fatspicblog

Amazing the place where we have been today, a town in a middle of a fiord. They do exist. You may think they don’t because you have never seen them but believe me I was there and I saw a big fiord and then we drove in and there was a town. It was not a big town because there are not big towns in Norway. All the towns in Norway are pretty small apart from the one of Oslo that happens to be the capital.

Petter Kramstad is from that town. He is actually from Norway. His mum lives still there and I had gotten some tickets for both of them and Petter’s wife to see the show. They are arriving this morning to Norway for a week of skiing.

I have not seen Petter for quite a while so I was looking forward to see him. I did not know I was not going to see him as much as I thought because he came to say hello after the show and then we went for a beer. Everybody in the show was so ready to leave that I hardly had ten minutes to talk to him or her and then leave the place really fast.

Dramen is not the nicest place in Norway. The city is a little bit ugly taken in consideration that there are not factories or things that make it ugly per se and at first I thought it was a holyday resort because I could see the slops with the ski lifts and all those things.

I am enjoying very much Norway. I thought they were going to be really boring Arian people but I have met mainly ex-Vikings who like to have fun and have a very good sense of humour.

Or at least I found them funnily enough. 

We arrived to these very good looking in the middle of the border between Sweden and Norway and the wind is very cold so there are not people on the street. The theatre is very nice and I have to say the techies here are really nice. They have helped us a lot with the lights and all the things that we have to do for every show.

Usually techies do not want to talk to normal people so it is very difficult to go there and tell them that you need your help because you do not know how to do what you need for the show but once they have tried a couple of things you would be able to tell them more clear what kind of light you like for your show.

Nicola gets a little bit upset with them so they just do not give a fuck and make it even more difficult that already is. But these two here apart of having a very nice and very new theatre they are nice people and are ready to help.

My favourite thing of this place was the lady who runs the theatre. I have to say that when I saw her coming in I thought I had seen and angel. She was a little bit old but young and very hot and very pretty. I fancied her a lot. I did not want to say anything in front of the others.

 In any case she made my day.The show went well because we had lots of fun on the stage. The audience helped a lot, not. They were very few, to the point that they did not even fell one row. At the end they clapped really hard because they knew that the show deserved a bigger audience and they wanted to be one bigger.

The tour in Norway carries on and I am not unhappy. I suppose I was a little bit scare when I came to the tour thinking that because I do not know very well this bunch there was a danger that I was not going to have fun. I have written the word I for at least six times in three sentences, perhaps I am a little bit too much self-centre.

We do not have many more gigs left and I think that when this is finish, sorry it will never be Finish because this is a Norwegian tour, je, je, but when it ends I am going to miss the people and even the country.

Today we did our best gig so far. We played for four hundred people in the Village of Lars, our Norway actor. I know that you are asking yourselves why do we have a Norwegian actor in our show? It is very simple. It is because the show is in English and they wanted to make sure that we would have someone to translate the show. Lars does some funny monologue in the beginning of the show to help the audience understand what is going on.

The theatre were we have played is called Ibsenhunt. It is a really pretty theatre. It is at least thirty years old and it has all that very practical Scandinavian decoration. Lars told me that once many years ago he was in the Green Room of the theatre with Dexter Gordon the famous Saxophone player. He had a huge ball of hashish and when he went to play the first set he did was shit after he sober up a little bit he started to play great.  It is a fantastic story.

I had a very good show. I got lucky with a couple of things that were happening and the audience laughed a lot. I do know that if I had been with Spymonkey they would have taken advance of the accidents.

In any case it was a nice theatre and nice and big Audience.

 Yes, it is a very nice day off. It is sunny. The weather is not too cold. There are not many people on the streets. I have woken up early to go to breakfast and I have gone back to bed for a little bit longer.

I went to Lars place in the morning to help him doing some shopping and then helping to take all the things up to his super great apartment.

