rastede, saturday, march 24th
it seems, that this tour is as much a journey through germany, as through myself...
we got up and around eleven a.m., had breakfast, loaded our gear into the trailer and said our thanks and farewells to carsten, tim and their helping hands. this was going to be the first warm day of the year and i can´t say, that i like driving hours in a packed car at twelve in the morning. this and a slightly unsettling mood added to the remains of yesterdays atmosphere which had shifted from band-member to band-member and made the situation unbearable, at least for me. kai and elmer had arranged through joon-sung, one of reno-kids guitarrists, that relief was to play rastede the same night as a substitute for pale, whose vocalist had sprained his knee during last nights show. my refusal to continue the tour under the current condition made the situation even worse and at that point i was definately not prepared to play another last-minute show. it all ended with elmer persuading me to get in the car, since he had gone through a lot to put up the shows we had..., as much as i hated everyone at that moment, i didn´t feel like letting him down.
on our way north, we stopped by in essen at kais place to gear up on stuff we had forgotten. kai was willing to borrow martin t-shirts, since he had forgotten to pack more than two , but oh boy!, none of the shirts would fit..., in martins opinion, that is.

rastede is near oldenburg, the show was to take place in the gym of a primary school. thomas, who put up the show greeted us upon our arrival and showed us around. reno kid and tonights "headliner" soulmate had already arrived. also billed were a local band, trite idiom, and pale, who´d been cancelled due to the vocalists injury but all of a sudden showed up anyway... they were able to play after all. we set up after the local band and i was surprised to find that the crowd was not made up of the usual alternative listeners rather than "conventional-looking" people, which made playing all the more fun. on account of five instead of four bands playing, we were once again forced to cut our set short, but crowd acceptance and sound were the best we´d had on the tour so far.
the evening ran it´s course: reno kid, pale and soulmate played admirable sets, each making for a climax of their own. i do have to say, that the bands got along very well and i´m looking forward to playing another show with reno kid, who i didn´t expect to be so much fun to hang out with.
the good "vibe" was enhanced by joe meeting a good friend of his, malte, who lives in oldenburg and offered to put us up for the night and take us out. unfortunatly our good mood was disrupted by the fact, that noone was prepared to pay us. i couldn´t believe, that thomas thought, that we had come the whole way to play for nothing, not even gas-money. true, relief is relatively unknown, but maybe someone should have told us in time, that pale were able to play the show after all.we recieved 50,-...

we then made our way to oldenburg where kai and elmer decided to stay at maltes place, tired as they were. martin, joe, malte and i set out to spend a couple of hours at a club called "schmizz". (we like to pronounce it: shmizzzzzzzz...). i hadn´t been out for quite some time and unexpectedly enjoyed being at a crowded and noisy place.
i surprisingly met a collegue from the university, whom i didn´t recognize at first. this was the last place we both had expected to meet eachother.
on our way back to maltes place, martin and malte discovered common ground in elvis presley and the likes, both being fans of the king.