SunriseAve ITALY

Poland – Germany – Greece    by Sunrise Avenue Diary

We made our second trip to Poland last week. We started the promotion trip from Warsaw where we performed at the brand new Hard Rock Café. It was the first acoustic show with Riku on guitar and therefore it was good to have 3 hours for sound check. And the check was fun. We played all the worst Finnish schlager songs as the waitresses were making everything ready for the evening. They thought we're crazy…

After a TV morning show the next morning on a TV building rooftop we started driving to Zielona Góra for a huge TV show festival. The distance is 450 Km and it took more than 9 hours to get there, The driver was so lost all the time and I must be honest and tell you we were pretty close losing our temper. The roads were amazingly bad too. We missed the sound check (by 3 hours) and we had 11 minutes to prepare everything when we got to the venue late at night before the show. Karri, our backline tech, really saved the day and us in front of the 100.000 viewers + a lot of folks behind TV screens at home. And experience anyway.

The show was cool and especially the dinner after it. In the morning we faced another traveling challenge when the plane we were supposed to take back to Warsaw had never arrived the airport. We had to take a Polish bus to the next city to get another one.

Even though our trip was full of challenges, all the folks were really nice all the time and we will definitely give them another chance ;=)

Yesterday we performed in Rastatt, Germany at the New Pop festival. The venue was the Mercedes Benz factory and actually the robots and engineers were at work and stopped only for the performances. They also made the car builder robots "dance" with the music. It was very cool apart from the fact that nobody told us we could have played one more song since we were the last ones on stage. Felt so bad walking off the stage after only three songs…. We could have done many more.

Luckily today we play a 30 min set in Athens at the Taekwondo arena. I just spoke to Karri on phone asking if I should bring some acoustic guitar strings with me to the venue if the ones on my guitar aren't ok. I have some strings with me because I am staying 4 more days in Athens to write some songs and to relax. The weather is just perfect. Anyway, Karri told me that the venue is amazing. Something very very old and there is a great atmosphere. We'll see. I'll put my jeans on now and get to the lobby where the driver is waiting for us to take us to the back stage…...