Day 10 - Bochum to Berlin

Day 10 - Bochum to Berlin

There she is - the work horse that is the Cardis!

As i begin writing this instalment of our tour diary, I am sat in the Cardis at a service station while Mike pays for a tank full of petrol, staring at a guy in the full German laiderhousen clobber. Hat and everything, topped off with a sweet beard. Excellent effort if I do say so. now that I've shared that with you it's back to business.

Bochum to Berlin. The second leg of our Paris to Berlin journey. It was awesome for Adam and Emma to offer us their floor space to us for a night. They had a hard days work ahead of them so they left us to get ourselves showered and sorted. Lovely to see friendly faces when away from home. We even got a hand drawn map to where our car was parked. Smashing! The trusty sat nave told us our journey to Berlin would take us around 6 ish hours in the glorious warm sunshine, landing us spot on for for our requested arrival time. Just walking to the car we had a nice little sweat on. Brilliant.

knochenbox

What the sat nav and ourselves are not to know, is traffic and delays. Today would now be the day we hit bad traffic. Something happened on the motorway and the police closed the road, sending all traffic through a small town. A regular 24 minute journey through this town took us just over 2 hours at the hottest part of the day. Not cool. But what can you do eh? We finally made it to the great city of Berlin and to the crypt in which we were to play in. Shows seem to start much later in mainland Europe than those in the UK so although we were 2 hours later than scheduled, we still had tons of time to spare. Enough to go for a walk in the perfect evening temperature and get a Sudanese wrap for our empty stomachs. It... was… AMAZING!

The crypt that is Knochenbox

The show was being put on my a nice chap called Dan and our good friend, and screen printing guru, Damien (he also plays in the most excellent band French band 'Alaska Pipeline'). We were playing with a band from Berlin called 'Ruins of Kruger' and their outing was to be their first public performance. The venue itself is a nice intimate crypt underneath a church named 'Knochenbox' and the evenings music was to be broadcast on radio. That was rather nice. The people we played to were so nice, polite and welcoming. Unfortunately we both don't speak any German except for the few simple words, and found ourselves saying the odd French word or few by accident having been so used to the past week spent in France. But we need not worry our lazy brains as most Germans speak very good English, so banter was flowing nicely. We had a lot of fun. We even sold a few records! Great bonus. Damien had also designed and screen printed the poster onto A1 paper and wanted to donate them all to us which was hugely kind of him. Merci Damien if you happen to be reading this.

We grabbed some beers on the way back to Damien's house where we had a lovely sit down, late evening chat, and sampled some of his house mate's home made bread before heading to bed. The next day would be our shortest journey yet to the next show of only 40mins South of Berlin in Potsdam. We closed our eyes with a rare small lie in on the cards. Get in!

Someone has a new vinyl!