Croatia Pt. 1

I've begun to realize that as we are getting farther into this tour and deeper into Europe, the ability to access the internet has been diminishing each day. It's not something I am dependent on by any means, but I think losing contact with friends and family starts to make one feel homesick. I'm still having a great time and the shows have been going great, but it's starting to take a toll on me. Several negative things have happened to each of us that could have had better timing, but we're doing our best to keep the morale high.

We parted ways with Phil and met up with a new group to join us on our journey. They're an acoustic pop duo with some electronic beats by the name of Cargo City. They're a very talented and friendly group from Germany. Both of their names are... challenging to pronounce, so we have been calling them Simon and Johnny.

After playing in Switzerland and staying having a night off in Munich, we went to Vienna, Austria (3/24). The venue was called B72, and it was definitely different than the other places we've played, as it was a smaller place but had two floors for people to watch the bands play. We played again with Slimboy, a Swiss pop-punk band that we played with in Bern.

I'd say this was the show that started off all the technical difficulties to come, but nothing too major to prevent us from performing to our full potential. For example, during the show, each band member lost power to their own amp or keyboard at some point in time. We still performed as well as any other show, and I even got down on the audience floor to get the crowd to sing with me during "Untitled." I've never tried this before, but I'm sure I will do it again now.

I love the German food called doner, but I'm sick of it... Regardless, we got to check out Vienna during the day and even saw a castle. It was pretty interesting:





Our next show led us to Croatia (3/25). We performed at a nice club in Zagreb called KSET. Upon our arrival, I opened my guitar case to find that one of the tuning pegs on my guitar had broken. One guitar stolen, another one broken. Great times, right? I spent some time backstage working out the parts without the one string, however, and went on with no problems. We got to try the authentic Croatian style pizza that had some sort of ham and mushrooms on it. It was alright. Anyway, Cargo City played right before us, playing some very catchy pop tunes. Johnny's bass stopped working halfway through their set, so he had to borrow Alex's. Oh don't worry, that's not the last thing to go wrong. It's almost more amusing to me at this point, just to see what's next.

On Wednesday (3/26), we woke up and ventured into Zagreb to see the city. It was very, very different than the other European cities we've seen up to this point. There were a lot more merchants and small shops, with simpler architecture. We split off and did some souvenir shopping. I got a hand-carved wooden fish bottle opener and an amazing pair of shoes (made in Italy!) that I can't wait to wear, as well as a nice little gift for a special someone.









After wandering all day, we drove to Varazdin. The venue actually turned out to be in the basement of a high school, which naturally brought in a large crowd of students. We met a lot of great people at this show, both through the staff and the audience. The strange thing about this show was that it turned out to be a mixture of... well, our worst and our best show. What I mean is everything was working perfectly fine during the sound check, but as soon as kicked into the climax of our intro song, one of the amplifiers we were borrowing from the opening band just stopped working. We extended the intro to see if Zach could figure it out, in an effort to play it off as if nothing had happened, but there was no getting around it. One song into the set and we just said "Who cares?" and I played the rest of the set on keys.

That's what I would call the worst part of the show. On the other end of the spectrum, we rocked harder than I think we ever have. Our performance alone was... off the chain. There's no other way to explain it. Where we lacked in working equipment we made up for in our showmanship. And the audience really appreciated that, as the definitely showed how much they enjoyed it. They requested an encore, and "The Answer is Always C" came out once again. It was our best selling merch night too, and we signed several CDs and shirts and talked to a lot of new faces. It just goes to show how important it is to play through anything, no matter what may happen during a set, because you can't let it affect the outcome.