RAMMSTEIN in Klagenfurt!

Posted on July 19, 2024 by borysSNORC

In September 2023, I received an email saying that Rammstein were bring back their famous European stadium tour for what sounds like ‘one last time with feeling’! I had though that 2023 was going to be the wrap up of the tour – Till and some of the other band members had various creative solo plans all on the go, and to be honest, how much longer do guys pushing 60 want to be performing songs they wrote 30+ years ago. The 2023 tour ended up surrounded by a fair bit of controversy so perhaps they wanted to go out on a bang without any salacious scandal hanging over them – whatever the reason, as soon as I saw they were touring in 2024, I started machinating to figure out how to get not just Angus, but BigSal and SurLee there too!

It took about two days of research to decide which stadium would be our best option – nothing outdoor in a park setting, covered seating if possible, and preferably a smaller stadium than the 100,000+ seating at Lyon in 2022. After much googling and translating, I decided on Klagenfurt am Wörthersee. Well located, smallish stadium (all the same fire power, itty bitty space!).

Then the tickets were released and the German ticketing website was painful! It wouldn’t let me choose tickets in any particular section of the stadium and would only offer me 5 seats ‘best available’ and every time you went out and back in again it would give you 5 different seats in a different part of the arena. 🙁 Having seen a very similar show in 2022 from the corporate boxes on the west side of Lyon stadium, I was really keen to get a front on view, with enough elevation to be well over the top of any beer tents or raised sound booths etc. I kept coming back to the website until FINALLY it offered up some seats that matched the criteria … then the countdown was on!

Sadly Stephola was unable to come with us, so her ticket went to waste, but after some logistical dramas for our BigSal & SurLee, the four of us managed to rendezvous in Villach and make our way to Klagenfurt for the concert! To say I was excited to share this experience with these guys is a huge understatement.

Creating memories, people! That’s what travel is all about!

Perfect! Just right of centre, and not too obstructed by the central flammage tower. 😀

Four random Aussies in a huge crown of German and Austrians. 🙂

I think it was right after this pretzel that BigSal ‘friended’ a strange Nazi who was sitting right in front of us… his English was as broken as my German, but we had a short conversation where I managed to impart that we were from Australia, and he asked to ‘friend’ her on FB. Which they did – because why not? A few minutes later, she saw a selfie he had taken with her tagged on FB, and he had called her a ‘Comrade from Australia who was here to protest the ban on some super right-wing neo-Nazi magazine!’ Man, did that escalate quickly. Needless to say, mental notes to ‘unfriend and block’ him were made immediately!

The concert was amazing. The playlist was different enough from when I saw them a couple of years ago, but still with all the major highlights and their greatest hits. Additionally the smaller stadium call was a good one! Klagenfurt with it’s <50k people in it had far better sound quality and less distorted volume than the Lyon show, which was an awesome bonus… also, I was right about the flammage – all they high impact, burning-your-eyebrows pyrotechnics in a much smaller space was just so much more in your face!

We were having a much better time than the people behind us! 😛

Du Hast… with the flaming arrows.

Concert landscape photography!

No Rammstein gig is complete without the ol’ penis foam cannon. lol.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how many truly memorable days I have had in my life, and so many really great memories I have also feel heavily clouded in pain. But this concert? With these amazing people? Well, fuck not even the 152 steps I walked up and then back down to get here (thanks for counting Angus!) on a severely torn meniscus will dampen my memories of this! So much pain, but I’d do it again tomorrow!

Did I mention that we were in the Austrian alps but it was 32C that day? Thankfully as soon as the sun passed over it was much cooler – but the locals weren’t having it at all.

BEST. DAY. EVER! I will never forget this.
Big thank you to these guys, for joining in on one of my ridiculous flights of fancy.

^ This was our view as we waiting in line for a solid 30-40 minutes to get out of the car park. This and drunken locals staggering and yahooing, swaying and peeing on the side of the roads. lol. Didn’t care! Too hyped!

A few days later, I saw this from the Rammstein FB page… the smiley is where we were seated. <3

Las Vegas & Penn & Teller

Posted on April 3, 2014 by borysSNORC

Whoa, what a long day in transit! Portsmouth to Boston, to Chicago, to Vegas… took about 13 hours, door to door. But we arrived safely and Mr K sweet talked the check in clerk at the Bellagio and got us a room upgrade to a high floor with a view of the strip and the famous Bellagio fountains, which is really quite spectacular. So after a few hours settling in and enjoying the enormous shower, we dressed up and decided to head over to the Rio to see Penn & Teller – because Vegas is all about the tickets, and we have tickets! 😀On heading out the Bellagio north entrance you can see the Rio on the other side of Frank Sinatra drive, and after being cooped up in planes all day we thought we’d walk there – it looked predominantly flat, it was cool without being cold and we really needed to stretch a bit. OMG. Big mistake. You can see it, and it LOOKS like there are sufficient pedestrian access areas around the freeway, but not so much. We walked for a couple of kilometres and seemed to be getting further away from our destination, not closer, and then there turned out to be a couple of non-traversable escarpments and culverts in the way too. So, we eventually had to give up and flag a cab to get us to the show. Lesson learned, if it’s not on the strip, don’t even bother trying to walk!

