The BellRays

Hey just updating our shows. Got some good ones coming up! La 7eme Vagues on May 10th and we’re headed to Australia in June!

Here we are in Schaffhausen (i think i spelled it right) after the show and it’s the best one yet! The crowd was awesome! It’s a beautiful city in the north of Switzerland by the German border. It’s raining so it’s not quite as cold as I thought it would be. I figured it’d be covered in snow by now and freezing. It’s our 3rd show in Europe now and we seem to building up to something really cool. The first show in Zug had literally 15 people there. But one of them was a 10 year old kid who rocked and danced ALL night! We went back to France  and played to a hungry crowd that made up for  the night before. And then tonight was a great step up from there. It’s weird how much Christmas stuff was up in Brazil but it’s not until it gets cold and we get to europe that they seem to make it feel like Christmas. It’s hard to get the feeling when it’s 80 degrees and 40 percent humidity I guess.

But here everything is lit up and it’s feeling very seasonal so we busted out the christmas tunes in the set last night and now we’re rocking those too.

Bob

Two plane rides later and we’re back in Europe. It’s pretty cold but not nearly as bad as I thought it would be. No snow either, go figure. Anyway, Brazil was a great time. We got to do the meat attack dinner the night before our show in Sao Paolo. Meat attack, for those of you who haven’t experienced it, is when you sit down to dinner, flip a little dial from red to green and then you’re besieged by waiters carrying skewers of meat to your table, non-stop, until you flip the dial back to red . It’s all really great cuts and it’s all delicious. There’s beef, pork, lamb, chicken and a huge bar with sea food, sushi, etc. The waiters come to each person and ask you if you want what’s on the skewer. You say yes, they cut you off a piece or two or three, again until you tell them to stop, and then the next guy hits you up. It’s incredible. It’s Fogo de Chau on crack and we had the best time. Our show in Sao Paolo was great. A big crowd and we hung out in the dressing room til 4 or something talking and stuff. Good times!

It’s nice to be back in Europe though, probably because it’s just so much more familiar to us. But there’s definitely a weird vibe around here since they’re having such a bad time economically. It’s rough all over but in a region where they recently switched to a unified currency and they’re already talking about scrapping it, it carries a little bit darker tone than just hard times. We met up with Antoine which is always a pleasure and I’m looking forward to having him tour manage us again. Still can’t get the desire to be home though because I know Twylla is going to be there when we get back and I’m really anxious to see her and spend some quality family time.

Bob

We played the festival last night here and it was a really great show! We went on an hour or so late so it was 3:30 am when we hit the stage but there were probably around 2000 people there and they were a lot of fun. The band that went on before us was Raimundos and they were pretty good. We’re going back to the festival tonight to hang out and see what’s there from the other side of the velvet rope. It should be a good time.

Bob

Wednesday we left home at 4:30 to drive out to LAX to catch our 8am flight, first to Toronto and from there, down to Sao Paolo. It was a long flight but Air Canada was really great. The planes were comfortable (Airbus, not that  Boeing shit) and the Maple Leaf Lounge in the Toronto airport was a great place to spend a six hour layover. I had ravioli with pesto sauce, a couple of beers and all the soda I could handle. It helped make the 9 hour flight from there to Sao Paolo not matter so much. I watched two shitty movies (one and a half really), “Green Lantern” (weak story) and “Transformers Dark of the Moon” (awful acting, directing, cinematography, script). I turned this off after 20 minutes cause it was wretched and fell asleep until breakfast.

After we arrived at Sao Paolo we met up with our tour manager Marcelo and waited another 5 hours for our plane to Goiania where our first gig, a big festival, is happening. The plane was nearly empty so we had a lot of room to stretch out and sleep for a couple of hours. TAM airlines rocks too.  Goiania reminds me a lot of Hawaii. It’s really tropical and a lot of the buildings are open to the environment (as much as they can be  with  electric fences. There’s a lot of crime in Brazil I guess. The hotel reminded me of what a russian gulag might be like and we had ourselves moved after one night cause it was just fucked up. So they moved us to another one in the same chain, Serras de Goyas, and it was a lot nicer.

Dinner our first night here was at a place called Aero Caldo and it was a sort of  a soup buffet. There were about 16 different pots of soup, some with meat, some vegetable, heart of palm, beans, with lots of stuff to add. we did what most people did and mixed three or four different kinds ( I had shrimp, vegetable and heart of palm mixed together with some pork cracklings, onions, little bread balls and something that nobody could actually tell me what it was) along with some fried cheese balls, fried bacalao appetizers and a caparihno. It was delicious!

At the time of this writing we are just back in the hotel after our show at the festival but it’s 6am and I’m too burnt to relate it all right now. So good night!

bob