I realised that I like supermarkets and there are very good supermarkets in Norway. My favourite one is ICA. Everything looks very good quality and there is lots of space in the corridors. I mean between one of the selves of food and the other self of food.

I said ICA is my favourite but before yesterday I found a very nice Coop supermarket. Not only the supermarket was very good it also had a fantastic range of bags to do the shopping.

I wanted to help doing the cooking but they wanted to be together and alone so they invited me to leave and that was good. I walked through the town and it was nice.

In the evening we all went to Lars apartment for a party. The food was very nice and we had a great time. Lars invited some of his friends and they were really nice. I met this guy from Romania. He was an architect and had lived in Paris in the sixties and in Lisbon and had met Cioran and lots of famous people that lived those amazing times that change the world.

While walking back to the hotel we laughed and laughed. We were a little bit drunk it is true so that helped us to make really silly jokes. It was cold and we were shouting ¡Rape! ¡Rape! The park was full of people going back home and we laughed.

This was just a town very close to Oslo. In a way we left the city and half an hour later we were there. It feels we are in a posh neighbourhood of Oslo. The theatre is very good and we have encountered a tech that seemed to be given some troubles to dear Nicola.

The technician was not very helpful. That was at the beginning later on when we became friends Erik was very helpful. Thou probably for the lights of the show that night it was a little bit too late.

I went for a walk to the mall next to the theatre because I wanted to find a nice waterproof oilskin or similar.

I checked all the shops and really they were really nice shops but the problem was that they were really expensive. And let me inform you that Norway is by far one of the most expensive countries in the world. Probably that is too much to say but it is definitely the most expensive country I have ever been.

Everything is almost twice the price of what it costs in London. And as you can imagine that makes this country a very difficult country to be. The best thing of being in a very expensive country is that it is expensive for a reason and that is that everything is good. And you look around and you see the cars and the way people dress and the streets and everything looks expensive and good so you have to pay if you want to have good things there is not other way. Well there is … other way would be charity or mecenazgo.

The show went well actually. I think I flopped at the beginning because I dropped one of the eggs I was joggling with but then I got better and the audience laughed and enjoyed the show.

We have arrived to Oslo today. We are in a nice hotel in the middle of town, very close to the real palace and the garden that surrounded it.

It has been very hard day because we had to leave the hotel, a very nice hotel very early in the morning and we had to be in the bus for almost four hours. We had arrived to Oslo and then one hour later we had left Oslo to go to the theatre where we are playing today.

Being completely honest with you all the theatres are starting to melt into just one.

The fact is that when we arrived to the hotel our rooms where not ready and we were all so tired and we needed to have a little bit of a rest that I wanted to kill someone.

Thanks to God and his nasty friends that I got a room quite soon and I could go up and rest for a while.You probably are wondering now why I said thanks to God and his nasty friends. The thing is that I do not want to thank God for anything. I do not believe in God so I do not want to thank him but the language and my education and the society have created that expression “Thanks to God” and I am starting a new trend to get rid of it. So I am going to try to put out there in the world another different one. I accept suggestions. If any one out there have another expression that says thanks to a supernatural power be my guest and I will start to use it but I refuse to use ever again the one “thanks to God”

The show went well because we were so tired that we did not gibe a fuck and we just had pure fun.

We arrived this morning to this town. It seems really small but it is so pretty that I had to go up to the hills and look at the town from up there and it is much bigger than it looks like. It is by the sea and it seems to be a holydays town. The port is very picturesque.

We are in a very nice hotel, no, wait, we are in a fucking amazing hotel by the water. The sea is so close to the hotel that the seagulls come to have breakfast with us. Also it is a very sunny day and quite warm for Norway standards.

Today we had something really funny happening after the show. The only reason why they got the show in this town was because they wanted to have a drink with the performers on the stage after the show. SO we were told that once the performance as finish, the performance will never be finish because it is English, Gabrielli is an English company, je, je, … all the performers would have to stay on the stage and the audience would come into the stage and we would all share a glass of champagne and some canapés. I did not see the canapés anywhere but the cheap champagne was there. It was kind of nice, we opened the bottle of champagne that we open in the show and suddenly the curtain behind the set opened and there was a big table with lots of glasses of champagne.