But we got to the show in plenty of time, and had great seats, Row D front and centre. I’m not a huge Penn & Teller fan, I haven’t seen them before and I haven’t watched a lot of their TV shows. You can probably sum up what I know about Penn & Teller from a recent pro-vaccination campaign that’s been going around, and from an old episode of the West Wing where they do a trick burning an American Flag wrapped up in the Bill of Rights in the White House for Zoe’s birthday…

http://youtube.com/watch?v=NymRecFWgAs

So I had no idea exactly what to expect of the show, except that it is likely to be part politics, part atheism, and a little illusion and misdirection throw in on the side – and that is largely right. What I wasn’t expecting was for them to start pulling apart and explaining how other illusionists are doing their tricks, debunking how mentalists and mind readers do their thing – they’re calling Bullshit on nearly all of their colleagues, which I thought was quite funny considering they are doing the exact same sorts of things, but with a political and religious conscience.
Anyway, they did do the American flag burning trick, which was very cool, but they did it twice and second time around showed you how it was done… all the while poking fun at China and their lack of rights. They did the old sawing the girl in half trick, showing you how all the other magicians pull that trick off, but then they pushed it a bit further leading you to speculate, ‘well, if that is how the others do it, how did you just do that?’ Teller did some very accomplished sleight of hand tricks where he appeared to be turning droplets of water into coins, and then coins into goldfish which was very cleverly done, and the big finale at the end was a ‘magic bullet’ trick.

They got two firearms savvy guys up on stage (a Texas Deputy Sheriff and a US Marine) on either side of a wide yellow ribbon, and gave them each a .357 revolver to check over and determine if it was a real gun – apparently yes, no tricky guns. Had them confirm that two panels of suspended glass were in fact real glass. They gave them each a bullet to write on – their names on the projectile and a picture or something else on the bullet casing, and then they loaded these two revolvers and set them into a stand while P&T got dressed in protective eyewear, a kevlar vest and helmets. Then they stood at opposite ends of a bare stage and with laser sights on the revolvers, and telling they audience to plug their ears, they appeared to shoot directly at one another. The panels had bullet holes in them and Penn & Teller were each standing there with bullets between their teeth. They called their experts back onto the stage and had them confirm that the bullets and casings both looked and smelled like they had just been fired, and that Penn had indeed caught Teller’s bullet between his teeth and vice versa. At no time did either Penn or Teller appear to cross or interact at all over the divide of the big yellow ribbon, making it appear that there is no way they could have swapped the bullets. It was quite impressive. We’ve been wondering how it was done… it’s going to need some more thought, this one. 🙂

Going Ticket Crazy Lately

Posted on November 28, 2013 by borysSNORC

It started innocuously enough.. my friend picked us up some tickets available through a early private pre-sale thing, to go see Jimmy Carr on the 22nd January at Brisbane City Hall. She got on the phones as soon as they were available and we scored tickets in the second or third row if memory serves – which is a sort of dubious position to be in given the amount of audience participation at Jimmy Carr shows, but time will tell. I am really looking forward to it – he’s like a one man game of Cards Against Humanity! 🙂

Not long after that it was ‘hey, Opera Australia are doing Opera on the Beach next year’, so tickets were acquired for The Magic Flute next May… yah, Mozart under the stars with comfy chairs (somewhere in the red section), lots of wine, good company and gourmet hampers. Sounds like lots of fun. 🙂

Then I saw that the new Cirque show, Amaluna was going to be in New York City! And waited desperately for several weeks for dates to be released to see if they would coincide with our planned travels for next year. Eventually dates for NY were released and squeals of delight were heard all over the house and tickets were promptly booked to go even though we hadn’t booked flights or anything else yet! ‘Cos that’s just how I roll… book my Cirque tickets first and then plan the rest of my travel around that.

What was after that? I think it was Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. A couple of friends reported going and said that it was fabulous. I was already toying with the idea of taking the Small Child – just to get a bit more culture stuffed into him… a bit of musical theatre can’t hurt! – and their recommendation sold the plan. Managed to get us two tickets to a Friday afternoon matinee session on the 20th of December and I’m really looking forward to it. We’re in the front row of the first balcony, so let’s hope he hasn’t inherited his father’s fear of heights!

