aleksavich: Post 15- Snow Patrol!!

Monday March 16^th is a day I’ve been waiting for since BEFORE I left for this trip. I had bought my tickets to see Snow Patrol in London in advance.

This is Snow Patrol for those of you who don’t listen to them:

This is one of my favorite songs (one of their new ones)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=942tk_Y1bUE

Or this one was their biggest one. If you know one Snow Patrol song, its this one

After a well needed good sleep after a crazy Ireland weekend, I got ready for the show and went to meet Rickie, a girl also on this trip.

She had taken care of the train stuff. We went to the train station and got up to the platform JUST as the train was pulling away. We tried to exchange our train tickets, but they said NO. Our only option was to buy new ones. They had originally cost us (with our discount card) about $10 each. The new ones were about $50 each, yea, that sucks. Rickie paid for this because she felt it was her fault we were late. That was nice of her.

After this damper, we were off. We had been pushed back a ½ hour, so we did not get into London until about 6.

On the way to the hostel, something interesting happened. We were walking through a business area that had really nice looking buildings. I stopped to take a picture. This cop waves his arm, (you can see him doing that in the one picture I got). I thought he was waving to a car or something, but he was waving to me. He came up to me and told me I was not allowed to take pictures. He was smiling as he said it so I thought he was joking. I kept trying to take a picture, but he kept putting his hand up, covering my lens. It was so weird. It might sound like I should have understood sooner about him being serious, but his face was smiling the whole time, as if he was joking. I guess I kept pushing it for a while, trying over and over again to take a picture. He finally grabbed his radio and was about to call backup when I finally realized he was serious. Do we have anything like that in the US? I also couldn’t believe him because I didn’t think anything like that exists. I understand if I am in a museum, or inside an airport or something, where it is private. But I was in a place where it is public to walk around.. but not public to take pictures.. I was BAFLED by this.

Does anyone know? Do we have a place like that in the US?

So that’s my story of almost getting into trouble in London.

By the time we got to our hostel, and got to the venue, it was already 7:30 or 8.

The venue Snow Patrol was playing at was the O2. (O2 is one of the huge cell phone providers here, like Cingular in the US.) This venue was HUGE. Before we came, we assumed that it must have been pretty big because another person from our group was seeing a different band the same night there, but exceeded our expectations in size. The O2 was full of restaurants inside, a mini theme park with bumper cars and a couple other rides, and it even had a museum with a History of Music exhibit. How cool is that!?

When we got into our stage that was almost the size of the HP Pavilion. It was an enormous standing area, surrounded by a huge amount of seating.

Rickie and I made our way as far forward as possible, but having missed the first band, it was already crowded and we couldn’t get very far forward.

The second (to us, first) band played. They were called Fanfarlo. They were pretty good. They had a violinist, and the violin was really fitting for them. It worked well in their songs.

When they were done.. it was time for SNOW PATROL.

The opened up with “If There’s a Rocket Tie Me to It”, which is the opening song of their new CD. They played all my favorite songs through out the night. I recorded them all pretty much, because I couldn’t see L so my way of watching the stage was through my camera that I held high above my head.

Being small, like me, is usually great at concerts, because I usually arrive early, and while its not too crowded yet, I sneak my way to the front. But arriving late, being small sucks!! Especially when the singer encouraged people to raise their arms up, and then I couldn’t see anything at all.. L

My recording would have been better if I knew my camera better, but it was only until the very end of the show that I realized why my camera would only let me record a minute max at a time. It was on some setting, that I just had to change, but didn’t realize it. So for my favorite songs, I went in and put in the pieces together in a computer program.. so that is why, you might notice, the songs skip a few seconds in the middle L

The background of the stage was very cool. Their lights and video shows were great. It was different for every song they played. Sometimes it would just be a live video of the show, sometimes the TVs would change their positions, (straight lines of tvs, to ziz zag..) and sometimes they had a big sheet in the background and would play premade videos behind them playing. It was very entertaining to have this variety. You will see some of this in my videos below.

So, overall, the music was amazing. Snow Patrol put on a good show. It really sucked that I couldn’t see anything a lot of the time, and when I could, the stage was still pretty far away. The money.. well.. if I had known ahead of time how much all of this was going to cost, I never would have bought the tickets. (tickets themselves, train there, train back, hostel, Rickie had to pay the really expensive train tickets again for the train we missed..) So, I know I would not have done this knowing all that .. but having done it, I don’t take it back.

Pictures: