Hey guys and girls, sorry I haven’t

updated in a while but I’ve just been keeping cool, going with the flow and

whatnot, just school, skating, the normal stuff.  I decided to update now, because the past

week, I got to participate in something pretty cool.  As some of you may know, I play lead guitar

in a band here and we played a concert for this school festival type of deal

which was pretty fun.  This blog will be

the story about the concert and everything including pictures and video and all

the cool stuff like that so all of you guys can see what it was like.

            For the

last month or so, with about 5 kids from our class, we have been planning this

festival that went down this past Thursday. 

The festival, Majales (pronounced Maiyalis), was basically an 8-hour

event party thing for the graduating classes of our school.  The two graduating classes each did

something; for example one of them did a remix of the theme song from “The Lion

King” in Czech, and the other class presented a satirical rendition of the most

famous Czech play.  That’s really beside

the point though.  Anyhow, for the last

month on lunch break, or instead of PE or some pointless class like that, we

have been going to collect sponsor money, talk to people, coordinate the stage,

hire food stand people and that type of stuff for Majales.  It really took a lot of planning and hard

work on our parts that not many people realized until the day of the show.  Oh yeah, and I forgot to mention that this

festival was entirely set up by us, the class directly below the graduating

classes.  No teachers, no adults, no

nothing, just us 6 kids planning this festival, making advertisements, getting

sponsors and everything, so it ended up being pretty hard.

            So fast

forward to 7:15 Wednesday morning, the day before the show; we all met at the

spot where it was to take place to setup our campsite type of deal.  We just chilled until about 10 when the rest

of the kids showed up so we could get started on setting up the food tents and

whatnot.  You guys should probably know

that the festival was held at a park/field between the gates of this castle and

the river.

This town, Nymburk, has been

inhabited for like 600 years and has a huge castle gate around one part of it,

and a river on the other side, with a field and walkway in between and that’s

were it was being held.

So back to the

story, by now we had about 15 people there, 4 of which had cars, and all parked

on the field close to the river.  At all

times, one car had to stay parked with a few people at the campsite to ensure

that everything stayed put and to keep everything under control.  Over the course of a few hours, we managed to

get all the seats to the field, all the tents, a trampoline, and some other

stuff for entertainment purposes.  While

we were bringing the last of the tents and chairs, who is to show up but the

police?  great… Now started a minor

problem.  We “technically” were only

allowed to be there on Thursday, the day of the event, and having 4 cars parked

in the middle of a field, random seats, tents, and a trampoline everywhere and

the dumbest cops in the world, it was quite a challenge to successfully explain

what we were doing and why.  After like a

half hour of half arguing half explaining, it was taken care of and the cops

left but only after having us move our cars from off the field, no biggie.  There was only so much we could do on

Wednesday seeing as that we weren’t scheduled to put the stage up until

Thursday morning so somebody conveniently had a grill with them so all after

noon we just kicked it and grilled and waited. 

That night, a bunch of people slept at our campsite to keep watch over

it, (me not being one of them because I had matters to attend to elsewhere),

and we planned to meet back Thursday morning at 8.

 (This is kinda off topic but here is a project of ours that we had been working on specifically for this event.  Its our buddies old car, precisely a 1971 Skoda 105l, an old communist czech car.  we mounted two speakers on the top and ran the chords through the window into the radio, to which we had a microphone.  We would drive around and speak into the mic advirstising our festival and spreading the word.  Either that or we would sneak up behind some pedastrians and blast some techno but either way it was fun)

So Thursday, the day of the concert, and we all stumble out

to the field at precisely our far too earlier decided on time, 8 am.  If things were to have gone as planned,

everything would have been fine, but guess what, nothing ever goes as

planned.  Mr. Murphy and his ridiculous

law (Murphys law, which states that whatever can go wrong will go wrong at the

worst possible time) kicked in the night before and dumped on us an entire

nights worth of rain.  The crappy weather

stayed in town as well, so at 8 in the morning on Thursday, it was extremely

wet, cloudy and like 40 degrees.  Woohoo.

