Day one

Sunday February 27.

Mark:

After a mercifully slow morning we’re out early afternoon but everywhere around the Reeperbahn is closed. Everywhere. Oh well. We give up and come out to try again around 7pm. But again, most places are still closed. After the fully pumped up environment we found ourselves launched into last night this is a confusing and frustrating experience. But we find two possible venues where the people we speak to make positive noises but it’s more, come back in a day or two when the manager might be around. In one of them is some kind of test the power of your punch boxing machine with a few enthusiastic participants playing it. This creates a quite annoying punctuation of aggression every now and then which makes talking to the assistant manager quite difficult and, when we leave, we’re not entirely sure we would want to play there anyway. This is added to the guy talking to us about playing a three hour set. Or at least playing a few sets in a three hour period taking the bar deep into the night. We do not do covers so that wouldn’t work for us; no-one wants to see an originals band for three hours. Even in famous land, only the very top top and legendary acts play for three hours or more. More often, you’re looking at an hour to an hour and a half.  We have a slight language barrier along with the sounds of that mad boxing game so he doesn’t quite grasp all this. But he still seems positive and he does come round to the possibility that we could play for an hour or less while another act takes the rest of the night.

Maja:

How can a city have felt so alive just yesterday and today feel like a ghost town? I don’t understand it. I just don’t get it. Someone, please come here and explain to me so I really understand. This just does not make sense. At all. 

Maybe it’s a German thing? When we were in Berlin a little while ago, the whole city was closed on Sundays as well. It was so closed that even the supermarkets weren’t open. Come on guys. Seriously? Do you need to close down the entire country every Sunday? Even my little city of Stockholm is alive on Sundays. Walking around here seeing everything being completely closed makes it feel like I am in this little town in the countryside with everything being closed so the people could go to Sunday mass. Only the things around is a club town with music and sex clubs everywhere and that is very much not fitting my image of being in the countryside. 

As we do the second round out in the evening some bars are starting to open up, which gives me a little hope. Maybe it’ll come alive soon. I am giving this place the benefit of the doubt, the restrictions in Hamburg have been very strict and many places are still completely closed because of covid. Let’s see how this develops.