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Friday - April 11th 2003
It was a bright sunny and warm morning in Rostov
and we set off for Krasnodar which was about 275 kilometres. Viktor,
the guy who owned the restaurant we spent so much time in insisted
on driving Monica, Max (security chief) and myself to Krasnodar
in his shiny new Jaguar and I had a feeling that this was going
to be… entertaining! AND IT WAS!!
We were stopped three times by the police. One was a routine checkpoint
and the second was for speeding (we were only doing twice the 90
km per hour speed limit!!). This was apparently settled with about
$5.00. The third was a little more amusing as it seems the second
cops had telephoned ahead to the third ones to tell them I was in
the car so we were stopped for… autographs!! So I exchanged
autographs for photographs as you will see! One of these guys was
about 9 feet tall I think.
Anyway the roads were bad and I think I prayed the entire way there
but we managed to arrive safely in time to check into the hotel
where Monica and I were presented with flowers and shown to the
Presidential Suite. This is all very nice but, like I said, I don't
plan to get used to it… especially when we will spend a grand
total of about 9 hours in such a beautiful room. Ten minutes later
we were on our way to the press conference where I was presented
with an honorary diploma from the Kuban Wine Society. I don't know
why they did this and it took a long time and I didn't like the
wine but I didn't want to be rude and refuse their hospitality.
They gave us lots of bottles of wine (most of which were awful to
be perfectly honest) and some other little gifts and we politely
made our exit to go to sound check. I did learn that this region
of Russia, which is only 100kms from The Black Sea and about 500
kms from the northern border of Turkey, is called Kuban and is five
times the size of France!! Oh well… just thought I'd pass it
along!!
Travel Tip… when travelling through rural Russia, go to the
bathroom before you leave and take your own toilet paper!!! Also,
learn how to say "WOULD YOU PLEASE SLOW DOWN" in Russian!!
Sign language doesn't work.
This was the best show yet and the crowd was really loud. One small
snag was that there was a big gap between the front of the stage
and the first row of the audience which made close "contact"
very difficult. There was a little "catwalk" thing but
my guitar cable wasn't long enough for me to go the whole way out
but, as always, we worked around it and ended up feeling really
good about the way things are going!!
Dinner was nice but a bit slow so it was quite a late night…
a good one though!
Next
day...
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