We Rock with Über-hardness

After last night's horror story in Dresden, we made good time to Aachen, right on the Belgian border, and play a real rock 'n roll club. This is one of the shows that has been setup for a long time (not a fill-in gig, whaddya know), so we're excited. It's a big club, larger than Mercury Lounge in NYC, and it used to be a fallout shelter. The owner was showing us the intricate ventilation system, the old furnaces for providing heat, the many many rooms where families would stay for days. It was really creepy, the walls between some rooms were at least 2 feet thick, with low ceilings and narrow corridors. I couldn't help but think about the people who were down here 50 years ago and that their experiences here was infinitely more horrifying than ours.

The two opening bands were also female-fronted, and also in the rock category. Thank God, we're all realy sick of the hardcore punk that we've been saturated with over the past 2 weeks. It was a very professional setup - lotsa lights, good sound system, nice drums. We played an excellent show, giving it all and the crowd giving it right back. We got 3 encores, I'd guess we played about an hour and a half - about twice as long as we usually have played on this tour. This is the way it should've been the entire time.

	Look at how much room there is on the stage! And it was clean, too.
Guitar god Jerry.
	Travis breaking hearts.
Dr. Shlagzeug hard at work.
	The many faces of Noli.

After the show we hung out with the other bands and the promoter, Marcus (who looked like a rock star himself) drinking wine, trading stories about the road, trying to correct our east German pronunciation of their language, "It's 'eesh', not 'ick'. You sound like a Krustie". Once again, we were the last to leave.

We had some time on Sunday, so we did some sightseing in Aachen: nice churches, Christmas markets, great crepes.

One more show.

Shambo