida. A quite ancient town which had a lot of places to see and an absolutely beautiful ancient town. When we arrived there we checked in at the hotel and started of for the city. First stop was „Fountain of Youth“. Wouldn’t have been my choice but Nina & Doug insisted on the point that if you are in St. Augustine you have to see that. The Fountain of Youth is somehow an ancient fountain which is said to be already used by the natives of that area before the Spanish conquistadores arrived there. Those realised that the natives went to get much older than themselves and it was said that the fountain was the reason for this. It’s quite a funny place, very touristy but with a nice surrounding so we took a walk through the park. I wouldn’t say I need to see it again but it was a good start for that day.

St. Augustine has a crocodile farm and that should have been the second place we wanted to visit. Honestly when we saw the prices for entrance we decided it wasn’t worth 20 dollars per person and directly went on to the lighthouse. We didn’t know that this weekend was lighthouse festival the whole area around it was filled with people and little attractions like riding on ponies. We spent the whole afternoon there, walked up the lighthouse and took a walk to the harbour. The picture going with this post is taken inside the lighthouse.

We walked through St. Augustine town and there we discovered a little Café serving the best coffee I had in USA so far. It was called „Café del Hidalgo“ and besides really good coffee they also have gelato. For the Europeans normal icecream but compared to the icecream they normally sell in the States it’s awesome. Due to that café I can easily say that if I should ever plan moving to the states I will probably end up somewhere near St. Augustine, just to be sure to have good coffee at hand.

For the evening we went into town to have dinner and ended up in a fish restaurant (I believe it was something like Harry’s seafood restaurant) which served a really good food and where, for the first time of this year, we could already take our diner sitting outside.

19th March 2010

This year’s March I traveled to Atlanta to visit my friend Nina who’s living there with her husband & her little daughter.

There wasn’t much travelling over the country but at least 3 days are remarkable. 19th March we had tickets for the concert for Alkaline Trio at the Masquerade in Atlanta. My first concert ever in the States and as I had so far only seen Alkaline Trio in Germany I was quite curious in how far the concert would be different from one in Europe.

The Masquerade is really a cool venue and it didn’t seem totally sold out but it was quite filled. The crowd was absolutely great and everybody sang with the band who were in a really good mood as well.

The picture is a crappy shot I took with the iphone ..so of very poor quality 🙁

The setlist for the concert was:

This Addiction
Armageddon
Emma
Dine, Dine
We’ve had enough
Lead Poisoning
Mr. Chainsaw
Dead on the Floor
Fatally Yours
Crawl
Off the Map
Private Eye
Blue Carolina
Continental
100 Stories
Sadie
Nose over Tail
97
Fine
Angelfuck (Misfits cover)
Radio

and something they only did at the US shows was that they sold a poster designed by Heather Gabel which is limited to 900 copies and of which one is attached to my working room wall right now. I had to buy a second bag for my flight home to transport it to Germany but it is worth it.

Alkaline Trio, Luxor, Cologne, Germany 23rd of January 2010

On 23rd of January there was a special show of Alkaline Trio in Cologne. The band was on promo tour for the upcoming record release of „This Addiction“ and played a show in the „Luxor“ in front of 400 people.

When we entered the venue we didn’t know if there would be a support band or not but finally there was a German support named „Lo Parker“ opening the evening. The Luxor was quite crowded but not sold out and Lo Parker did their best to activate the audience.

When the Trio finally entered the stage they directly started with „This Addiction“ and afterwards a very drunken Matt Skiba said hello and explained the audience how it is to drink a campari at Cologne Cathedral at 5 a.m in the morning (with temperatures quite some points below 0). He explained that this would be the first show 2010 and the first show playing some tracks of the new record and we should forgive him if not everything would be perfect.

We didn’t mind at all and the audience was able to  keep up with the lyrics so nobody seemed to care if Matt could remember them or not. A quite awkward moment was a little fight between Dan Andriano & Matt Skiba on stage when Dan yelled at Matt but they seemed to have balanced that until the end of the show, even though Dan wasn’t able to hide the fact that he was quite upset for the rest of the evening (which can be easily seen in the pictures of the concert).

Totally a funny and great evening.

Setlist:

This Addiction
Fatally Yours
If We Never
Time To Waste
In Vein
Cringe
Skeletons
Dine Dine
We’ve Had Enough
Dead On The Floor
Private Eye
Old School Reasons
Crawl
Stupid Kid
Off The Map (gespielt wurde: Blue In The Face)
Peter
This Could Be Love
Radio