MY CHOCOLATE COVERED HANGOVER.

                Marco is an awesome tour manager.  So far, he is taking good care of us.  I’m really enjoying listening to him talk shit and curse at people in Italian, especially when he is driving. He has taught me a few derogatory words and phrases so far, but I think he is holding out on the good ones so we won’t understand him when he uses them on us.  He saw a tall beautiful woman on a bike as we pulled into Berlin.  He called her “cavalla,” (I’m sure that spelling is wrong) which basically describes her as a horse in Italian… a big, beautiful horse. This is very much a compliment according to him and I repeat it along with other phrases he taught me in the wrong situations where they don’t apply just to make him laugh. 

He has a good sense of humor and his English is really spot on, which makes things very easy for us. Every now and then he can be hard to understand though. Again, he was describing a woman and he called her “matcher.” I thought he was saying an Italian word, but he was trying to say “mature.” He also thinks I play the bass (pronounced like the fish).  Someone accidentally called him Marcus and he laughingly said that was a black mans name.  Since then he has referred to everyone we have seen that’s black as Marcus Johnson.  It cracks him up.

 I know I’m painting him as a sort of racist, Italian version of the Pepe LePew character from Looney Tunes so far, but he isn’t like that.  He is a very passionate fan of music and movies and that has occupied the largest parts of our conversations.  His main job is working for a gay and lesbian film festival in Torino where he writes the synopsis of each movie and puts together the brochure and/or program from what I can tell. 

He tells me all about Berlin as we drive into town. I have to make a conscience effort to not hang out the window like a dog because I’m so excited.  It’s definitely big and has a lot of character. There is a lot of graffiti, art, and plenty of parks.  It’s not particularly clean though. There is broken glass everywhere and I definitely saw some syringes this morning when I was walking around. It’s cheap to live in Berlin and there is a big party and drug scene, so Marco says it’s very easy for young people to move to Berlin and sort of “lose their way.”  The parks are also a hub for drug dealers and users.  We saw some shanty towns which was odd because the shanty towns, crappy buildings, and really nice buildings all occupy the same space. There doesn’t seem to be “good areas” or “bad areas.”  It’s all just “Berlin.”  Everything coexistences together from block to block.

The club we are playing is more what we are used to. Imagine the first floor of the Pour House in Raleigh, but with the shitty rock and roll ambiance of Slim’s.  It really reminds us of our favorite club in Savannah called the Jinx.  Everyone here is covered in tattoos, piercings, and crazy haircuts.  We feel right at home.  Not because we fit in, but because over the years we have always gotten great receptions from the employees of places like this. It’s not that they necessarily like our music, but I think they like the genuineness of our band.  We don’t have a particular look and we aren’t trying to fit into any popular style of music.  We just do it because we love it and we have way too much fun doing it. At the very least they seem to respect that about us.  The other band was a bunch of old English dudes that were straight out of Spinal Tap. They were nice, but horrible.  After sound check the club fed us Tandoori chicken with curried veggies and rice at a Tiki bar next door. It was really good.

I was less excited about the show than I was about getting to see my old friend Laura Raber from high school. She was a foreign exchange student from Germany and over my senior year we became really good friends and even went to prom together.  She is an absolutely amazing person and I couldn’t wait to hang out with her in her home country for once.  She showed up with her brother Wolfe and his friend Tom.  After introductions we went to a store and bought beer. She told me I had to try Berliner Pilsner. It was .70 euros which is around .89 cents back home and it was a 22oz (or whatever the milliliter equivalent is) bottle.  I thought it was going to be hobo beer, but it was really good.  We took all our beers into this big park near the venue.  It was really packed and totally sketchy, but in a way that didn’t feel dangerous.  Fireworks were going off for some reason. Maybe the day of ascension? We talked for a long time and got as caught up as we could in the time we had. She told me more about Berlin and Hamburg, (where she currently lives) and she taught me some more German, which I would go on to mispronounce and bastardize for the rest of the night. 

