Beware! The Leopard

Last days

So I sit here in an internet cafe in Zagreb, the happening city in the north of Croatia (Hrvtaska).  It is our last day on our continental adventure, as we return to London in a few hours.  In a couple of days we will leave Europe behind and return to our native Canada. 

I have to admit, there is a lot of bittersweetness in these thoughts and posts.  I feel that there is unfinished business here in Europe.  Maybe it will take the form of European tour in the future at some point.  I realize that there are new adventures to be had, and that we did not have much choice given our visa situation.  But London is the place where I began to find my voice as a musician, and where I firmly decided to pursue this lifestyle of starvation and anxiety.

Toronto will provide a good base for my future career though, and I am eager to get started.  These next weeks returning and getting set up will be filled with impatience.  But I look forward to my first Canadian gig on April 23rd, and getting Beware! The Leopard off the ground in my home country. 

Look for some thoughts on travelling tunes in the next post.  Hint (Foals).

Ciao!

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In Croatia!

Sitting in rain Rijeka.  It's a beautiful coast though, or at least what I can see of it.

Slovenia was amazing.  It's hard to describe, but I have hundreds of pictures, and I'll share the cream of the crop with you when I get back.

For now, it's off to see the sights and then take a night bus to Dubrovnik!  10 hours of bus travel ought to cheer me up! :-)

Beware! The Leopard, over and out!

Ljubljana beautiful Ljubljana

Instead of picking London for a year, I should have picked Ljubljana, because aside from having a name that is incredibly easy to pronounce but hard to spell (Lubliana) it is incredibly beautiful, not polluted, has a great cafe/bar scene, and the likelyhood of me getting beaten up by a gang of benefit thieves is miniscule.

The downside is I don't speak Slovenian, and I'm not sure exactly how much of a market for atmospheric folk music exists in a city of 250,000 people.  I do know that I really enjoy what this city has offered so far, and I've only been here 24 hours. 

Tonight we're going to try and find some live music.  So Beware! The Leopard could have some more updates with what the scene is like here.

Keep your eyes peeled.

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Buda Buda Pest Pest

Budapest is amazing!  Loads of beautifully designed buildings, squares, monuments, etc.  Did you know that Hungarian is closer to Finnish than anything else?  What that means is that there are no Latin-Germanic words here, I have idea what any of the signs mean, it's kind of awesome.

I've found some great little venues that I'll have to play when I come through on my Eastern European tour sometime in the next decade. 

Budapest is definitely a city I'll want to come back to.  Just to much culture to soak in.

It has also inspired some lyrics which is great.  The song will be called Reds.

Innocent revolution
Did the Reds take it away
Time to find some solutions
Before it blows up in our face

More to come, but for now, on to Etzsergom!  I think that's how it's spelt.

Beware! The Leopard

Safe and Sound in Romania

I'm sitting in a cafe near where Vlad the Impaler is born.  The history has been glossed over by his connection to Bram Stoker's creation Dracula and all the kitsch that goes with it, but this small town is still incredibly beautiful. 

Musically Romania is a mixture of everything we love to hate in the west.  In a cafe in Bucharest the other day, they played Air Supply and followed it with Black Kids, and then  some early 1990s techno (I'm pretty sure it was C+C Music Factory).  The amount of techno here is incredible.  I'll have to drop some beats and create something interesting, maybe I'll become big in Bucharest! 

That's it for now, I'll try to hit you up with more news from Budapest!

Sorry about the absence

Between packing, cleaning, stressing out, and all the usual shit that comes with moving half-way around the world, we decided to also add a one month trip to all that stress. 

So it means that I haven't thought about anything much except what to throw out, how much money I have, and whether or not a satirical shirt about communism is appropriate for Eastern Europe. 

Tomorrow at this time I will be bedding down in a hostel in central Bucharest.  It should be a great trip, but it means this blog will probably suffer a bit.  Keep it in your feeds though, as I'll be right back at it upon my return.

Cheers!

The Leopard