A few days ago I was cleaning the 8 or 9 thousand emails in my Outlook and I found this old TRUTH in the draft folder that I wrote back on November 22nd 2003. I remember now, I was sitting in my hotel room in Miami prior to my set at Privilege. I left to play and never found the time to get back to it, but now that I read it again I feel like it’s a waste of words to throw this in the bin. Even if it’s quite old, there are some funny bits so I felt like posting it. —————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————- Last Sunday I got back from Europe after being to Tel Aviv and Ankara. It was the first time I was going to be in Israel, which has been a very interesting experience for me. I was quite thrilled to go there honestly. Everyone told me not to go there as I would blow up, well that is not true. Not more true than the chances to blow up anywhere in this world nowadays. I actually almost blew up for real, but that was because Tomer, the promoter, stopped at a gas station to put fuel in his car and he had forgotten to shut the engine… Ha ha! Imagine? Going to Israel and ending up in a thousand pieces in the air for that! But I am ok. As I was arriving straight from Montreal I was very tired and didn’t get to see much as I slept a lot the day after my gig. But I did have some time to hang out here and there at night, between restaurants and clubs, since I was there for two days. Well, let me tell you, I have never seen such beautiful people in my entire life!! Really. My head was spinning round and round as my favourite record says, and I couldn’t stop being impressed. Brian and I were with our mouth open down to the floor for two days basically. Everyone is gorgeous there! Men, women, everyone! I found even the ugly people somehow good looking! It was incredible! And the food… I had such good meals, yum! I really had a fab time, except for the sad thing that happened to my records… They decided to stay in London and not grab the same flight as me. So I had to play with the 35 records I had in my hand luggage. I did it, I played 2 and half hours, but I don’t feel like I played my best set as I was too limited with the stuff I wanted to play. With only 35 records, there is no such as looking at a record and think “naaaaa, I don’t fee like playing this one tonight” and it sucks! The resident DJ lend me some records but I only used about 5-6 from his case. Anyhow, that was a hard experience, especially because it was a new place, a new crowd and I didn’t know what to do with that! It wasn’t one of those places that I can call “my backyard” let’s say. Hard work it was. Some guy came up to me, probably feeling that I was stuck and insecure in my way of playing, unlike always as I usually play in a quite confident way, and said to me “why don’t you play what you like?”. I was quite upset at that as the guy obviously didn’t know that I was indeed very stuck and limited on that night and that I couldn’t do “what I liked”. Anyway, I really hope that I didn’t disappoint anyone and I hope that people know what the TRUTH is. I also truly hope that I can go back there soon, with all my records this time, so I can play a better set and show people what I can really do. After that it was time to go to a new place in Turkey: Ankara. I was really thrilled to go there too, as it’s in the middle of Turkey, in the middle of the mountains, in the real east! It was a serious experience to be there for me. Everything was done in a such a non familiar way for me, young girl who lives in Montreal, Canada. I didn’t know what to expect from the gig. Honestly, I had no idea. Mehmet, the promoter, was telling me that people were really looking forward to the night and people loved my music from hearing my Radio 1 & Kiss FM sets, plus a recorded set on the web from a night at club Big Wig in Chicago in February 2001. I was quite impressed just with the fact that so far they all search for my stuff on the web. It was nice. After dinner, when we were driving to the club, we were all listening to my set from Radio 1 banging our heads (Mehmet and his girlfriend + Brian and myself) and then Mehmet said “It’s incredible! I can’t believe it! It’s so coo to listen to Barbara with Barbara!” Brian and I looked at each other and my smile was bigger than from a ear to another. I was really touched! So we get to the club and we go visit the place around. It was packed in the main room and no one was left in the lounge upstairs. The music the resident DJ was playing was a mixture of slow techno, electro pop and rock based tunes so I really didn’t know what was going to happen when I was going to turn my relentless beats… Oh, I have to precise that my records decided to make it to Turkey. Well, when I went on everybody started screaming, which gave me a nice boost to start giving it to them in a more straight up way, which felt really good as in Israel I had no choice than to contain myself, having almost no records. Wow. I felt like I was back at Club Aloca, in Sao Paulo, Brazil. I had loved that club since I played there on my birthday in 1999 because people, guys and girls, were totally crazy, dancing on the sub woofers and all dressed up funny with masks and costumes as if it was Halloween! Well, I had the same experience at Club 20, in Ankara. It was MAD. CRAZY. Everyone was out of their minds. They were mental. And I loved it. It excites me more to see so much love and so much craziness for techno in the deep centre of an eastern country like Turkey, than to see that in Holland for example, where techno is a more common style of music. Mehmet was right… People were really nice and they were all party animals! On that night, the first of the two bombs (so far) dropped in Istanbul blew up. It’s pretty crazy all that’s happening in the world. All these religious issues are so ridiculous. I mean, I was thinking about this… I am catholic and in 2 days I have been among Jewish and Muslim people to work for them and I had the best time in a long time. What is the problem with all the crazy people who are dropping non stop bombs everywhere because of religion differences??!!!!! I cannot stand it and it makes me really sad. There is so much racism in this world, it’s not