Archive for April, 2008

International beer prices

Friday, April 11th, 2008

An impor­tant part of a trip like this one is bud­get­ing. Enter Pint Price — a web site that shows the price of a pint of beer in 140 coun­tries. A very use­ful met­ric indeed — the site claims to be “the only travel and short-break hol­i­day guide you really need” and I’d almost be inclined to agree.

Base­line: Aus­tralian aver­age price accord­ing to PintPrice.com: AUD $5.04 (Perth specif­i­cally shows $4.41)

Poland: AUD $2.26 (Krakow $1.79 — woot!)

Slove­nia: AUD $3.17

Italy: AUD $7.16 (Rome $8.54 — ouch!)

Ger­many: AUD $4.37 (no spe­cific price listed for Hamburg)

What this means is that Poland and Slove­nia could be very messy indeed. Ger­many will be about the same as home, and Italy… well, let’s just hope we can find some cheap pubs.

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Contents of the “Full Metal Bag”

Saturday, April 5th, 2008

bag

The Wacken organ­is­ers have announced the con­tents of the “W:O:A Full Metal Bag 2008″. Well, actu­ally the posted a pic­ture of what’s in it. It looks to be some kind of show­bag that ticket-holders pick up when they get there.

From the pic­ture, it seems there is:

  • a “his­tory” card game (intriguing)
  • a sticker (always useful)
  • a patch (ditto)
  • a post­card (why not)
  • a pen (to write on the post­card, presumably)
  • a pon­cho (because we WILL be rained on at some point)
  • a trash bag (very handy)
  • a con­dom (many of which will no doubt be blown up and bat­ted around)

Plus “spe­cial gim­micks like CD’s and much more!”

Sounds awse. I’ve heard sto­ries of cer­tain other Euro­pean metal fes­ti­vals being not well run, but Wacken has a rep­u­ta­tion for mil­i­tary effi­ciency and pre­ci­sion so I’m expect­ing noth­ing less. They are Ger­man after all.

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