I passed. Mostly. And then I passed out.
Before we actually headed into the city proper, we picked up Wes' long time friend Nick from his house not far from here (just around the corner, as Wes puts it, but more like just around the corner and down several hills, around a few round-abouts and through another intersection or two). Poor Nick had to deal with the back seat due to my lingering car sickness, along with my barely comprehensible babbling about winding roads and twisting turns.
I made sure to keep the window at least partly closed for the sake of conversation, at least.
Noisy thing, wind.
When we arrived at Sydenham, I had the lovely opportunity to save Wes $4.40 and test out my debit card on a ticket to the city. Like I said previously, Sydney's train system is blessedly simple to use. Input destination, choose your trip-type (ie: round trip or one way), decide your payment method and away you go.
While the trains weren't particularly busy on the way into the city, we decided to stand instead of sit. The cars weren't completely full, but it's just a bit awkward snuggling in with a stranger on the bench when it's not a busy time of day. It's not like we were particularly tired, either.
When we arrived in the city, we got out and headed to the Town Hall steps to meet Mike and Jon. There were quite a few people around, meeting friends and waiting for buses, but we easily found Mike.
However, we also found something far more unusual. Or possibly far more disturbing, depending on your take on things.
We found ...
Cosplayers.
Well, one anyway. A girl in a blue and white dress that was spotted here and there with teddy bear patches.
She had on a long, black wig, high, white socks and was clutching a teddybear in her arms while three young men with cameras, soft boxes and reflectors went at her.
From the look of things, she either was having a horrible time or the character she was dressed as just doesn't know how to smile. My extensive Googling has brought up no results for the character, either, so I have no idea who she was supposed to be. It was sort of surreal, since Wes has told me repeatedly that that "just doesn't happen here".
Eventually, Jon found us and we headed to Century Bar for pre-gig drinks. The boys had three pitchers of beer (one of which was Franziskaner Weissbier, much to their delight) while I nursed my lone tequila sunrise. I was starting to feel the niggling of the Plane Plague at that point and didn't want to overdo it in case things were about to get worse.
I spent quite a lot of time discussing what I do and don't like so far about Australia with Nick (and I have to say, I was able to cast quite a bit more in the Like pile than the Dislike pile, thus far). I also chatted a bit with Jon about crazy drivers and his kendo training. Hilariously enough, he was due to go in for a training session the morning after the concert and was worried that he'd go in half-deaf and hung-over.
After we finished our drinks (and the group, minus me, was happily buzzing along), we hit Superbowl in Chinatown for dinner.
Superbowl is definitely more like what I remember about Chinatown. Really, really crappy toilets (seriously bad, man), crowded, loud, and with a menu in at least two languages. As soon as we started to tuck in, Jon happily made note of my "good chopstick technique" while the rest of the table laughed. This led to a very brief discussion about the weird ways I've seen people hold chopsticks before, as we dug in. We went all-out family style and had a mix of dishes, including fried squid, tofu, duck and beef.
The duck was amazing, by the way. Jon nabbed me one of the legs. I skipped the skin (because sadly, this had to remain a Crohn's Girl Friendly Adventure), which Wes happily snagged from my plate later.
With dinner settled in our guts, we settled the bill and marched back from whence we came, to line up at the Metro for the concert.
They looked through our bags at the door and told Mike that he had to check his backpack at the bar, because it was jammed full and a hazard. He was rather angry to discover that this mandatory bag check not only denied him the use of his gadgets for the night, but cost him three dollars as well. When I asked if I was good to go, the guy at the door said "Yeah, you're fine" and off we went.
Now, at first glance, the Metro was a great venue. My previous concert experiences have always been pretty limited. I've experienced concerts in cramped ball rooms converted for shows, crappy school gyms transformed for university-sponsored events, a single "true" entertainment center performance, and a handful of specially tailored "gig" bars. But this, this was something else all together.
In the lobby area, you had the bar and ticketing booth, then the actual stage had its own, separated area. You went down a hall and either up the stairs into the balcony, or further on into the pit. In the hall, the bands had set up their merch tables.
While Wes, Jon, Nick and Mike got in line for t-shirts, I pulled out Wes' camera and the massive zoom lens to get a few shots of the opening acts. I stood on the stairs leading to the balcony to get shots over the heads of the crowd.
That's when things got sticky.
The guy at the door apparently got his phrasing wrong when telling me I was good to go. After I'd gotten perhaps two dozen shots of the first (fairly crappy band) and was starting to figure out the settings on the camera, he reappeared and tapped me on the arm.
When I lowered the camera, he informed me that I was meant to check the bag at the counter, with the camera inside it. That such equipment wasn't allowed in the venue.
At the very least, he was polite about it, but I was rather annoyed that
- they didn't tell me this at the door when I asked if there was anything else I needed to do with the bag,
- they somehow "missed" other people getting in with larger bags (believe me, Mike and Wes were getting a faceful of one young man's backpack during the show) and
- other people were being more blatant in their camera usage, but had no one stop them.
The first two bands, whose names I can't remember (something about Eyesores perhaps), were pretty awful. The first was completely nondescript and generic. The most interesting thing about them (and the only thing I can remember) is that their singer had impossibly long hair that he wore like a cape. It must have reached his knees and was very, very smoothly brushed.
