{"id":1628,"date":"2012-04-15T16:03:38","date_gmt":"2012-04-15T14:03:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/passioncolorseverything.com\/blog\/?p=1628"},"modified":"2017-06-22T13:02:26","modified_gmt":"2017-06-22T11:02:26","slug":"surprise-meeting-at-the-airport-new-friends-and-shared-jokes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/passioncolorseverything.com\/blog\/?p=1628","title":{"rendered":"Surprise meeting at the airport, new friends and shared jokes"},"content":{"rendered":"

Poets of the Fall \u2013 Ravintola Piste, Ruka; April 13th<\/sup> 2012<\/strong><\/p>\n

Kuusamo was the one gig I had not planned on attending. It was announced quite late, flights weren\u2019t exactly cheap, hotels outrageously expensive and I thought maybe I should not take vacation again so soon after Berlin. Also there was part of me that wanted to prove Marko wrong and not be at every gig. Yep, that went well! \ud83d\ude00<\/p>\n

As I returned from Kiev I had a direct message on Twitter from S., offering me to stay with her in Kuusamo for the gig weekend. Now at that time I didn\u2019t even know her name, much less anything else about her, but I am always for adventure and she sounded nice from her tweets, so why not? I only hesitated momentarily because I wasn\u2019t sure I could take the day off work, but Fridays are usually not a problem. Thus, I told her I\u2019d be happy to come and booked a flight.<\/p>\n

I do admit I was a bit nervous about the whole thing, but we exchanged some really nice emails and I had a good feeling about it. Somehow I knew my Poets\u2019 related luck would not leave me. So fast forward a few weeks and here I was once again on a plane to Helsinki with a connecting flight to Kuusamo. I had about an hour at Helsinki airport to change gates, but that wasn\u2019t a problem. 15 minutes after arrival I was at the right one for my next flight. I was totally lost in my own thoughts when I heard a familiar voice \u201cHey Stef! Nice to see you.\u201d And saw Ollie standing right in front of me. What a nice surprised, I didn\u2019t know they were flying to Kuusamo. We chatted for a while, then Ollie went looking for a seat. Next I saw Captain and Marko and pondered if I should walk up to them because I was missing Captain\u2019s autograph on my \u2018Temple of Thought\u2019 booklet. They were talking and didn\u2019t see me so I decided not to bother them.<\/p>\n

On arrival in Kuusamo I wondered what S. would do to \u201cmake sure I would recognize her\u201d as she had promised. When I walked out I saw her right away. She was holding an Alchemy flag. \ud83d\ude42 We hugged and she wanted to wait for the guys to ask autographs. I said I\u2019d be hiding while she did that, but when she was talking to Marko I walked right up and told him to blame me, because I had told her they\u2019d be on the same plane. We talked until the guys had to leave. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

S. and her boyfriend T. took me to their beautiful home, where I was greeted by Nana the dog and Marski the cat. \ud83d\ude00 I dropped my stuff, changed and off we went to Ruka to have dinner before the concert. The restaurant was rather nice and we could hear some of the soundcheck from where we sat. I spotted some friends also and said hello. Dinner was good and after we went over to the bar area, watched soundcheck for a while (nobody cared, the bar was not even closed), waited. When they were done I took the opportunity to ask Captain for an autograph and of course got it.<\/p>\n

The stage had a strange, angular shape and not much light, but a nice wide wooden railing that I knew would be perfect for Marko to walk on. The gig started a bit after 11:30 p.m. and before the intro was over, Marko was up on the railing, singing down to us. I actually backed up a little bit so I could see him without bending my neck too much.<\/p>\n

This was a gig where it immediately clicked for me, everything was right, everything fell into place, never mind that it was too dark to take pictures or that at times I could not hear Marko sing at all. Generally, the sound was good and the atmosphere was really nice. I could not tell how much of the audience was there because of Poets of the Fall and how many people had just come to party, but somehow the mixture was right and everyone was having a good time.<\/p>\n

They played the shorter setlist again, without the acoustic set. It makes the entire gig more fast paced and it feels shorter than it really is. There’s hardly any time to breathe and take everything in before it is over. I know what to expect and at certain points in time I know where to look, but I still feel I miss a lot of what’s happening on stage. It is just impossible to watch everyone.<\/p>\n

I had thought I’d have a good view of Jari for a change, because he was closer to the front than usual on the small stage. However, Marko was blocking him most of the time so I hardly saw him at all. Captain was also close to the front and I watched him singing along most of the night, especially to the new songs. I spent quite some time studying Jaska’s and Ollie’s guitar work that night too and exchanged lots of smiles with them. Jani seemed lost in his own thoughts mostly and Marko? He spent a lot of time standing or squatting on that railing, exchanging looks with me now and then. We were almost having a few conversations there, I am just nit sure we always understood each other. \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n

I enjoyed all of the songs again, but can’t say what happened when except that I was offered some of Marko’s Coke during ‘Illusion & Dream’ and he pointed at Ollie, indicating that this time, he remembered how to play it when ‘Carnival of Rust’ started. At one point, Marko lost his balance and almost fell on me. Luckily he didn’t. For ‘Lift’ he invited Ollie up on the railing too and I enjoyed getting an even closer look at his guitar playing.<\/p>\n

All in all it was a wonderfully relaxed and fun gig and I was happy I’d made the long trek to Kuusamo to be there. Of course I would have wanted it to last longer, but that goes without saying. \ud83d\ude09 I’d probably still want more if they played twice as long. \ud83d\ude00 We didn’t see the guys after the gig, but didn’t expect that either. I said goodbye to Einari and Hannu on the way out and had a nice chat with them before we left.<\/p>\n

The evening ended with relaxing in the sauna and talking with S. into the night. She and T. took great care of me for the rest of the weekend, including some Kuusamo sightseeing and a nice hike to Kiutak\u00f6ng\u00e4s. Half of the river and the rapids were still frozen. It was beautiful. \ud83d\ude42 Thank you two for being such wonderful hosts. I hope we’ll meet again soon.<\/p>\n

10 gigs down, 6 to go. Next stop: Lahti<\/p>\n

Setlist<\/span><\/p>\n

Kamikaze Love
\nDiamonds for Tears
\nTemple of Thought
\nRoses
\nCradled in Love
\nLocking up the Sun
\nWar
\nThe Lie Eternal
\nStay
\nIllusion & Dream
\nGravity
\nLate Goodbye<\/p>\n

Encore:<\/em>
\nDreaming wide awake
\nCarnival of Rust
\nLift<\/p>\n

pictures of this concert<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Poets of the Fall \u2013 Ravintola Piste, Ruka; April 13th 2012 Kuusamo was the one gig I had not planned on attending. It was announced quite late, flights weren\u2019t exactly cheap, hotels outrageously expensive and I thought maybe I should … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[13,15,19,169,171,9,170,159,14],"class_list":["post-1628","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-concert","tag-fan","tag-finland","tag-friends","tag-kuusamo","tag-piste","tag-poets-of-the-fall","tag-ruka","tag-temple-of-thought","tag-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/passioncolorseverything.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1628","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/passioncolorseverything.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/passioncolorseverything.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/passioncolorseverything.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/passioncolorseverything.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1628"}],"version-history":[{"count":26,"href":"https:\/\/passioncolorseverything.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1628\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8052,"href":"https:\/\/passioncolorseverything.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1628\/revisions\/8052"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/passioncolorseverything.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1628"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/passioncolorseverything.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1628"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/passioncolorseverything.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1628"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}