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May 15, San Jose, Costa Rica
What a great welcome we got here, last night -- it's our first visit to Costa Rica.
Our flight here wasn't bad, but the suitcase with our monitor system didn't make it (same thing happened in March on our trip to Japan!) ... so
soundcheck was more difficult and a lot longer than usual - no time to look around.
But it was a great audience, and considering it's the first show of the tour leg, and we didn't have our usual monitors, we did well. (In fact, I can't say about myself but
Markus and Pat played their asses off!)
I've heard and read a lot about what a great place Costa Rica is for vacations and eco-tourism, but as usual we have no time to visit anywhere. Seeing a hotel and a venue
is the norm on a rock tour.
(Well, I did see a little evidence at hotel breakfast of this being the earth's greenest nation!)
On our upcoming trip to El Salvador we'll have a day off after the show and I'm hoping for some scenic visiting and some good photos for the website.
Estoy tratando, en este viaje, hablar mejor el Espanol - I'm trying to do better with my Spanish this time in Latin America, especially during the shows, explaining the pieces. The
last few tours here I picked up some vocabulary and grammar, but my main problem was that, with the excitement of being in a show, often it's Italian words that pop into my head. Yes,
the languages are often similar, but often they're not, and it must seem pretty strange for audiences to hear the halting Spanish, then a word or phrase in Italian from this American.
So for the last few months I've not only been listening to Spanish language tapes while driving, and reading Neruda poetry at night, but I've been avoiding thinking in Italian (well, except for saying
'spaghetti' and things like that) to make some room in my shrinking brain for the new words.
Of course, I'll pay the price when we next tour in Italy!
Anyway, the biggest challenge for me in the show is doing the spoken lyrics of our song "Crack in the Sky" - "Una Grieta en el Cielo" - in Spanish. They're pretty poetic and way different than the
'me gusta una cerveza fria' kind of language on my instruction tapes. ("Come tu, nos dejo mirando pasmados, mientras caias hacia arriba, a traves de una grieta en el cielo" is quite a mouthful, even
while not playing!)
I have the lyrics written on a page at my feet to peek at between phrases if I need -- at last night's show I didn't do
badly, but when I got tripped up near the end, I found that, yike, I had mixed the phrases up on that page and it wasn't much help when I needed it.
That's what's going on so far here on tour. As usual I'm not taking many photos til I get more comfortable with playing the show (and learning lyrics.). Probably will get more shots at the
tour goes on. Tonight, our second show at the Jazz Caffe Escazú here in San Jose, so... more soon.
May 16...
Second night's show was just as nice.
Only have a couple pics of the audience:
Tomorrow we fly to San Salvador and play a show there.
Time for another diary page.
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