geneva & open air st gallen, switzerland

16 Sunday Aug 2015

Posted by mintyandtashi in music, travel

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geneva, open air, st gallen, switzerland

Next stop Switzerland and we started in Geneva for a 3 week stay to catch up with Tash’s family. We spent a couple of nights staying with Tash’s Cousin Lukas, Marie and their two kids Kay (the tassie devil) and Lea just across the border in France in a village called Ecorans.

They have a wonderful place up in the mountains looking down into the valley and Geneva with views to Mont Blanc off in the distance. Ticked off the first Swiss cliché of cows with bells (even though we were technically in France and so they were French bovines). It was nice spending a few days in the village, we saw Kay perform at his end of school play where he played the big bad wolf in little red riding hood and we went to a village BBQ/bonfire, complete with mobile bar.

We had to tick off the Geneva tour so we spent a few hours in the city (more like a quiet town), drove past the UN headquarters and saw the lake and fountain. Tash was also asked if she wanted to buy drugs from an old dude sitting on a bench who then went on to talk about his respect for Fred Hollows?! Then it was time for fondue in the red-light district, Pâquis. The ladies are out early in Geneva, Lukas said the older ones have to get a head start, baby got back!

Cheese, bread, beer, wine, grappa, limoncello, done!

And so we set off early Thursday morning, heading for St Gallen in the east of Switzerland to the Open Air festival. A motley bunch of 7 cramming into a van and on the beers before we had even left Ecorans at 7.30am! Due to sticking to Lukas’s strict timetable, we didn’t stop for a toilet break until just out of Bern. I now know what pregnant women feel like, I practically had to waddle to the bathroom.

I’m not sure really how to explain the Open Air experience, in typical Swiss style it’s in a stunning location with snow topped mountains and a lovely river skirting around the edge of the site. Then there’s 30 thousand crazy people partying harder than I’ve seen in a while. OASG has been running for almost 40 years so it’s a bit of an institution much like Glastonbury or Meredith. It’s the first time we have used RFID tags also which was nice and also dangerous as you just topped up your wristband at a booth and then just swipe away. You were given a token for each cup, plate, whatever and it had to be returned or you were burning some serious francs, which was happening anyway. It was a heavily German themed lineup but we managed to checkout Rise Against, Royal Blood and the Chemical Brothers amongst a few other random bands

Most of the action was happening at the Stars and Stripes bar high up on the hill overlooking the festival and a short (convenient) walk from our tents. This bar was open from beginning to finish, not closing once, nothing like being woken up by the crew at 6am for a sunrise beer as the late night partiers were dying out and the daytime kickstarters were arriving. 8am signalled the Prodigy’s firestarter and a massive increase in volume and onwards we sailed into the blurry daytime. The bar, being on a hill had a rather precarious steep slope which provided great entertainment throughout the day as those boozed up bravados attempted to run, skate, surf or just walk past and fall down to their mud filled doom. Special mention has to go to the Turbojugends, a group of guys that bring no tent and spend the whole time at the bar in various levels of sobriety and drunkenness, anywhere is a bed, even the steep muddy slope.

cereal and beer at 7am

Euro festivals have a much more relaxed vibe, especially compared to the US and Australia. Some guys pushed a mobile bar into the river and we sat around drinking beers, someone was letting off large fireworks at random spots, there’s the bar and it’s on a non-fenced slope down to the tents below and there’s the large hay store where people go to buy hay to spread around the campsite and soak up the damp. Genius! Until the peeps in said camp somehow manage to set the whole thing alight! Might have been the large fire you had 5m from the tent??

A fantastically boozy slog which introduced us to one of the best festival bars around. Thanks to the crew; Lukas, Marie, Tania, Steve, Jonas, Alain and Super Steve for making it a cracker.

J & T

detroit (rock city), michigan

13 Monday Jul 2015

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america, demf, detroit, movement

“Detroit hustles harder”, so they say in the motor city.

There’s a lot of good shit that’s come out of Detroit from mo-town to techno, Fords, Chevrolet, Eminem and Kid Rock…..well maybe not the latter. But it seems the most we hear about Detroit nowadays is how broken it is. So we decided to spend a week there post Toronto to see if we could scratch the surface of what has become a bit of a mystical city.

Arriving late in the arvo via Windsor and taking the bridge back into the US we navigated our way to our 3rd airbnb stay in Corktown, just north west of the city centre. Turns out Corktown is the old Irish area from back in the day but in its current form is pretty sketchy with lots of vacant blocks and sporadic homes with a little stretch of hipsterville on the main drag (if you could call it that).

