Cardiff 11/18 Wed

I love grocery stores. Or I should say I find them really intriguing. There’s people just throwing things in their basket with mindless abandon, there’s people with crunched up foreheads torn between nutritional value and monetary value, and I guess in every country, there’s also lil old ladies touching every single piece of fruit they can manage. We are in a Waitross, which we find out later is the hoity toigty supermarket in the UK. I’ll admit, it was pretty swank inside to the point of when you checked out, they gave you a little green medallion that you could use to vote for one of three animal relief foundations. I picked tortoises. I’ve never seen people trying to save the tortoises before. But the kittens were winning. Always the kittens.

We made our way to the town centre to check things out. The Cardiff Castle staff was totally on to us after we jumped the fence to get in. But it was pretty cool from the outside too.

I’m warming up to the left side of the road, and after some fun unintentional extra revolutions in some roundabouts, we’re at our first show at the Buffalo Bar. Man, this place is super. Totally cool bar, total chaos in the universe of organization. Phantagram is on the bill with us, who had the misfortune of showing up at their venue and setting up all their gear b’fore being told that the location for their show had changed. But we were stoked to play with them. They are strobe-light awesome.

After a little bit more confusion regarding our backline (which wasn’t there) and some additional misunderstanding regarding our rider, we ended up with two pizzas, chips, and coleslaw (James eats pizza with coleslaw on top. I don’t recommend this course of ingestion. Sure, maybe everything you eat ultimately ends up in the same place, but I personally enjoy tasting my individual meal components. Unless of course you’re talking about mixing mashed potatoes, gravy, and corn, because that is a tasty combo), which we ate picnic style on the floor of the bar while Anikka got us everything we needed in the gear dept.

The show was great, so we kept things going strong by heading down to Clwb Ifor Bach for dancing. That is of course if you call dancing bouncing up and down and shooting beer on the bouncers while the DJs rock One Armed Scissor, Bulls on Parade, and Smells like Teen Spirit. Some people in the crowd were painted up like Smurfs, they had 1 quid shots of Sambucca, at the bar, and James ended up in his underwear talking to the front desk attendant of our hotel for 15 minutes.