The funny thing was the no one of the members of the audience tried to talk to any one of us. It was a little bit silly. We went to a coffee after wards and we all had a very nice laugh playing Doctor Phil.

Do not ask me much about that game because it only makes sense when the “La Serva Padrona Gang” are working.

Oh we have travelled some kmts today. Perhaps not too many but taken in consideration that we had done a show yesterday and that we are tired and that we have a long tour ahead of us. When we arrived here yesterday I was quite happy to be here. This is town by the seaside. I believe the ferry to Germany leaves from here. The town has a big high street and that is it really. No, what I am talking about? The fact is that there is something really good about this place. It is by the sea and you can see that it is big enough. And the prove of the pudding is that there is like a big opera society that likes to come to see the kind of shows that we are doing but today were having a big rehearsal or something and they did not come to see the show which made the audience much smaller than what the play deserve.

Never the less it does not seem to be very important the amount of people that we get in the show. As Anrfinn says to the others and me his company is organising this tour because they are trying to create an interest for the Opera, and interest that does not really exist. It does exist thou a very big interest for the big Opera house building that they are building in Oslo. Everybody tell us about it. I really do not know what is all about but everybody says it is amazing and that it is one of the most amazing buildings ever.

We will be leaving in the morning and between you and me I do not really like this place very much. I went for a walk and I saw some junkies. I did not think I was going to see that here in Norway. Actually that is not right, I do not care about that I just think this is one of those backwards cities. We did have a very nice and expensive meal last night but that is not everything.

We have spent the day travelling to this place called Kristiansand. In a way I wish the whole tour would be like this, travelling one day and the next day gig but you know there is not tour that is profitable if it is done like this unless you are the Rolling Stones. And I have to say that I would not mind to be Ron Wood.

In any case Norway has a really nice countryside and that is what I have been watching with pleasure during all the time that we have been driving.We are driving in a Mercedes Luton. It is like a big bus. It is not comfortable at all, if anything is practical but we carry a big addition that the bus is pulling where the big instruments and the set travels. The bus is very uncomfortable thou.

We have stopped a couple of times and we have seen the snow for the first time in this country. They say it will snow in couple of days and then we will really see what it means to snow here. I cannot wait in fact I am thinking of going snowboarding. Lars has told me that when we are in Oslo I would be able to get the tube and go to the slops on the tube and then spend the day snowboarding. It would really be a very nice thing to do thou I bet you I am going to be so tired that I am not going to touch the snow at all.

We have gone for dinner to a very nice restaurant. It was super expensive. Lars was very generous and he paid for all the wine we drunk and even with that we pay something like seventy pounds each. This country is quite mad when it comes to prices.

Tomorrow we have a show so I am going to go to sleep very soon because I need to be very relax and rested to be very good in the show.

I have been in Norway for two days already, can you believe that? In a way I cannot really believe it. It feels such a different country to the one I come from. But that is not the most important thing because I have been living in other countries around the world and there are many places that I recognised and that sound familiar to me. In fact for a while yesterday I thought I was in Calgary. I was leaving the hotel to go for a walk and suddenly a bunch of people dressed in cowboy’s hats and things like that came into the theatre and I could not believe it. I had to pinch my arm so I was sure I was not dreaming.

Now the first show in Norway it has been a big success. I could not say this for the big laughs that were coming from the auditorium because that was not the case, it was because the producer of the show told us that the people were very happy and he is the one that spoke to them so… I have to believe him. It also helps that he took us out for dinner. I would not say the dinner was amazing but it was for free and the fish soup was very good.

We drunk some wine and I have started to become friends with the people in the tour.

It is a pity that Vivian the Alma matter of this show is leaving very soon, we will miss her a lot.