Sneaky Days Off.

Proper, do-nothing, be-bothered-by-no-one, days off on tour are rare for me. It's my job to be on-call for problems so I'm used to it (If I'm honest, it freaks me out when I'm in Asia on vacation and I spend a day without something coming up; it feels unnatural to get back to my hotel room and there's no note about a problem with a ticket or someone needs some money or someone's put their trousers on backwards, etc, etc....). On Monday we had a day off in Lisbon and no one bothered me. I almost felt a bit guilty about having a paid day off but then I realised a couple of things.

1. There are so many days, even on the easiest tour, where you don't get any down time or rest for days on end, so somewhere some karmic credit must accrue.
2. There's a high likelihood that the reason I'm not being bothered is because I planned well beforehand. As Matt keeps saying: "We're professionals...."
3. Don't look a gift horse in the mouth.

But just to spoil things, this big-nosed, shiny-faced, ginger-eyebrowed git keeps getting in all of my photos.





I did what work I needed to do at the hotel and then jumped on the subway and ran around the old part of Lisbon for a couple of hours. This has to be the best perk of my job - you can keep the tedious avaricious after-show parties with limp-egoed wannabees, you can keep the meet and greets with celebrities in feral, stuffy dressing rooms, and you can fuck right-off with your impotent Hard Rock Cafe branded sex and drugs and rock and roll image and imagery (yawn) but please, leave me the good gigs and days off in cool places. Thanks.

View from the afternoon.



Bob Eiffel's left-over lift nestled deep in the heart of Lisbon's earthquake district.



I wandered around the Alfama and climbed up to the Castle de Sao Jorge on top of the hill. It was built by the Moors / Muslims and while there I pondered on the universal theme of organised religions everywhere: build big castles and consolidate your power base (Ever seen St. Peter's in Rome? Knoworramean?). Back in the day even the tiniest castle would have taken forever to build, and this one was a doozy on top of a hill. I'm glad they did though, the views from the ramparts were great. Shame about the busker playing the tin whistle inside while dressed in quasi-medieval gear. Still, I suppose the tourists liked him.

The parque at the castle. Things don't get much more typically Iberian.



Tourists and castle and Lisbon. (The tourists just aren't as round over here as they are in America, it has to be said. Unless, of course, they're American...).



Note the ironic framing of picture to show my scorn for organised religion. Even when I'm a tourist I am still, and always will be, sticking it to the man.




I went home for a run along the River Tagus, which was another treat. Going trotting in unusual places is always interesting and the riverbank by the Parque das Nações was peaceful and lined with interesting modern buildings and, more importantly, hardly any people.

In the morning we were scheduled to fly on a budget airline to Göteborg via Brussels. I tried not to brood on the potential for disaster and instead enjoyed one of a diminishing number of nights in a bed. Once we play Göteborg we will have exactly 2 nights in a proper bed to look forward to in 17 days. Now that I've realised this, it's a wonder I'm out of my pajamas and on my feet at all this week.