even funny. It makes me think for instance the last experience I had in Macedonia, on August 31st. This, in itself, is a whole TRUTH post which I wanted to write since then but life made it impossible to do. Are you ready? If not, press the button save into your favs and get back at it tomorrow… When I travel in Europe I always travel under my Italian passport to avoid questions and delays at customs. But in August I travelled to Europe with my friend MJ who is Canadian. We had a fab time in Greece, with the amazing gig at Decadence in Thessalonica where I VERY MUCH missed Brian and Malissa, but I survived… After Greece, it was time to go to Skopje in Macedonia. This time, Nikola’s brother, my friend Viktor, was in Europe and was going to be at the gig so he came to pick us up in Thessalonica and the three of us we drove to Skopje. That’s when the fun starts… When we get to the boarder between Greece and Macedonia, such a mess… There were so many cars lined up to pass through that we literally got out of the car and every time the line was moving Viktor was starting the engine and driving the car forward of about 2 meters and then stopped the car, got out and waited outside too. We were talking, drinking beer, having fun and looking forward to go through and finally get to Skopje to do a rockin’ gig and celebrate MJ’s birthday coming up at midnight… Yeah right! In our dreams maybe… After almost 1 hour wait, we get to the boarder. Viktor gives the 3 passports; his American one, my Italian one and MJ’s Canadian one. After a few minutes, the officer says “Sorry, the Canadian girl can’t come in. She doesn’t have a visa”. Viktor, in his fluent Macedonian and without a worry as he thought that he could “talk” to a Macedonian officer as we can “talk” about anything to get out of trouble in the Eastern Europe countries, started talking and tried in everyway to let MJ enter anyway but there was nothing to do. The officer said “Canadians and Australian are not allowed in Macedonia without a visa, sorry”. And we had to move to let other cars come through. We all look at each other in the face, each one with a different expression: Viktor with an expression of “I am shocked, I can’t believe it, but I will try again. I don’t know how, but I am stubborn so I definitely WILL try again”; MJ with an expression of “Oh my God, all this because of me?”; and me well, typical slow realization of what’s happening, I looked like a “This is so funny, but not, but at the same time so funny. Oh my, we can’t get through for real? Fast, I need pen and paper, I have to write that in my TRUTH!!” And then, I ask Viktor: “What do we do now?” Viktor called his brother right away when he had the brilliant idea of contacting the club owner, who’s brother was working for the Minister of Foreign Affairs. I asked Viktor how this could work, on a Sunday night 9pm when MJ has no visa, but Viktor is a very positive guy and does not know what stress is, unlike me… Obviously, no one is capable of reaching the club owner who was taking a nap, so while we wait we go back to the duty free. I was dying to pee and there was nowhere to pee except in a basement probably very stinky and full of dirt, and I had to pay money to get in there on top of that. So I decided to just pee behind a wall, and when the lady who was the doorman at the toilets understood that it’s what I did she started screaming at me in Greek. Oh well, what can you do… We waited and waited for an hour, to finally have a phone call from Nikola saying that the club owner had woken up and he was going to try his brother. Another phone call came in a few minutes later saying that he couldn’t find his brother anywhere, and he was trying again. After maybe half hour, the good news arrive that the club owner found his brother and he was going to try to contact the Minister right away. Another phone call came in to say that the Minister was unreachable but that he was trying again. That’s when I say, very negatively, “Of course! Where do you want to find a Minister on a Sunday night?!?!!” (I was getting nervous then, as I didn’t want to miss the gig and all the people waiting for me, but I wouldn’t have left my friend alone, behind the boarder). After another half hour wait, we finally receive the phone call that the brother of the club owner couldn’t reach the Minister but had managed reaching some other very important person highly placed in the Ministry, who placed a phone call at the boarder and said to let the Canadian girl pass, but the boarder main officer straightly refused, so there is nothing we can do and there are only two solutions left: 1) someone comes pick me up and drives me to the gig and while MJ’s visa gets processed in the morning and the next day Viktor and MJ drive to Skopje to meet me, so I had to leave her alone with Viktor and let them go back to Thessalonica and spend her birthday there, and me on my own in Skopje. 2) We all go back and I miss the gig but the club tells the people who paid to come back the next day as I accepted to play the next day and we could come in if her visa was going to get processed in the morning. I chose 2, of course, as I wouldn’t let any of my friends alone like this, especially on the night of their birthday! Sadly, we had to go back towards Thessalonica. We were trying to think of a hotel to stay when the phone rang again and Viktor, always speaking Macedonian, started shouting like crazy and almost scared me as I wasn’t understanding a word of what he was saying. He hangs the phone and says, let’s go back! So we’re like “What??!” —————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————- The post technically finishes here, as I had no time to continue. I can tell you that the rest of the story is that we finally went through and when we arrived at the boarder the Officer said “I don’t know who you are, I don’t know who you know but let me tell you that 99.99 % of the times what you just did doesn’t work! You must be a hell of a good singer to obtain the right to go through! Have a good night!” We all looked at each other with huge eyes and after a few meters away from the boarders we screamed like there was no tomorrow. We made it and the night was all ours… Barbara
