Grand Island

Friday night, I went to a rock concert. It was held at a student night club in town. The club bears a striking resemblance to a set from some cheesy vampire movie. Your first impression when walking through the doors (after having your handbag checked for bottles and your arm stamped), is that someone must be desperate to save on electricity. The fact that the walls and the sparse furniture are also painted pitch black, adds to the whole vampire theme. The only thing that messes with the impression, are the large, red candles placed everywhere with the words “merry Christmas” on them. There’s always music blaring out of the speakers, loud enough to make you permanently deaf, and since the new smoking law came through and banned smoking in all public places, they’ve gone a bit nuts with the smoke machine. People need to be able to hide behind a cloud of smoke if they want to, law or no law, dammit.

The concert was scheduled to start at nine, but since no rock band ever goes on stage as scheduled, we turned up at around eleven. It was still to early, and we spent the next hour trying to have a conversation by finding clever ways to combine shouting, eye movements and gesturing. Thinking back, I’m not sure either of us had the same conversation.

It’s not as if Grand Island wasn’t worth waiting for though, and I crawled happily into bed around three am with a loud ringing in my ears.