SXSW I

"Rock-Ola! Jaaa! Rock-Ola e kanskje dæinn kuuuulaste fyrn i heile bygdå!" (Jeg er utrolig dårlig på dialekter.) I have no idea what this thing is but it sounds hilarious in Norwegian.

Alright! So last weekend, I went to Austin, Texas, for seriously the coolest weekend ever in the history of time, at the South By Southwest festival. Austin is pretty much the most awesome city in the history of the world, and I thoroughly enjoyed my time there, even though both my trip there and my return to New York were made horribly clumsy and ridiculous and slow by the WONDERFUL snowstorms of New York. Gotta love snowstorms.

Either way, I stayed at a sweet, freakin' hotel, in the middle of downtown, and appropriately, the hotel had a river running through it. At some point, someone in the engineering firm that planned the thing was like, hey! Let's build a fucking river in the middle of this hotel! Why? Because rivers RULE!


There was also a nice little pool - it was so freakin' sweet to get out of the cold and windy New York for a couple of days, and enjoy eating Texas steak - uhm, I ate steak for every single meal I had there.. Poor cows. - in the sun! It was the grand life, I tell you!

Either way, I was there to see a bunch of my favorite bands. Like, say, Thomas Dybdahl:

He played a really great show in a church there, which sounds kind of weird, but if you had heard the acoustics of that room, you would totally understand why one would want to put an acoustic concert in that church - it was fantastic.

Next up was Marit Larsen, which was a pretty damn cool concert at the Nordic Nights party.


..Followed by Grand Island. Apparently, the Banjo is back in a big way in Norwegian rock, but hey, it totally worked, and the Grand Island concert was one of the better ones I saw while I was there.


That is the lame thing with a festival like SXSW: With 1500 bands, there are so many cool acts you want to see, but there is only time to see a tiny fraction of them, but still, it was fun to just walk around and see random bands play at random places, like this incredibly hipster-ish band from London! Literally every single little open space in Austin was used as a concert stage this weekend, it was really kind of ridiculous.


Of course, I met an unlimited number of famous - famous to me, anyway - people whilst in Texas. Like Per Borten from the New Violators.


This is Even Granås, the drummer from said New Violators. Turns out the band guys are possibly the friendliest people in the music world, and it was pretty cool to meet them.

So, Norwegian abroad, plus awesome bands, plus free booze (yeah, with our badges, the amount of free stuff - including booze - we got was kind of ridiculous. I still have like 15 pounds of CDs to listen to.) equals serious fun and late nights, and this is the view from my hotel room as I was strolling in through the door at like 6 a.m. Austin is beautiful!

Dude, and what better way to see a town like this than with a Duck Adventure! So, my dear colleagues, who I met in Texas, went on this sightseeing thing slash boat, and since it could float, what could possibly be more natural than giving all the guests a little flute-thing that makes the sound of a duck! A great idea, until the bus driver shoots everyone, which I am sure is an ever more likely event.