hell bent for metal

Deci­bel magazine’s blog has some timely death metal tourism advice for us in Adam (Hate) Lists Top 5 Things To Do In Poland.

1. While we won’t be actu­ally doing sug­ges­tion Num­ber 1 – Play Pol­ish death metal – we’ll cer­tainly be try­ing to find some local stuff to check out in the numer­ous bars of Krakow.
2. Num­ber 2 is Fight Chris­tian­ity – well, that’s all in a day’s work, right?
3. Next up is Climb Tatra Moun­tains – that one is on our todo list also.
4. Spend time by the Baltic Sea eat­ing pierogi and kil­basa – we’ll be doing a vari­a­tion of this one, but just in Krakow. I for one intend to con­sume pierogi pretty much for break­fast, lunch and din­ner, although Dave can keep the kil­basa (sausage) all for himself.
5. As for num­ber 5, Visit Białowieża – that will be a lit­tle dif­fi­cult in our lim­ited time. This for­est, home of the rare Pol­ish bison “zubr”, is quite some way away from where we’ll be. But Dave recently fin­ished off some Pol­ish bison vodka – com­plete with prairie grass stalk in the bot­tle – and we’re both pretty amazed by the Zubr web site (super-cute!) so that will have to be close enough.

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.

The Wacken Open Air fes­ti­val itself is from July 31 to August 2… but we’d be nuts to fly halfway across the planet and not visit any­where else. Plus Dave isn’t allowed to set foot inside the con­ti­nent of Europe with­out vis­it­ing his rel­a­tives in Poland. I don’t even want to think what the con­se­quences of that would be.

So, the plan of action is thus:

Mon­day 14th July: leave Perth at around 4pm. 2 hour stopover in Sin­ga­pore (just enough time to stock up on extra mem­ory cards and var­i­ous other elec­tronic necessities)

Tues­day 15th July: arrive in Frank­furt at an ungodly hour of the morn­ing. Hang out in the air­port for 3 hours and then board plane to Krakow. Arrive Krakow at 10am, refreshed, rested and ready for our hol­i­day (yeah right).

We’re spend­ing 6 nights in Krakow. Appar­ently this place has more pubs per square metre than any­where else in the world. As well as giv­ing Dave some time to catch up with his rel­a­tives, we hope to visit some of the local attrac­tions (like these insane salt mines), eat much of the local food (pierogi any­one) and hope­fully catch some authen­tic Pol­ish death metal. So if any­one is read­ing this and knows where to find out about upcom­ing gigs please let us know!

Mon­day 21st July: fly from Krakow to Munich to catch con­nect­ing flight to Ljubl­jana, Slove­nia. From here a friend of Dave’s is gonna pick us up and drive us to his home town of Jesenice, where we will drink vol­umes of the local beer which I’ve heard is excel­lent. We may even have time to look around at what life in a small town in Slove­nia is like.

Wednes­day 23rd July: fly from Ljubl­jana in the early after­noon to Vienna then onto Rome that evening.

We’re spend­ing 5 nights in Rome. We’re essen­tially going to walk around look­ing at old stuff and eat­ing. Sat­ur­day is Al’s birth­day so I imag­ine there’ll be drink­ing as well. Also if there’s any metal to be found, we’ll be onto it.

Mon­day 28th July: An after­noon of fly­ing, from Rome directly to Hamburg.

Ham­burg is our last stop before Wacken, so we’ll be men­tally prepar­ing, doing some liver con­di­tion­ing, and stock­ing up on things we may need (sleep­ing bags, booze, snacks etc). Then on Wednes­day we’re hir­ing a car and dri­ving the hour-odd to Wacken, a tiny vil­lage of (nor­mally) around 1800 peo­ple. Approx­i­mately 65,000 other peo­ple will have the same plan, so it should be fun.

The fes­ti­val starts on Thurs­day 31st July and goes til Sat­ur­day 2nd August, so we’ll be camp­ing four nights from Wednes­day for what­ever sleep we may need (prob­a­bly not much). We’re going to bring a big-arse Aussie flag to attach to the car some­how so we won’t get too lost (hopefully).

Then on Sun­day 3rd August in the morn­ing we’re pack­ing up and dri­ving back to Ham­burg to stay the night, where we will need to shower sev­eral times each I’m sure. Another day in Ham­burg, then Mon­day night we fly back to Perth with another 3 hour stopover in Sin­ga­pore (it’ll be Tues­day 5th August and very late at night when we get in). I imag­ine we’ll be too broke to buy any­thing by then.