Then I went and booked some tickets to go see La Nouba in Orlando while we are in the States… because, well if I have to go do all the space stuff in Cape Canaveral and Orlando isn’t that far away, we might as well get another Cirque show in, right?

Then just yesterday I decided I could take Mum and Great Gran to go see The King and I for Christmas (don’t worry – neither of them read this blog!), so I bought tickets for that which is… looking, looking… April 29th for next year! For the first time in years I bought tickets in the stalls – no opera which means no surtitles, no flying cars in the plot which means no potential aerobatics, and so in the stalls we are! About eighth or ninth row towards the centre. 🙂

So, what’s left? Well, I still need to book tickets for Ka in Las Vegas (Take Two!, hopefully we will get to see it this time). Tickets for Beatles Love in Las Vegas maybe, and potentially tickets for Varekai in Beaumont Texas… Keith is threatening me with tickets to ice hockey games *groan* but I am going to see what I can do to get out of that. Still, sooo many tickets! What’s a girl to do!

UPDATE:

I’ve been busy booking more tickets – this time for Vegas. We have got tickets booked for Penn and Teller, because I really think this is something that Mr K will enjoy. Personally I have no idea, though I do find it kinda odd that their seating plan is arse about and the stage is at the top of the picture. 😀

And… We also have tickets for Ka! Yep, second time is a charm, I am hoping. After missing out during my last trip to Las Vegas, I am really looking forward to going and seeing this. Fourth row, centre! Awesome.

And because I am in Las Vegas, and it is the best show in town, I decided to go see ‘O’ again. Mr K wasn’t interested… I know! What is wrong with this man?!? So I am going on my ownsome and leaving him to gamble. Could be dangerous – the gambling that is.

But wait! There’s more! While we are in New York and in a most fortuitous turn of events, it appears that one of my favourite operas is on – La Bohéme at running at the Metropolitan Opera. The Met Opera House at the Lincoln Centre is HUGE, and tickets are beyond ridiculously expensive so we are going to be sitting in the Dress Circle where you can nab a seat for around $150-$200 each, and unfortunately for Mr K, this is the third balcony… which might be a tad interesting given his severe aversion to heights! 😀

No doubt this means I am going to have to rethink my wardrobe choices for our trip. It’s going to be cold and for me that means casual because Brisbanites are not normally people who own lots of evening wear for cold weather! And, I’m not so sure the regular Met Opera patrons would appreciate a couple of random Australians rocking up in jeans and sneakers and hoodies!

UPDATE:

OMG… I knew this was going to cost me, only I thought it would just be money. Mr K is retaliating for all this culture and opera and theatre and stuff and it involves… (Oh the abject horror of it all!)… attending sporting events! I obviously didn’t think this through. O_o

First he’s booked tickets to go see the Washington Capitals play the Vancouver Canucks (which I think is ice-hockey, but I could be wrong) for March 16th at the Verizon Centre in Washington. From what I understand he’s got good seats (Section 121, Row E, Seats 1&2)… something to do with being towards the centre and his team aiming for that end twice?!? I can smell the beer swilling, nacho munching puck-heads from here!

He’s still at it though! Apparently his favourite team, the Toronto Maple Leafs (I hate them already… don’t they know it should be Leaves not Leafs!) are playing against the New Jersey Devils while we are in New York. Now ordinarily, I’d say ‘Newark isn’t in New York, hon.’ and hope he’d drop it. But apparently the trains are really good so it’s not that long to get out there and oh well, I am dragging him to Flushing to see Amaluna, so we are going. Seats this time determined by ‘getting as close to the boards’ as possible.

Also, he says the Leafs (*twitch twitch*) are playing quite well at the moment, so there is a good chance they will win this game, but we can’t gloat about it if they do or we will never make it out of New Jersey alive! Fuck me dead! Maybe I better get myself a HockeyRoos jersey or something.

Awww, shit. Apparently there’s more… the Boston Celtics are playing the Chicago Bulls while we are in Boston. Now, I am pretty sure that is basketball and if it gets me out of a baseball games that goes for god knows how many hours, then I am in. 🙂 Celtics are sitting 8th in their division (at the moment, this of course could change) and the Bulls are just outside that… so fighting to get into the play offs. This one I can get behind – at least I know the damn rules! 🙂 Unfortunately though, with two such well known teams, tickets are at absolute sandy lube, arse rape prices (up to $620pp)… so it’s up in the nose bleed section of the bleachers for us.

According to the all knowing Interwebs, the view will be something like this, (but a little more central), so not as bad as I thought and will definitely fun to just be there. Seeing we will be sitting in an entire house of Celtics fans, I think I’ll root for the Chicago Bulls. 😛

Fingers crossed, that is it for the Operation Opera Retaliation. :/