We had decided to do a room share this time as there wasn’t much accommodation left in Detroit due to the Movement Festival on that weekend. Our host, Tony was a bit of a quirky guy who turned out to be a bit of a Detroit die hard who only seemed to want to talk about the city. Things started off OK but just got more awkward throughout the week where it seemed like he was our Dad waiting down stairs and we were trying to sneak out to avoid talking to him. So we decided that was the last time we would be doing that. We even checked out a day early and bailed while he was out things got that awkward. Cheers Tones.

But that aside, Detroit turned out to to be damn interesting, you really do need a car to get around – it’s the Motor City after all – and was designed for driving, lots of it. Locals were genuinely happy to have a chat and inquisitive as to why we were actually there but we learnt a lot to the history of the city and why it seems to be coming back from the dead. Plus it’s foodie heaven! Since arriving in North America we had become a bit addicted to a show called Diners, Drive-ins and Dives where this dude called Guy Fieri cruises around America eating at said establishments, good thing is you can look up where he’s eaten and we ended up eating at some sweet spots (mainly due to not wanting to be around Tonemeister at home). Slows BBQ for lots of slow roasted BBQ like it says on the box, Traffic Jam & Snug for more meat this time in sandwiches, Vinsetta Garage for burgers and beers and Astro coffee for a bang on flat white. We also got in some more baseball action, this time the Tigers vs the Houston Astros but didn’t even make it to the end as it was so bitterly cold despite being in the company of Kid Rock who was also in attendance. We arrived back to find Tony dancing around the lounge room to Polish music (weird factor increasing even more).

Driving around the city is surreal, there’s just so much space! Some areas have no houses, just trees, long grass and streets with homes being demolished due to being in such bad shape. Others have notices of intent to demolish adjacent to a cluster of homes that are inhabited. Large buildings lie abandon and the overall vibe is strange at first, but then you get used to it and start to enjoy and just go exploring. There’s also a lot of roads with not too many cars to add to the feeling of space, lots of space.

Movement Festival began on the Friday of the Memorial Day weekend. It’s a rather large techno festival with well over 100 artists crammed into Harts Plaza on the riverfront overlooking Canada. I’ve always wanted to go so was excited about it but turns out that I think I’ve moved on from such festivals. 30,000 people crammed into a tight space for 3 days can get a bit much. The first 2 days were good fun but by the 3rd we were over it and went and watched Mad Max at the cinema next door. Hard core!

A week staying with Tone-Loc was a bit too much but we will be back to the ‘D’ for sure if not just to stuff our faces some more.

J & T

denver, colorado (via utah)

21 Thursday May 2015

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alkaline trio, colorado, denver, usa, utah

Alkaline Trio are one of my favourite bands in the whole wide world. Months before our departure from Australia we found out they were playing all 8 of their albums over 4 nights in only a handful of cities. We quickly went online to purchase tickets and Denver was our only viable option. We basically planned our whole west coast jaunt around this event.

We decided to take a couple of days to get to Denver and stopped in 2 towns along the way in Utah. This state has some of the best scenery I’ve ever encountered. We only chose one park to explore which was Arches National Park and it did not disappoint. Thankfully, because our accommodations did. Jaymin’s ultimate wish was to stay in “one of those motels like in the movies where you park in front of your room”. The first night we ended up at a little motel in Cedar City and boy did it deliver. The following night was at the Robbers Roost in Green River which was a huge improvement, but that may have been due to relativity.

Onto bigger and better things…Denver. Such a cool city! We had a great basement suite that we got through airbnb in an up and coming area to the north of the city. Only in town the 4 nights of the show, we did most of our touring by day. We visited the Red Rock Ampitheatre where Jaymin discovered that running up hundreds of stairs at high altitude was a bad idea, we did a tour of some microbreweries, ate some great Mexican food and indulged in a bottomless pint for $10. But the highlight of course was 4 nights of amazing music that left us almost voiceless and happy we had remembered to bring our earplugs.

It was getting pretty cold in Denver so we decided last minute to do a long haul and drive ourselves back to Vegas where we could get a room at the Hard Rock for $30/nt and be back in 30 degree weather. As we were leaving that morning the weather started turning ugly, we saw a Fedex truck in a ditch and a temperature gauge that continued to drop. When we started seeing cars coming from the other direction covered in snow, we knew we were in for it. Within minutes we were in white out conditions, barely recognising the existence of a road and seeing car after car sliding off the road. Jaymin and the tire chain-less Yaris held fast though and after hours of expert driving we made it out of Colorado and back onto the dry Utah roads. It was then my turn to take over and ensure we make it to Vegas before midnight.

T & J