Leprous

DAY 9/34 - Masters of Rock Cafe, Zlin, Czech Republic - 05.11.2010

Z to to L to the I to the N. That's right, folks.. Zlin! We're finally here. Our first encounters with Czech roads at 11 o'clock in the morning make for a bumpy introduction. I give up sleeping any longer and like the rest of the band usually do, I kill off some time watching TV series. The bus has effectively been split in two from day one: the LV guys at the front (Loch Vostok.. do your homework!), us in the back and all the bunks in between. A broken panel on the air duct above our section cool us down to below zero. Gotta get that one fixed, although it might not be all that badconsidering the current level of hygiene. Takes away the edge, haha..

The bus does its signature "shake and stop" (like all buses of course must do!) outside a mall. "We're here!". I take a quick look outside the bus and jus beside the mall I can see the logo: Masters of Rock Cafe. Todays venue has one of the smaller rooms so far, but the stage looks good. Not as spacious as some of the other ones, but we make it work. Our backstage is a small room in the back of stage right, and we're starting to get used to sharing the backstage with our swedish companions as we move east through Europe.



We've traveled through 6 countries and after a total of 3145km so far, the bus is ready for its first cleaning on this November tour of the great Europe. Mano from Loch Vostok gets to work with the on-board vacuum cleaner, while the rest take care of stray socks, boxers, sweaty stage clothes, bags, cans, bottles, chips, remote controls, deoderants(??), medicines, sunglasses, metronomes, computers, chargers, dvds, to-fix-dreads needles, jogging shoes, peanuts, pence, cent, groszy, ZLIN-money.. do you get the picture? The point is that stray pillows, plastic bags, jackets, headsets, drum sticks and other stuff is actually just lying aroung in the bus. Believe it. Anyway, Einar has dreads as some of you might know. And sometimes they need a fix (not dope, no). He needs a special kind of needle for that, and just as he's leaving Zlin's "Needles For Dread Fixing" shop satisfied with his purchase, he decides to check the message I sent him BEFORE he even entered; "Hey, man! I found the needle you lost!". So now there's actually three needles lying around, as he decided to buy two.

Our late arrival makes for a short day before the sound check. Luckily, the stage crew is extremely slow, the monitor guy is pissed at the world and one of them speaks English. We've been waiting so patiently for that! Things eventually get done. Before we hit the stage, we decide to just wing it, no matter the monitoring.

The past-show hang-out and dinner is done at the cool VIP room on the second floor. Hammerfall, Sonata Arctica, Manowar, Manowar and Manowar are just some of the famous bands that have eaten their food here. If you look through one of the 8 10x10cm windows on the wall facing the stage, you'll see the backs of the press, band members and other VIPs on a small balcony. The evening is otherwise of the calm kind.

Zlin was Zlin and now we're ready to put on another 235km to Vienna.

Yours sincerely,
Øystein