Alright….I’m back on the blogging action. Its been an absolute madhouse the past couple of weeks and with limited internet available its been hard to get this happening…however, I’ve written a bunch of blogs now and will be updating this pretty much every second day for the next while, sorry for the delay.
On the way to Philly we took a little detour and cruised through Lancaster in Pennsylvania to take a cheeky look at some Amish folk. We had been driving around with no luck for a wee while, just seeing lots of poor attempts at people cashing in on Amish tourism, basically a bunch of kids dressed up like Amish cruising around in very un-genuine looking carts. We were about to give up, but I decided to press on and took a random road out to the country, and after about 10 minutes, it was like we rounded a corner into the very heart of Amish country, carts everywhere, dozens and dozens, little Amish kids running all over the fields, we all fantasized briefly about growing up Amish, briefly.
On the way to Lancaster we found Toms petrol station. Easily my favourite of all the US petrol stations. The US is very unlike NZ, instead of the half dozen nationwide chains, the US has heaps of State only chains. Toms easily has the best logo of all of them though.
We were meant to play a house party in Philly, but since the landlord of the house had been getting grumpy about all the drunk kids it was moved to a proper venue. We were looking forward to the Philadelphia show because it was one of the few shows in the US that we actually ended up playing with choice bands. We were playing with Video Hippo’s, a really awesome (VERY “Flying Nun” ala Gordons/3Ds sounding…well live anyway) band from Baltimore and also DD/MM/YYYY, a band from Vancouver on their way to meet up Crystal Castles with whom they were doing a big tour with soon. The show was really great and we enjoyed the whole night. It was freaking me out how much the singer of Video Hippos looks like Mark or Marineville…but that’s just me.
No Idea what this guy called himself, but he did a choice spoken word thing before Video Hippos set
Perhaps the best thing about Philadelphia is we discovered how cheap and awesome Chinese food is in the US. Bummed we hadn’t discovered it until now, picking up $3-4 Chinese meals was a great way to get some rice and vegetable intake. We almost exclusively on Chinese for dinner from here on for the rest of the tour.
At one of the Chinese restaurants we went to this night (yes…we were on a Chinese food bender) we ran into a band from Australia who were also on tour! We got talking and knew all the same people. One of the guys had even seen Disasteradio when he was there a few months ago. It was nice to hear some good ol’ aussie accents.
Both OTA and DD/MM/YYYY crashed back at the house of the organisers, so it was very cramped. I spent another night in the car, though was actually slightly scared for the first time ever. Being on some random street in the east coast…only a few blocks from one of the dodgiest areas of West Philly…I was kinda nervous, but it’s the good thing about working myself ragged, is I don’t have enough energy to analyse about how sketchy a situation I’m actually in and soon go to sleep.
The folk we stayed with in Philly