Seattle and Vancouver

on Wednesday, February 28, 2007
I spent a few days in Seattle last week, and then a couple more in Vancouver.

On Thursday afternoon, I arrived in Seattle. Tim Carstons picked me up at the airport, and got me to a friend's place that I was staying at. Unfortunately, that friend (Robert Walker) was in New Zealand at the time, so I didn't get to see him.

On Thursday evening, I played a full show (three hours) at En, a nice Japanese bar & restaurant that has an outlet in Seattle and another location in Tokyo. I usually play in clubs that don't serve food, so it was an interesting change get a good meal while I was playing. On Friday night, Tim took me sight-seeing for a bit and I got a chance to go to the top of the Seattle Needle, which had a spectacular view. After that, we went back to En, and I played again. However, Friday night was just a short set, and two other DJ's played too, so I actually got to sit down and enjoy someone else playing for a change.

On Saturday, I flew to Vancouver, where I spent the weekend with Shawn Cole. Shawn now owns the Lab Monkey recording studio, and he also teaches a few courses at one of the sound engineering schools in the city. Shawn used to be my roommate quite a few years ago, and was a DJ at the MTA Pub and my Assistant Manager for a while. On Saturday evening, we hit the studio and had a little bit of a party. On Sunday, Shawn had to record a group (Bend Sinister) at the Mushroom Studio, so I spent the afternoon and evening at the studio with him.

I had a flight back to Toronto late Sunday night, but unfortunately, that plane got delayed coming from Mexico, so I missed my connection in Toronto. There was chaos at the Toronto airport. Air Canada had overbooked several flights, and people were getting bumped everywhere. Now I can't fault Air Canada for overbooking a flight slightly, because that's a reasonable business decision since there are usually a couple of no-shows on each flight. However, some of these flights had apparently been over-booked by several dozen people, and a lot of the people in the airport were extremely pissed. Add to that the fact that it was snowing, and the airport was also having problems de-icing enough planes, and it turned into a generally bad day for air travel. Luckily, I am the most patient traveller in the world, so I just bought a couple books and hung out in the corner.

Throughout the day, I managed to get bumped off seven different flights. The last one was a bit of a disappointment - I was actually given the very last seat on the plane, on standby, and I was a couple feet through the gate when the passenger who owned my seat showed up at the last second and I got called back. I was a little annoyed at that, since there were no flights open on Tuesday, which meant that my choices were either to spend another day and a half in the airport, or to take a flight to Saint John and hitch-hike home in the middle of the night (since the bus station would be closed by the time I arrived). I had asked for a seat on the Saint John flight earlier in the afternoon, just to be safe, and my luggage was checked for that flight. However, after I got pulled away from the seventh Moncton flight, the agent said to hold on, because there was one more flight to Moncton that I hadn't known about. When that flight finally got ready to go, once again a bunch of standby people got the first half-dozen empty seats, then my name was once again called for the very last seat. How's that for luck?

Now I just have to wait for my luggage to arrive from Saint John, although I always take my records as a carry-on so I don't have to worry about losing my music or headphones.

Tokyo, Japan

on Tuesday, February 27, 2007
After visiting Osaka, I spent a few days in Tokyo. While I was there, I stayed with Kevin Snedker, a good friend of mine who used to be the Assistant Manager at the MTA Pub while he was at university. Kevin has been teaching English into Tokyo for the past couple of years.

We took the Shinkansen (the bullet train) from Osaka on Monday morning, and ended up having drinks on the train to get the trip started. When we got to Tokyo, we didn’t have anything planned until supper, so we mostly relaxed for the afternoon. After supper, we walked around the city for a while, then we spent several hours having dinner and drinks at The Lockup, and I met several of Kevin and Danielle’s friends. Several of them were Canadians or Australians who are working for a company called Nova, teaching English in Japan, and I also met Danielle’s friend Yuka.

Naturally, I didn’t get to sleep until about 7am, so I got nothing accomplished on Tuesday morning. However, in the afternoon, I walked around Tokyo, and Kevin took me to the Meiji Shrine. This was a large park area in the middle of Tokyo, with a large Shinto shrine in the middle. After Meiji, we spent several hours walking around the Electronics District, then went for dinner on the 49th floor of the fourth tallest building in the city. The view was incredible, and I was lucky enough to get some really good time-exposure photos of Tokyo at night. After dinner, we went to a couple bars, and again, stayed up pretty much all night.

On Wednesday, I slept for most of the morning and afternoon. I played at Velours that night, which was a fashion bar with a very high-class clientele. The venue was gorgeous, with chandeliers and comfortable couches everywhere, and the place was full of fashion models and other notable people. I played from 1:30am to 4:00am, and it was probably the most fun I've ever had playing a show, just because the venue was so different than most of the several dozen other places that I've played in.

Here are some photos from the trip:
http://www.djbolivia.ca/photos_tokyo2007a.html

Unfortunately, on Thursday, I had to get ready to move on. The four-hour trip to the airport in the afternoon was a bit of an adventure, but I made the plane with a little bit of time to spare. The neat thing about the flight was that I left Tokyo on Thursday at supper, and I was booked to DJ in Seattle on Thursday evening. However, flying across the International Date Line moved me backwards by a day, so I arrived in Seattle at lunch on Thursday.

More notes to come shortly about Seattle and Vancouver …

Osaka, Japan

on Tuesday, February 20, 2007
I flew to Osaka (Japan) this past weekend for a show. Although I’ve travelled pretty extensively before, this is my first time in Asia, so it’s been a great adventure so far.

