|
We had a hard time sleeping that night after the Norwich concert since we were still all psyched from the night's impressions.
Hence we were quite tired when we had to get up, check out and take the train to Cambridge,
which took about an hour. Checked into the next bed and breakfast and
took a one hour nap before taking a walk downtown. In front of the
venue, we ran into Mark (Polaris) from the British Empire, who had been waiting for the
Greek Empire to arrive - but our Greek brothers, obviously still on
Greek time :-P, were running late, with their hotel being outside the city. We had a
Seattle snack at Starbucks, did some sightseeing and ended up
having drinks and dinner at a bar right next to the venue, while talking
Ryche with some other UK fans that happened to be there. A little later
Mike and Lara showed up, and finally the Greek Empire's taxi stopped
right in front of us.
We again picked up our fanclub tickets at the Corn Exchange venue, this time it was assigned seats. When we read "row J" we were all wondering where the heck we'd be sitting, but once inside, it turned out they had to extend the stage and removed rows A to G, so row J was actually second row, full of fanclub people! And even better for us, (if not for the band), the first row never got up from their seats, so standing in the second row was like being in first row after all. That night I also got to meet Chris and Miki from Arizona - they had been to the show in Norwich and I was wondering if they were UK fans. Turns out they were some crazy Rychers from the States who came to the UK to follow the band for a week - now that's dedication (or addiction? hehehe :-). At one point before the show started, Mike called me over and introduced me to Susan Tate, who had joined the tour that day. She was very nice and easy going...oh oh, I hope the vultures are not gonna come get me now, for I now belong to an imaginary inner circle ;-P The venue seems to have been sold out and had a very special atmosphere (an old carefully renovated Corn Exchange), although for us Germans it is kind of weird having assigned seats, being used to general admission at all times. After the intermission when Mindcrime 2 began, everyone was still sitting, so it was Polaris, Rainer, Dimitri and myself who got up first, followed by the rest of the Greek Empire on the other side of our row...and once the second row had stood up in union, everybody sitting behind us was basically forced to do the same, and the party went on :-) That night we did not have M&G, so we went to the bar next door with Mike and Lara, Chris and Miki. The friendly bouncer even offered to let us stay after midnight, when the bar officially closed, to have an aftershow party in privacy. Fozzy alias Dr X and Jason alias Nikki joined us for some drinks. Enjoyed talking to Jason for quite a while about life in Europe, since he's been living in Italy for many years. Returned to our B&B past 2 and tried to get some sleep on our rather noisy place, thanks to paper thin walls and squeaky staircases in a rather old building we woke up earlier than we intended. |