We arrived in Brzeg, Poland on August 23, haggard and stinking after 24 hours on the road. We were delighted to find that the hotel we were staying in was only a few blocks from the train station. Our room was small but charming. Two narrow beds, a small table, a shower and a closet. We moved our personal stuff in and made a lunch of couscous and lentils with hummus, which we ate with tortillas and fresh vegetables. After an hour's rest, we set out to see if we could catch some of the other performers and maybe meet our host, Romuald.
Brzeg is a small town, so it didn't take us long to find the main square. We saw a group from Japan called Ojarus performing and some musical acts. It was delightful to see a pretty weird and experimental group from Tokyo performing for a rapt Polish audience. We decided we should try to find out where we were supposed to eat dinner. We learned from another performer that Romuald was an older guy in a straw hat and a white jacket with blue stripes. We spotted him outside a restaurant and introduced ourselves. There was a tense moment when he thought we were a group called “Las Bombas” who had also applied to the festival but who he had not invited. Once he realized that we were the Bombastics, from the USA we greeted us with hugs and tickets entitling us to bizarre, vegetarian Polish meals three times a day for the next week.
The next day we had no assigned spot on the schedule, but we talked to Romuald and he gave us a spot at 2 pm. We were quickly discovering that BuskerBus runs a little differently than most street festivals. It's not so much all work and no play, with international artists trying to play great shows to huge crowds and make lots of money. It's a much more loosely organized affair. There is a rag tag family of performers from all over the world who, despite their generally high level of eccentricity, perform surprisingly diverse and delightful shows. For a week, this family of performers (and it really is a family) will travel together, eat together, perform together and drink together all over Poland.
Get on the bus! Romuald is in foreground below.
We decided to stop for lunch before our two o'clock show. Breakfast and lunch in Brzeg were served in the Milk Bar. Milk Bars are an institution left over from the communist period, which serve simple food at very low prices. Our usual milk bar breakfast consisted of a cup of instant coffee, a few slices of bread, two slices of cheese, half a tomato and a bowl of cottage cheese with dill. A little unusual at first, but not a bad breakfast if you can stomach it. Lunch was much the same.
Our performing location turned out to be no more than a street corner two blocks from the center of town. It would have been a decent spot for a guitar player, but for a circle show it was just about impossible. Fortunately, our buddies Philipp and Petra who we met in Ferrara stopped by and scoped out the situation with us. Philipp gave us a killer pep talk, which is becoming a tradition, and encouraged us to just set up and do a show and to block the street if we had to. This put the fire in our blood and we ended up playing a great show on the street corner. By the end of our show we had blocked the entire sidewalk and had a crowd standing behind us in the street. Needless to say, we were glad we tried it. Thanks, Dad.
Much of our time in Poland followed the same pattern. We would wake up, eat breakfast together, go play a weird show in a weird spot, have dinner together and then all go to the “Festival Club” (read “bar”) for the particular city where we would spend our hard-earned zloty on Polish beer and vodka.
Dinner at the "festival club" Left side of table speaking German, right side Japanese.
Instead of listing everything chronologically, I will instead give a brief account of some of our unforgettable shows before I proceed.
Kiddy spin from overtime show (see below)
Amp show: We built a huge crowd on a great pitch in Wroclaw and just as we were about the start the show, our amp quit. We performed our entire show unamplified and without any music, including an eerily quiet juggling act. UPDATE: Part of this show was filmed and put on Polish TV (or something). Find it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_jjynyNvIU
Sprinkler show: We showed up to our pitch to find a sprinkler soaking the entire area. Philipp arrived on the scene and then went to talk to the authorities. Nobody knew who had installed the sprinkler or how to shut it off. Philipp failed to issue his usual pep talk and instead shocked us by saying, “It's not worth it.” We immediately decided to give up.
Overtime?: We played a show in the main square in Wroclaw. We were a little late to get started, because Dan Marcus got hassled by the police, so Philipp and Petra gave him their spot and played a bit later, but then they had to wait for Valeria and then we had to wait for them. The end result: we finished at 7:07 rather than at 7:00. This apparently made us some lifelong enemies out of the couple of clowns who were supposed to take over the spot at 7. I think they had some serious beef with Americans. Interesting to be stereotyped...
And then....a show where it threatened to rain the entire time, a show where we started out with a great crowd and lost half of them before the finale to Djammal's sound system, and our wonderful final show in Wroclaw where we had a hilarious translator pretending he was a presenter from the home shopping network (unbeknownst to us of course.)
Oh, remember when Marya got locked in that kebab restaurant bathroom? I had my turn of being locked in a bathroom for the trip. I got locked in the 40 degree (around 100 degrees Fahrenheit) shower room of our hostel for over an hour while the staff tried to find a locksmith. Don't worry, the humor of the situation wasn't lost on us.
Another momentous occasion: Marya turned 26 in Zielona Gora. We celebrated at the Piekarnia, a huge bakery turned bar (and that city's festival club). She had happy birthday sung to her in over 12 different languages. We had her traditional birthday watermelon as well as a delicious little cake with fruit and nuts and a large bottle of champagne (Thanks Philipp and Petra!), which magically seemed to serve everyone who gathered around.
Family portrait at the Piekarnia (Philipp and Petra pretend to be our parents)
The day after Marya's birthday was our last day in Poland. We also celebrated Romuald (the organizer of BuskerBus) and Buskerbus's birthdays. Romuald turned 60 and BuskerBus 15. It was a great night and we said our farewells to many wonderful people. At the end of the night we returned to our hotel where we shared a special Polish vodka that tasted of nutmeg with Romuald at 4 AM. It was the perfect final moment of our Polish adventure.
They are not big on cake in Poland... Vodka (60) and honey wine (15).
The next morning we all piled into Philipp and Petra's car and set off. To Osterreich!
Our cozy ride to Austria.
For our own reference, some people we want to never forget: philip and petra, sheishei and mai, nozomi, ojarus (masa and haruki – japanese ame and the pompon dance after their whip trick), stripey (and his mosquito bites and accent and the time he sang us all of “Billy Austin” in Wroclaw), romuald (and when he sang the song to Marya on her birthday), trickster circus (and their sweet dance moves), dan marcus, djammal (uh-huh), daniel mays, blond polish drummer (who said “say hi to your mom” when I told him my family was polish), fred/charley, tahmour, duo ruach, martin (our german friend – and how he sounded like Jan Damm doing Hans), christiano (his story about how the border police thought his friend's kazoo was a pipe, so the friend had to play it to prove that it was an instrument), qian lan (bicycle helmet) the danish musicians (we danced polka.)
Very cool! I like the video. I think maybe you should do the parts in Polish for your native English speaking audiences too. It would give the show a spicy dash of surrealism. Anyway, you guys are awesome and this trip sounds awesome. Looking forward to the next update!
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