 We get everything started, cleaning up,

setting up the rest of the tents, calling people and whatnot.  Eventually the company who rents out stages

comes and we start setting up the stage.  We had ordered a pretty big stage, about 8m by

4m, so when it came we all had to get to work pretty quickly in order to get it

ready in time for the show.  We all get

to work on building, and after several hours we managed to get it up.  Meanwhile the sun had been trying to peek its

way through the clouds and we were all hoping that the clouds would clear and

we would have nice weather for the concert. 

After a few runs to the store for food and getting the rest of the

little things taken care of, it was time for the festival to start.

            Oh yeah, I

forgot to mention, while we were setting everything up, a homeless dude found

his way to the park and saw that it was a stage and deciding to come have a

look.  Now you’re thinking to yourself

big whoop, a homeless dude at a park, but this dude stood right up to the stage

and started singing his longs out.  He

just started singing like it was his concert. 

Poor ol’ drunk dude couldn’t even hold a note.  Oh yeah and the best part was, that when he

wasn’t singing he was playing on his kids electric harmonica, that played

ridiculously loud for some reason.  We

all ended up getting a kick out of this guy.

            So back to

the story, it started off with a walk from the school to the park but I didn’t

do that because we had to stay back for whatever reasons.  From 2pm to 6pm, the graduating classes

presented some stuff, other classes danced or whatever, just dumb stuff.  At 6pm we started playing.  Well, we are basically a rock, funk, fusion

type of deal band made up of a tenor sax, alto sax, trumpet, flute, guitar,

bass, drums, and piano.  We ended up

playing 11 songs, well twelve because we played the first song again on the end

because some russsian grandma asked us too. 

One of the songs we played was a parody love song on the shitty pop

music of today.  This was our attempt at

taking a stand against where pop music culture is going but whatever it was

fun.  So for this song, we all played a

chord progression of Fmaj7-C-G-Am, which is a super lame over used chord

progression and I conjured up some super corny love song lyrics and we gave it

a go.  Oh yeah, and in the middle of the

song the music stops and only the piano is playing, and I start reciting this

speech about how I loved this girl and she broke my heart and that I hate her,

basically the lyrics of any modern day emo band (in English of course), while

my buddy stood right next to me translating into Czech so the crowd could

understand, and everyone got a big old kick out of it and it ended up being our

hit of the night.  Coincidently the band

that played after us happened to be the exact genre of music that we were

making fun of.

our bassist.  really cool dude

our horns

whole band (the girl behind me, our flutist is super hot by the way.  czech girls are super hot but they all somehow manage to have boyfriends.  oh well, lucky czech kids.)

heres a picture with the kid who translated my little emo speach.  the car that we rode around in is also his.

yeah and i rapped a song too.  everybody here thinks its really cool that i can sort of rap in english i dont know way, so the band convinced me to make an idiot of myself and rap at the concert.  so i wrote some lyrics that were actually pretty sick and i rapped.  it didnt turn out to bad, they liked it.

            After we

played, we all just chilled out and listened until the other two bands finished

playing.  The other bands played until

about 10 o’clock, and after that, we started taking everything down because the

stage was being rented the next morning. 

By the time we got everything put away and taken home, it was 2 in the

morning.  Ironically that Thursday, was a

workers holiday so everybody had off, but we worked from 6am Thursday morning

to 2am Friday morning.

            I’ll end

this right now because its late and I need to go to bed.  All in all, it was way fun and its super fun

playing concerts.  I can’t wait until I

get the chance to play again.  Let me

guys know what you think and everybody keep it real.

On a closing note, I had my buddy film it but he’s an

idiot.  He only ended up filming like 20

minutes of it and couldn’t even get me the footage until yesterday and turns

out, the footage is terrible.  No video

quality. No sound quality.  He compressed

the footage intensely so no video for you guys im sorry.  If he can somehow get me the footage into a

listenable state then I will post the vids.