I started by trying to fly to San Francisco for a visit on Wednesday night. Unfortunately, I flew through Montreal and then Chicago. I got to Chicago with no problems, but when I arrived there, I found out that there had been a huge snowstorm there the previous day, which had cancelled over a thousand flights. It was really nice outside at the time, with very little snow on the ground, so I didn’t really think that there were going to be any problems. However, when I got onto the plane, the airline eventually said that they couldn’t fly us to San Francisco because there were no pilots left in the airport – the pilots for our flight had been diverted to fly another plane earlier, to help catch up on the backlog of stranded passengers.

This didn’t seem like it would be a problem – they said that they were going to fly in a different crew from New York to take our plane to San Francisco, so the delay would only be a few hours. However, by this time, the storm had moved so it was over New York, which meant that it took a couple hours longer than expected for that crew to get out of LaGuardia. By the time they arrived in Chicago, the airline decided that those pilots couldn’t take our plane to San Francisco, because it would put them over their daily flight time limit. Our entire flight ended up getting cancelled, which was a disaster because that put all of us into the huge pool of people waiting to fly stand-by. I then ended up getting bumped off or passed over for the next four flights to San Francisco, as the airline tried to slowly catch up on the backlog.

In the end, I did get to San Francisco, but not until after midnight (about twelve hours later than expected). I was a little disappointed by that, because that was the stop on the trip that I was looking forward to the most. However, on a positive note, it was the one night on the trip where I could mostly easily deal with not showing up. Hopefully I’ll be able to reschedule for a visit later this spring, or maybe right after the summer ends.

The rest of the trip went smoothly, and the flights to Vancouver and then Japan were uneventful. We crossed the International Date Line, so it suddenly became Friday afternoon instead of Thursday afternoon. I was a bit nervous getting into the airport because my passport was only valid for two more months and Japan requires a foreigner’s passport to be valid for six months from the time of arrival. However, I had the itinerary to prove that I had a flight already booked to leave the country a week later, so that didn’t turn out to be a problem. Dan Elliot from the Oasis Lounge picked me up at the airport, and took me directly to his club, where I started to orient myself to the Japanese culture. A few hours later, a friend of mine (Ian Warney) showed up. Ian is a DJ and is living in Osaka teaching English. We went out for a night on the town, and I met a bunch of people that evening.

On Saturday, I spent the day touring around Osaka, and taking photos. That evening, I played at Oasis, which turned out to be a very fun night. Ian found me again on Sunday night and we went out for more sightseeing, and then we ate at a nice restaurant in a skyscraper overlooking Osaka.

So far, Japan has been great. There are far fewer foreigners here than I had imagined, but that’s about the only real surprise. The only big challenge so far has been trying to figure out the subway system. I’ve been on subways all around the world (London, New York, Paris, Moscow, and a ton of other smaller cities) but the Osaka subway has been the most confusing that I’ve seen, by far. The fare varies depending on how far you are going, and you have to buy a ticket getting on, then electronic gates scan it as you leave your destination station and don’t let you out if you didn’t pay the right fare. If you didn’t pay enough, you have to go back to another machine and do a “fare adjust” on the ticket. The Osaka (and Toyko) subway systems are not one large system, but instead are a whole bunch of separate lines run by different companies, so transfers can get complicated with ticket changes. Finally, there are very few signs in English, to make things even more confusing. However, after a few days, it was starting to make sense to me. Some of the stations are incredibly busy though – there is one station which has an average of three MILLION people per day passing through it. That’s pretty impressive, considering that the subways shut down at 12:30am and don’t start again until 5:30am.

A few other interesting notes so far:
- The cities are very clean compared to North American cities.
- There is apparently very, very little crime in Japan, and people feel completely safe and comfortable walking around anywhere in the cities.
- I have only seen a few children in the entire time I’ve been here – the Japanese must hide them away somewhere.
- I thought that I might get away with not running into anyone I knew during my visit, but on Sunday night a friend who had gone to university (Kyohei) saw me downtown and luckily had the time to spend an hour or so touring with us. That was an interesting coincidence, considering that Osaka is pretty big (nine million people, I think).
- There are far fewer Western chains than I had expected (lots of Starbucks & MacDonald’s and KFC, but that’s about it).
- A small but noticeable percentage of the population wear face masks in public and while working, either to limit the spread of diseases, or to protect them from smog & allergies.
- The amount of seafood is astounding – it is available everywhere, even as snack food in convenience stores.

Needless to say, I’ve been able to take a ton of interesting photos so far. I’ve got two photo pages up on my website now from the Osaka portion of my trip, and I’ve tried to add many more observations about Japan in the captions to the photos. Here is a link to the Osaka photo pages:
http://www.djbolivia.ca/photos_osaka2007a.html

After I left Osaka on Monday morning, I had three days scheduled in Tokyo, so I’ll write more about that part of the trip in a few days.

Benny Benassi

on Monday, February 12, 2007
I went to a Benny Benassi show in Halifax last night, at Club Rain. This wasn't really a DJ-oriented trip; I took a bunch of the Pub staff with me and we went down to enjoy the show. Here are the photos:

http://www.djbolivia.ca/photos_benassi2007.html

I've been pretty slack with blog posts lately, since I've been so busy in the past four weeks. I'm leaving on Wednesday morning for a short tour, and I'll be visiting San Francisco, Osaka, Tokyo, Seattle, and Vancouver. I'll try to get as many photos as I can at each show, and hopefully I'll be able to take the mini-disc and record all of the sets for my website.