TOUR-onto

Saturday was good - I finally managed to take notes on chapters 5 and 6 for psych, which I had been “working on” for a month. Then I popped them onto my Kindle and chapter 6 turned out really well - no conversion errors at all. Sweet.

        Sunday morning, I get up at 5 am. Have breakfast, brush my teeth, get dressed, wake up my mom. Then we drive to the bus station, buy the ticket, and I sit down to read psych notes.

        Get on the bus at 7 am, read psych notes for a few hours. Finish Voltaire’s Candide, read The Art of Manliness guide to Building Your Resiliency - highly recommended, in fact moreso than anything else I’ve read lately. Continue reading psych notes. Get stuck in a detour trying to get to the bus station - turns out sunday was the Santa Claus parade. So we spent half an hour getting to the bus station, when it was like right over there.

        So anyway then I walk from my bus station over to Union Station and meet Lily, after many texts of “I am at this place, where are you” and “ok wait I’ll go where you are.” Our plan for the day was as follows: Get hot-chocolate at some place called Soma and go to Honest Ed’s, then go to Kool Haus (not a horrific carnival fun house, luckily) at 5 pm for the show. By “the show” I mean Bring Me The Horizon (eh) and August Burns Red (yeah) playing with Polar Bear Club (woo!), This is Hell (??), and Emarosa (?). Which is something I was planning on seeing with Lily for a couple of months but it turns out I didn’t mention it to anyone. So yeah! I did that!

        So we got a map inside Union Station and walked on over to The Distillery District, which was a wonderful little place and I hope to find somewhere similar closer to home. You know how the little villages were in FF VII, with little brick houses and pipes and metal stuff for decoration? I mean, they were kinda like that. At least the place Cid lived was like that.

        If you don’t know what I mean, think 19th century village. Brick houses. Metal pipes. That’s the defining features. They had metal sculptures and “art” here and there - a “Christmas tree” made out of pipes with light bulbs in the ends, two ends of a bridge that don’t connect, stuff like that. There were people with fancy cameras everywhere, so I assume it was a cool place to be.

        It was also an expensive place to be! We were there for a few hours, went into two? places, and I spent like… $35 or something. First we went into the chocolatiers place, which is to say they make chocolate and sometimes turn it into a drink, and got some Mayan hot chocolate. Which had a pretty strong after taste that burned your mouth. $4.19 for that. I also got four tiny chocolates, which were $9 total. So that was all well and good and we hung out there for a bit to chat while drinking hot chocolate.

        Then we go off to find something to eat - I got a chicken club sandwhich (pretty good, $7 or something) and an Italian cookie/bread thing with almonds in it that was dipped in chocolate - $3. After sitting there for, hmm, an hour/hour and a half, I also got some caramel cheesecake for $3.50. So $15 for lunch.

        After checking the time and checking the map, we decided we didn’t have time to go to Honest Ed’s and decided to go see Kool Haus to scout out the area. This was around 3:30 PM and there were already people in line - like hell I’m going to wait outside on a cold day for an hour and a half. There was a market area nearby so we went there, but it was just flea market stuff because it was sunday and the parade was going by there. We worked our way back to Union Station and got food from a dude in a cart for $4 (each-ish). Worked our way back to Kool Haus not long before 5 PM and listened to increasingly desperate scalpers try to sell tickets.

        On the way in, there was a bag check - I had my pockets full of electronics and maps, Lily’s bag was full of books, the security girl was o.0. Drop off our coats for $2.50, go out into the main room - surprisingly big, actually. Huge crowds around the Bring Me the Horizon and August Burns Red booths, proving who the cool bands are, and absolutely no one over by the other three booths. I got a Polar Bear Club hoodie ($40) and a tour shirt ($10) and they’re pretty sweet.

        At 6 PM, the first band comes on, doesn’t announce themselves until a few songs into their set. Their singer was not that great, their guitarist (or bassist? I can’t tell by look) was a better singer and the best part of the band. He would jump into the air and fling his legs out in opposite directions. I got Lily onto my shoulders (with some help from the bar) so she could see but we were too slow and he didn’t do it again.

        But all was not lost! For Polar Bear Club was up next and that should have been great. Except their singer was as bad live as I have heard. I caught, maybe, one piece of each song they played - except their last song, Living Saints, which was recognizable. Hell, even when they announced the songs I had a hard time knowing what was going on. Barring the occasional signal from the music, I was essentially lost, and I knew most of the songs by heart. They played Light of Local Eyes (which I wrote my mock valedictorian speech about), Our Ballads, Boxes, something, and Living Saints. There may have been one more song, but in that case, they played two songs where I stood there for five minutes and had no clue what I was listening to.

        Interest was relatively low for them. Sad, but when they play that way… It wasn’t really their scene anyway, but even so.

        Emarosa comes on, they’ve got a keyboard, I’m like oh no… But it wasn’t actually that bad. I was bummed out after Polar Bear Club but I’ve filed them away to check out later.

        Up until now, each of the bands was getting set up in 15 minutes and playing half hour sets. Opening bands and stuff. August Burns Red also got set up in 15 minutes, and played for an hour. While waiting for them to get set up, I was kinda falling asleep.

        That didn’t last for long.

        The first three bands were all pretty restrained, jumping around and stuff but mainly playing in the middle of the stage and thus being invisible to Lily. August Burns Red were not like that. They brought out a bunch of boxes to put over the speakers and spent most of their time up there and encouraging the crowd. Not only were they more interesting to watch than the previous bands, they also played really, really well. The polar opposite of the other bands, if you will. Everything sounded right, and that was great, because I knew them well enough to recognize a few songs, if only by the chorus.

        So August Burns Red was a highlight of the day. Then we wait for half an hour for their royal highnesses Bring Me The Horizon to get their shit set up. I was pretty apathetic about them from the start, but to give you an idea of what we’re dealing with… Half the people there had already seen the band seven times. I heard it from a chick talking to a fat dude. At least she was there for her eighth time, and as one of the two people I eavesdropped on, that is half of everyone.

        They also had a *SURPRISE* GUEST SINGER OMG! Some girl comes out in the middle of one of their songs and everybody screams “OH MY GOD THERE SHE IS AAAAAAH” and I’m like oh, ok. Now it all makes sense. Yep.

        So she sings for a few minutes and takes off. Wikipedia doesn’t say they’ve ever had a girl in the band or in the credits of any of their albums, so I have no idea who she was. Attractive, probably the one doing all the female electronica stuff in their songs, but if she’s not credited with anything…

        So after their half hour set up Bring Me The Horizon played for 45 minutes, then tossed their shit out into the crowd and left. A brief chant for encore died when it became clear that they were thoroughly done with us. Cue the stampede for the doors.

        We go back to Union Station, I buy a vanilla hot chocolate and a cookie from Second Cup (the first time I’ve ever gotten anything there, actually) which were pretty good. I drop Lily off at her bus stop place, then go off to my own bus stop (around 11:45 PM) and get in line for my bus - which was leaving at 12:30 AM. I popped some ear plugs in and slept for pretty much five hours straight, which was pretty nice.

        So that’s what I did! And now I want to find a place with cafes and dumb art to go with a friend, except that it isn’t five hours away from where I live. Vael, we’re going to find one of those places, and enjoy it immensely in the summer.