april 14 – train to munich, video camera?, chris pierce & seal in an airplane hangar

i write this at 530a on a train to frankfurt’s airport station where we’ll be taxi-ing to the fedex office. we’ll get to why we’re on this early-ass train soon...

april 14 was relatively relaxing, felt like as much of a normal day as we’ve had on the tour thus far. got up at a reasonable hour, boarded the 6-hour train to munich, nice views of the german/bavarian countryside along the way. this was our first experience with the dining car, a nice concept. we also met a pair of san franciscans who’re following the alanis tour around europe. al & i had a one on one scrabble game that opened with two 7-letter words (mine = leaking, al’s = deviates).
arrived in munich and walked around the corner to check into the hotel, found that the video camera that was fedexed from the u.s. had not arrived, spent some time trying to figure out why it was nowhere to be found. various faxes sent and received. while i was online and on the phone trying to deal with that, carson went into an arcade and came out a sex shop. evidently they’ve got some sort of unholy relationship...

then off to “zenith,” an airplane hangar turned venue where our friend chris pierce opened for seal, a great show and great to see a familiar face in unfamiliar territory. we had run into jeff, the merch guy from the alanis tour, on the way to the show, & he got us all some nice german bier. had a couple pairs of weiners at the more than fair price of four euro. mmmmmmm...... weiners. hung out backstage with chris, rami (seal’s drummer, also plays in goldspot with another l.a. friend, sid khosla), some others from seal’s band and various others. rami’s really into cigars, so we were all smoking little cuban cigarillos in the dressing room.
dropped jeff off at his stop off the u-bahn (munich subway), then back to the hotel for skyping & photo upload.