hello and welcome to the european tour diaries! we left newark and arrived in the great schipol airport in the netherlands. what makes it so great? they have runways and places for planes to land. on the plane i wanted to hit the bald guy in front of me with my magazine because he kept moving around, preventing me from fully realizing my in-flight experience. is that wrong?

we are met by our friend gijs and the van, our new home for a month. eli can not join us at the last minute because of some family health complications, so we've enlisted the help of our friend sohrab- he hails from the dc band edsel. and we are reunited with famous tom, our soundman, and hetty, our dutch record savior/distributor.

we are playing vpro national radio and sohrab hits his head on the stage lights at soundcheck. there is blood everywhere-an auspicious start to the tour. we consider going immediately to the blood bank to make some extra cash, but decide against it at the last minute.

Ahh, today we play at the vera-this is the first time we've played here since 1996. our old band soulside played here in 1989 and then in 1992 as gvsb. after that show a dutch lady approached me and said "your band is very booring. I liked your old band much better." honesty counts, that's what they say.

the vera is a great club and they've expanded to include a hotel for the band upstairs from the stage. you can now rock your socks off and then pass out in a pool of your own vomit only feet from your bed.

here's some news you don't hear about much on cnn: while the u.s. is suffering from kudzu, killer bees, snipers and obesity, holland seems to have a major problem with their recent outbreak of bicyclists. swarming everywhere, you try to swat away clouds of bicyclists but they just keep coming. does kofi annaan know about this?

so today is a remarkable day because it's raining-no, wait, it's been raining since we got here. even better, tonight we play the rote flora, a notorious squat in hamburg. we played here in 1992 and is the home of the "happy family." this squat has been burned, chipped out from the inside, eaten away from the outside and is probably sinking. yet it stands to this day! if you need crack, heroin or other pharmaceuticals, the steps outside are an excellent place to make a purchase.

this is sohrab's 2nd regular show and things are looking up. lo and behold he possesses both the charm and the panache of eli (who has both in spades). tonight is our first show with the excellent, fantastic, charming and extravagent psycho-path from slovenia. there is also a puppet show with some of the people from milemarker. the show was very good but there are serious ramifications for a rock show/puppet show combination.

when we finish the show we load all our gear out onto the street. then it begins to rain like i imagine it rains in the deepest darkest rainforests of the world. but all is not lost because we are going to another squat to sleep and dance all night at the goth super party!

surprise surprise! it's still raining like crazy and we awake all post-gothed out, whatever that means. psycho-path's van has been broken into and carefully picked through. the thief even took all of the drum hardware out of the hardware bag so he/she could use it to carry more stuff. psycho-path is pretty psych-ed. we drive all day, it is old, cold and wet. the show goes very well and the club/bar turns out to be owned by rammstein so we hang out with their gold records and weird barbed wire/geiger stuff and go grrrr rawwwr alot. we also set ourselves on fire. after that we return to our van and find that we haven't been robbed! nice! however, the police are giving us a ticket and we wait for them to fill out the complicated form (name, address, license plate no., date) for about an hour. it is still old, cold and wet.