Harakiri for the Sky

I bet you’ve never been to an Austrian powered black metal concert in a vegan restaurant. Well I have, and let me assure you its awesome.

Prelude

My boy Mattias had contacted me about them playing in Bogota on the 7th Sep, 2022, so of course I waited in Bogota until they flew in.

So, at 34 the smart thing to do in situations like this is:

take it easy the night before
dust the rust off your creaking and broken knees
use your daily supply of old man energy to rock out with the legends

So me, ignoring the fact I’m mid 30s, did thusly:

went out the night before
gave it a good effort to bring about early liver failure via drinking
didnt sleep

Well dear reader, it turns out I’m not 24 any more and holy shit was I broken.

The Wait

The show kicked off at 8pm. I was meant to meet the lads for a few cheeky beers beforehand at ~3pm but I was tied up with work stuff. No stress. I also had to pick up some stuff up for them before the show as those poor fucks had just played and then flown in from Ecuador. I’d been in Colombia long enough by this point to have my times sorted - I knew getting the band supplies would take ~15-25 minutes max.

Here was my game plan:

Organise supplies for delivery 4:00
Finish work at 4:00
Take taxi to Chapinero (~10 minutes)
Beer with the boys at 4:15pm.

I would be 1.25 hours later than I wanted to be, but hey we all have commitments we need to meet.

Well it turns out Bogota can be a cruel mistress. There was some epic traffic the likes of which I can’t really comprehend. At 6:45pm my 4:00pm order arrived.

The Journey

I’ve used Uber in something like 30 countries around the world. Had a few mishaps but in general its always been pretty good. NOT TODAY SON.

I was a bit annoyed about not being able to hang with the boys before the show, but shit, as they say, happens. What I wasn’t expecting is for my Uber driver to drive us to the wrong place entirely. 🤦‍♂️

We are that blue dot in the approximate middle of the screen. The top of the blue line is where we started. The red in is where we were going.

Fuck.

After fighting through traffic for ~30 minutes we’d gone west instead of south.

Fuck.

We managed to redirect the Uber and by the grace of whatever celestial overlords you give blood sacrifice to the traffic magically disappeared.

The Arrival

Have you ever been stupidly happy to see someone you don’t know that well? (protip: Read the Matthias origin story). Well, it was like that - we went back stage and I was so excited to see this motherfucker I was jumping around. Except, I nearly threw up I was so hung over. Except I was so happy I easily kept it down. Except I’m an old man now and was doing those burp-vomit things. Except it WAS MY MAIN MAN MATTHIAS SO MY BODY FOUGHT THROUGH IT.

It was an intense few moments.