2012-12-08 Zimný Žákovic Open - Le Payaco, Walter Schnitzelsson

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I am still not sure how I feel about a friday night at the MMC club. First of all, I should thank my friend Martin "Soki" (maybe you remember him from PJ's 2012 Prague and Berlin show) for the opportunity to even go there. He won this ticket contest you see, and as he was in North.Slovakia, he couldn't pick it up. So he sent me instead.

Long story short, I got there a little late, but not for my favourite Hex songs. I tried to capture the moment on camera when I found out I'd left the battery at home. Being on my own, I decided to go back, so it really was a festival feeling for me - getting in and out of sets. When I got back after hurrying in chilly night, Le Payaco was already in full power, allowing me to immerse into the songs and take some photos. The band was much, much better than when I last saw them at the Pohoda Festival a year ago.

I could feel the band and the audience were sharing the moment. They were over way too soon for me, and even hough the evening was peaking with the next new band, quirkily named Walter Schnitzelsson. You should really see their unique train station performance in Bratislava here:
http://tv.sme.sk/v/25219/ani-policia-nezastavi-rocknroll.html
Again, I had to flee from their performance to catch the night bus way too soon, and so the Friday's Zakovic Open Festival still resonates in me a bit.

2012-12-01 Adventsmarkt Hainburg

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What a marvelous idea! I finally got a weekend afternoon trip out, thanks to Nadja. We were choosing between several locations close to Karlova Ves, Bratislava, where we live. Our close wine centers, Modra, Pezinok and Svätý Jur were all among the choices, but in the end, Nadja had a brilliant idea. "Why don't we just take the Bratislava public close-border transport and go to Hainburg, Austria instead?"

Long story short, two hours later we were on the bus. 20 minutes ride (shorter to some parts of Bratislava) took us to a small town on the other side of Austrian border, which is known in Slovakia for:
- the first mass trip from post-communist Bratislava to Western Europe ("Hello Europe" in Nov 1989 - see http://www.slovensko1989-90.sk/, part fifteen)
- shopping - for some reason, things are cheaper in Austria, where people have their wages 4-5 times the Slovak ones. Facts of life.

So we went here for a third reason - to sightsee and enjoy ourselves. Both of which we fulfilled to a high degree. We were lucky tho, because when we arrived, we found out, that there was a Advent market with charities offering Christmas products, punch, mulled wine and so on, so of course we had a sip of the orange punch and went for a stroll around the city, trying out two caffés, loosing Nadja's ring on the way unfortunately, taking photos along the way. These you can see up here of course. Cheers!