This slice of the odyssey (taken during the October 2007 Ukraine/Russia tour) is 9:30 long — probably too long.  Sorry about that.  It starts out on the finale of the show in Omsk.  After the show there was very little time to get to the train so everything was a big rush.  Once we were on the train it was not clear how long we would be on the train.  Estimates ranged from 18 to 24 hours.  It took more like 36 hours. Mik, Lou, Kelly and I went to the restaurant once without a translator.  We all ended up ordering what ended up being, well, boiled mushrooms in “gravy” which was more like water that had a piece of bullion tossed into it or something like that.  Not good.  We didn’t make that mistake again.  The smart move would have been to order chicken ceasars.  If you plan on going to Ukraine or Russia learn how to say three things: butter, thank you and chicken ceasar.  Trust me on this one.

Our train room had two TVs — neither was plugged into anything, though.  This was not unusual.  There are a lot of TVs in Russia.  They’re just not plugged into anything.  The few that are plugged in are all playing The Fashion Channel only.

And then there was another couple hour bus ride to the hotel — and everybody was packed on the bus like sardines.  Again.  The hotel was more like a compound out in the middle of a forest of birch trees.  We were glad to get there, and were able to sleep some six hours there, and that was a rare situation for this tour -- six hours in a decent bed.

--Friendly Site Admin and part-time video tag along..

Eric breaks out in song while an airline employees tries to stay warm waiting for the gear to get loaded on the plane.  We were in a bus in Khabarovsk about to fly to show #10 in Vladivostok.

This was the view from the train entering Irktusk traveling from Novosibirsk, which stands for “New Siberia” in Russian.  This was where concert #8 of 10 was held.  The train ride was a mere 20 hours.  There were two long train trips on this tour.  The bus part took 10 days and there were enough flights to round out a total of 20,000 miles total for the 10-show tour.

On the last tour stop in Vladivostok the local promoter was a bit of a nut.  He commandeered the entire crew out to one of his fishing boats in the harbor and brought out all the booze and fresh crab one could ever want.  Strange guy.  Unbelievable crab.  The captain of the boat had some interesting stories about fish that he sees now that he has never seen in the past and had photos of some things that were truly bizarre.  You never know what will happen in these situations.

This is what $5 a minute in roaming charges look like.

The local promoter brought out two of these monsters for us.  As an aside the British members of the band did not want to partake in the delicacy.  This was not the case with the Americans and Russians, though.  For some reason the Russians felt that good hospitality meant bottles and bottles of vodka and at all times of the day or evening.  This picture was taken at around 9AM.

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