Hello, we’re back in Frankfurt-Am-Main once again, for a few days, another ICE (Inter City Express) train journey early this morning from Amsterdam. At one point the indicator said the train was travelling at 302 Km/h, so fast!
We’ve been in Amsterdam the previous two days for the Awakenings Festival event, which we really enjoyed. It was great that it was a 12 noon till midnight event, no worries about falling asleep/keeping awake. We got to see/hear heaps of people DJ/play live; Marek Hemmann was our fave performer, really nice, deep, minimal sounds. British Murder Boys were excellent, I was surprised how much I enjoyed hearing those types of techno sounds again, awesome intensity. Joris Voorn, Martin Buttrich, Marc Houle all performing live (Apple laptops!) were great. Anja Schneider and Loco Dice were very cool, very deep, very minimal. Jay Denham, Robert Hood, Joey Beltram, Dave Clarke, Cari Lekebusch and Adam Beyer… all played very hard, lots of ye olde banging/loopy techno sounds… didn’t do much for me. I’ll go into more detail about all this later. Awakenings was a very well organised event, large but not huge. Shuttle buses from the train station there and back, never had to wait more than 5-10 mins for toilets, food/drink tickets, or to get food/drinks, impressive with an estimated 20-30,000 people there… for techno, and only techno! We had horrible weather in Amsterdam, a lot colder than we were expecting, and raining. Luckily the rain held off most of the day at Awakenings, but it was still very muddy, however there were lots of wooden boards/paths on the main routes between rooms/tents so my sneakers survived.
Amyway… must rush, we’re heading off to the Love Family Park event very shortly, looking forward to seeing Ricardo Villalobos Vs Richie Hawtin.
Paris was full-on, we saw so much art, so many museums. It was fantastic to also go on a tour and vist the actual locations/inspirations for many Monet and Van Gogh works. We had some of the most amazing meals, and wines, in some of the most hidden away places, all over Paris. It was awesome and exhausting. There is a crazy number of people living in Paris now (compared to when I was last there in 1992), every second person is black too. At times I felt like the only white guy around. We were standing, packed in like sardrines on every Metro train trip no matter what line, day and night, crazy! The vast distances between different platforms/lines, and 1000s of steps was a real challange. Barcelona was good practice for that. Will go into more detail about Paris soon…
Must go, thanks for all your comments, much love, speak soon.
Cheers Dave & Joanne