Day 9
Charlottesville VA – Philadelphia
When I woke up I found myself in a state of physical pain. The short nights, large amount of booze and my acute bronchitis of the previous day resulted in a major headache. After a great breakfast we checked out the best route to Philadelphia and hit the road.
The longest drive of the tour was the one from Charlottesville to Philly. The travel intinerary said it would take around 4,5 hours to get there, but we needed 6. Shit happens and around 6 PM we arrived at our friend from Radio Eris, who put up a show for us at their studio/space. We met the guys and girls from Radio Eris allready in our hometown Tilburg, where they played a show at the splendid ZXZW Festival last September, which was a lot of fun and also this time we had an awesome time.
I did not expect to end up in a sort of a ghetto, or like they say in US slang “tha hood,” but in Philly it turned out that we were playing in the area where the Fresh Prince Of Bel Air grew up and had his tough youth. Although the area has become much nicer to live over the last years and people really worked hard together to fight against crime, we were the only white people who walked in the street and along the way we saw a lot of murals to remember friends and familymembers who died in drive-by shootings and stuff like that. Strange to see! Next sunday we’ll sleep in a hotel in Harlem and we’re already looking for that!
At eRIS temple we both played a soloset and hang out with the crowd afterwards. Also an all girl experimental theatre-group played a show, which was fun to see. Steffan got out after the show to smoke a sigaret in a small hallway next to the venue and two groups of black kids got really scared by him, the reason why we still haven’t figured out…
The guys from Radio Eris recorded both of our sets, which turned out really nice, more about that soon!
