Friday, December 3

We'd started traveling the night of the 2nd. We flew Iceland Air, which although not the worst airline we've ever flown, was pretty cramped for Transatlantic travel. And they don't give you liquor for free. They don't give you those nice socks and teeny travel toothbrushes like they do on British Airways, and they don't have nice typography like Lufthansa. On the plus side, the check-in line was extremely speedy and efficient. And now we get to say that we've been to Iceland. We spent about a half hour in the Reykjavik airport at 6:30 am (their time). And then it was on to Oslo. Flying in was pretty incredible, we looked out and it was pure white bleakness, with little dramatic patches of trees, and some majestic mountains and clouds and ice in there too. It was like flying over another planet. (Like Hoth or something...)

And so we landed and spent a little time in the airport waiting for our rental van to be ready. First impressions: 1) The exchange rate is REALLY terrible and 2) the people are generally *quite* good looking. I mean, we knew both of those things in advance, but now it was actually real.

So we finally got our van and set out for Fredrikstad, with Boothnavy in the driver's seat. The landscape was amazing, this total winter wonderland with everything coated in white.

The further south we went, the less white things became. And they have graffiti in Norway.

The ride took almost 2 hours, and then we got pretty lost at the end, because of course our mapblast directions were pretty much useless once you hit a city. It doesn't help that all the street signs are teeny and hidden on the sides of buildings. Did I mention that we were pretty tired and cranky by this point? Anyway, we found our hotel and the guy was so nice we wanted to cry.

Then it was time for a quick nap before soundcheck, and oh, how wonderful it was. The beds had nice down comforters and it was the greatest feeling in the world. Amazingly, we managed to get up and go over to the club, which turned out to be about 2 blocks away. We met Kenth, who'd booked the night, and soundchecked, and then went to look for some food. Ended up at some nice-ish restaurant and tried to figure out what all the pizza toppings were in norwegian. It had started raining by the time we walked back to the hotel. I was expecting it to be completely freezing, it being Scandinavia and all, but it was pretty much just like being in Boston.

So we got dressed and went back to the club, and hung out for a little bit before we played. The place was pretty small, and a good little crowd was there by the time we went on. It started off a bit slow, but soon the people got dancing, and things started to get crazy when we played Tracey Gold, since we do the Stephan Groth remix version, and that's our big Fredrikstad hit. The thing about Fredrikstad is that there just happen to be a bunch of synthpop bands from there (Apoptygma Berzerk being the biggest one), and Stephan was at our show. He was all about fun, and brought us to this other bar afterwards, with a bunch of other synthpop boys, from Echo Image and Icon of Coil and Sweep. It was like a crazy convention or something. We also found out that a member of a really big Norwegian black metal band is a Freezepop fan. This delighted and confused us. I'm not going to name any names and "out" him here, because you know how crazy those Norwegian black metal bands can get...

Anyway, everyone was very "jovial" (i.e. tipsy) and there was some dude with a guitar there doing Bon Jovi covers, who amazed us all with his American accent, like as in we were trying to guess where he was from, until he fessed up that he was in fact Norwegian and had just picked up an American accent because he worked with some dude from Portland. I dunno though, as impressive as it was, a Norwegian accent is really hot and isn't something that should be lost. Just my opinion.

Then everything shut down, which was pretty good, because we were insanely tired by this point. They were all apologizing for the snow and everything shutting down early, and it was just like "Well, we're from Boston. We know."