It's kind of sad when a band's frontman's hair impresses you more than their musical talent, but hey. Whatever. We weren't there to see them.
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| If you cut it, will he lose his magical powers? I wonder ... |
The second band, while more memorable, was not much better. They were way too 80s for me and the singer just couldn't carry the act. However, the guitarists were both very talented and amazingly in sync, and the drummer was pretty entertaining, too. He would flip his sticks mid-sequence and at one point flung one straight over his head by mistake. He only missed a couple of beats before magically producing a new drumstick from thin air and resuming the act.
Okay, so it more likely came from a holder somewhere out of view positioned just in case of sort of situation, but you get my point.
The first two bands really were not that impressive.
The guy dancing to the first two bands on the other hand, was.
When the second band started, we moved into the main area and took up a position on a set of risers just at the edge of the pit, so as to have good spots for Blind Guardian when they came on. Directly in front of us, at the very back of the crowd that was on the floor, a man was dancing. And not just dancing, but spastically dancing. This man probably weighed all of a hundred pound (soaked in sweat, as I'm sure he was) and looked like a scarecrow caught in a twister. He was jigging up and down, not really following the time of the music, waving his hands and punching the air at random as he went bouncing around.
To be honest, we thought he might be really, really high at the time. We can't understand how he would be enjoying the music that much otherwise. During Blind Guardian, he moved his personal act to the balcony where he had more room, but as he was behind us, we didn't catch many glimpses of his antics.
Finally, Blind Guardian's intro came up. I'm not very familiar with the band, having only heard a few songs here and there, but they're amazingly easy to get into. Even feeling, as Wes puts it, rather crook, I was able to enjoy the music quite well. Most of their songs relate to fantasy themes (as if their name wasn't a dead giveaway for that one), with songs relating to Tolkien and Jordan's works, as well as mythology and general fantasy traditions and themes.
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| The only shot I got of Blind Guardian -- a crappy, cell phone image. D'oh. |
It doesn't hurt that their sound quality was way superior to the first two bands, such that you could actually follow along with the lyrics quite easily.
Also, before I go too far into the rest of the night, I have to say one more thing. Much though I enjoyed Blind Guardian's music, I hated the Metro's lighting choices. Hated them. They felt some bizarre need to flash strobes and blinding spots into the faces of the crowd during the "participation" portions of songs. It made the bands impossible to see and really didn't help with the headache I had brewing.
No one else seemed bothered by their choice in dramatic lighting, however. And, perhaps unfortunately, the Sydney crowd was maybe just a teenie, tiny bit too into the music. In combination with singing the chorus of a particular fan-favorite about ten times too many (the vocalist kept trying unsuccessfully to steer things back into the verses) and the Metro's midnight closing time, Blind Guardian had to cut their encore quite a bit short. They ended the night after just two songs from their encore line-up.
The fans were rather sore, but it was partially their fault for ooooooh-ahhh-ahhh-ahhh-ahhh'ing about a dozen times too many (seriously, I think that the crowd participation lasted at least four minutes on its own and the original song is meant to be about that long in total). Afterward, we made our way out and headed into the night, half-deaf but fairly happy. Jon parted ways with us at the station while Nick, Mike, Wes and I boarded the night train south to Sydenham and home.
On the train, we managed to snag seats across from three girls who were clearly headed home after a night out on the town. One of them, very blonde and very Australian, had her shoes in her lap and smiled at me really widely when we were settled.
"Big night?" she asked me, grinning in the way that only alcohol can allow.
"Sorta," I answered, "It's more that I've been up since about six AM."
"Oh, us, too. Seven," she responded, leaning forward very slightly and grinning. "I'm just completely drunk."
After a few more laughs, she started trying to guess where I'd come from. Her first guess was "are you Irish?" followed by "Scottish". When I finally said "American", she got very excited and asked where from.
One of her companions spoke up, saying that she has relatives in Dallas, where people are shockingly fat, but it's okay, because I'm thin. Very thin. Not at all fat. Lovely! And did I know where Bega is? They're famous for their cheese. I should definitely go down the coast some time. See Bega. Hang out and try the cheese. When we parted ways at our station, they all three wished us a good night and repeated their invitation to visit Bega while Wes held back laughter.
According to him, I managed to wrangle one of the friendliest night-train experiences he's ever witnessed. There was no puking, no swearing and lots and lots of friendly smiles rather than sneering or condescending ones.
The drive home by comparison was bland, boring and dull. I struggled to keep awake while Wes, Nick and Mike discussed the concert in detail. Somehow, I managed to keep my eyes open after we dropped Nick off, but only barely managed to drag myself upstairs to bed when we got home.
I promptly died upon finding the bed.
During the show, I realized that my "head cold" had gone full-blown plague mode, because the louder the music got, the dizzier I felt. Inner ear symptoms do not a happy Kate make. Thankfully, Wes and Mike let me sleep in the next morning when they went to get breakfast. We spent most of Saturday being lazy as hell. I watched them play a game of Dominion and we all settled on the couches to watch Phineas and Ferb.
In spite of the fact that the Plane Plague caught up with me when it did, it was rather a nice first outing!