We went back to the club and played. The crowd was just ok. Berlin on a Friday night has a lot going on so it’s harder for a band like us. We were happy though.  The club really liked us and gave us some shots that were kind of like bloody Mary shots.  I didn’t like them, but Ryan did and early on in the evening it was evident that Ryan and I were going to be the ones partying hard down in Berlin.   A dance party broke out after our set.  It was really funny to watch, but we were told it was not a typical German dance party. It’s sort of their version of a hipster party.  You dance wildly to non-dance music.  They played Billy Idol, Talking Heads, and The Smiths.  We drank a lot of beer and then we told Laura that we wanted her to take us somewhere cool.  She exchanged numbers with Marco so he could tell us when to come back and we left to go somewhere down the block. 

The club was in a basement that looked like a meat packing plant. It was somehow exactly how I imagined a German club would look.  I bought a round of beer and Laura made me order, pay, and thank the bartender entirely in German.  Ironically, he spoke better English than I do.  We went into the main room to dance to a DJ playing Electronica.  Everyone here dances exactly the same.  It’s a real laid back kind of head bob dance and no one dances together.  We were informed that you’re supposed to try to act very cool and aloof. Ryan and I were not having that. We broke out some ridiculously bad dancing and for some reason decided to try to be wingmen for Laura’s friend Tom.  Our attempts pleased no one in the club except for Ryan, Laura, and me.  Tom thought it was funny, but we definitely embarrassed the shit out of him.  We spent a LONG time there apparently, but it went by so quick.  We just continued to drink and talk to strangers, and do our newly discovered German dance until Marco called Laura and said it was time to go.  She walked us back to the other club where we found the other guys and continued to talk harmless shit to random Germans and yell curse words in butchered Italian.  In other words, we were really bringing America’s A game to Europe.  We said goodbye to Laura and every stranger we had harassed and went to our Hostel.  We had a private room with six bunks and our own bathroom.  The sun was coming up.  I knew I was going to hate life in the morning when I woke up.

I was right.  Ryan and I woke up somehow still drunk and hungover at the same time around eleven when we had to leave our hostel.  Today was much warmer in Berlin and the hangover made it feel even hotter than it was.  We set out looking for cheap “doner” or gyros, but all we could find was a schwarma place.  It was really good and they put pickled cabbage, pickled beets, and potatoes in it.  When that didn’t cure my hangover I decided to kill my pain with chocolate. Since I’ve been here I have been fighting off a craving to eat every piece of chocolate I can find.  I finally caved.  If I was going to feel like shit then I might as well eat like shit.  I bought a chocolate bar with nougat in it first, and then I had one with hazelnuts in it.  After that, I ate one filled with marzipan, and then one filled with strawberry yogurt.  The last one was my favorite.  The tartness of the yogurt was really great with the chocolate.  Why don’t they have this stuff back home?  While I was trying to kill my pain with chocolate we got to wander all over Berlin and even got to visit parts of the Berlin wall.  It was so exciting.  I honestly never thought I would be able to see all these cool things and still be doing the thing I love.  Totally worth the divorce!!!!!

We finally left Berlin and drove a few hours to Lauchhammer where the club is a Texas style Saloon.  That’s right, a fucking saloon. The owner had on a snakeskin cowboy hat and matching boots on when we pulled up and wore them all night.  There were American and Texas flags all over the bar.  It was quite comical.  If it wasn’t for the beer selection you would never know you were in Germany!  The stage was great and the room sounded awesome for sound check.  Afterwards they took us upstairs where they had a giant spread laid out.  Sliced baguettes topped with salami on some, cheese on others, swordfish as well, and some type of raw sausage mixture that would have made my mother cringe, but my Dad would have loved it.  They were all good. There was roasted chicken, meatballs, schnitzel, scalloped potatoes, pork chops, Serrano ham wrapped sausages, roasted cauliflower and broccoli with a hollandaise sauce, and lots of good bread.  I’m going to be fat as fuck when I leave here!

The show itself was amazing. Much like the first night the owner (who was also named Ralph) was a big fan and had been to Texas and SXSW a lot.  He loved our cds and played them often in the club.  By the time we went on it was packed. We played well and have sold lots of merchandise so far.  I hope all the shows go as well as they have been.  I’m about to go back to the merch stand and finish selling our stuff. Hopefully we will get into something fun tonight after the show with some wild and crazy German locals!

-May 19^th 2012 (11p.m.) Lauchhammer, Germany