[Updated : now with pictures!!!!] Trip to GTO area to see 雅-miyavi-
So, 雅-miyavi- was coming back to Toronto last Sunday, so a group of my friends and me decided to go. I had decided to go by myself a long time, but wound up joining their group because it was cheaper and a tad more entertaining. They had booked a dormitory in the hostel where Odore had taken us in July 2010 to see his previous tour. The room had 6 beds and they were 5 so they were glad to get to have someone they knew join them instead of a random complete stranger they wouldn't have felt safe staying with.
Our bus left Montréal at 3PM. It was a double decker and we decided to enjoy the view by sitting at the top frontmost part of the bus. The view was great and I was very comfortable but after a while, Shima started complaining that it was much too hot because he was sitting spot in front of the heating vent. There was only a stop in Kingston -as it was an express bus- and then, three more hours of road. Shima and Shigeki were sitting left of the aisle with Shige's laptop, Juni and Shelby right behind them and Gen and me were sitting on the right side. I got the windows side so not only did I have a great view, but cool air and we also had cup holders, which the rest of the seats didn't have! All the way to Toronto, the Wi-fi was working fine so I did some catching up on FB, Tumblr and e-mails and then we watched a movie, Gen and I. It was a weird movie, SP Yabo Hen ; but it made for good jokes the next day in the wait line. When we got to the Toronto Greyhound Terminal, we walked to our hostel. It was a bit of a hassle with my broken suitcase (I had originally packed the suitcase I bought for Gabz and Pat's wedding, earlier this summer, but the zipper's cursor decided to slide off the track on one side and then I could do nothing useful with it for the 10 minutes I lost fixing it before giving up because Jf called to say he was waiting for me in the parking lot. ), but we got there quite easily, thanks to my sense of orientation and Gen's printed map (but had they been on their own, they didn't know the North from the South and would have gotten lost).
After going through registration and administrative hostels blablah, we drop our things in our room and walked to a nearby Japanese restaurant we'd seen on our way there. Shigeki was so over excited that he kept talking to Shelby about how HOOOOOT the waiter was until about mid-supper when he wound up saying well, you know, the more I see him; he's not THAT hot, finally... and I thought it was funny. Him and Shima made quite a lot of jokes with connotations that might be awkward to many other people at a dinner table. Juni and I skipped on the sake the others had ordered because Juni was on flu medication and I did not enjoy my last adventure with sake at my job's Xmas party a few years ago because it's a very treacherous alcohol to me. I can drink it and not really feel drunk... And the next morning, I'll have this splitting headache... It's the only alcohol my body reacts badly to, except for Tequila.
Our sushis were yummy, but maybe the dishes were overpriced for the amount of food we had. The desserts were also semi-expensive for their sizes, but considering how good they were, I guess it was not so bad and I'm just too spoiled now because of that place in Chicoutimi with the yummy desserts for 2$/piece we went to the night before Gabz's wedding.
The decoration was really cute, with the room being framed by Plexiglas frame-like things that were light a pinkish
shade of red from within and displaying cute sakura motifs in a lighter shade. The bar was very modern looking and the tap for the Sapporo brand beer was a katana handle, so I had to take a picture and send it to my friend JF because he loves katanas in home deco!
After our meal, we went to shower and sleep and talk about the plans for the next morning. Shima, Shigeki and Gen woke up at dawn to go and keep the spots in the wait line in front of the venue. They got there at like 8am and there were 3-4 other people who'd been sitting there since as early as 3! Juni, Shelby and I got to leave at 10am because we were tired/sick/had a longer way to the bus terminal. We walked to the venue which wound up being way further north than we had anticipated from the map. About 1/3 of the way from the hostel, Shelby's feet were already killing her. Later on, we thought we had walked past the street we were looking for, but it turns out we were just around the bed from it because it has 2 names.... When we finally got there, we switched shifts and the first bunch went out for lunch and then it was our turn. We ate at Harvey's located just a couple corners away and it felt great to be warm and their onion rings are really good!!!! We went back to wait in line...
At about 1PM, the venue manager showed up and threw a tantrum at the people sitting in the stairs in front of the venue and he was kinda pissed for nothing and he was really impatient. Like, when you ask people to move over, you should at least give them a minute or two to get up and gather their stuff that's scattered around them. It's not like they had been blocking the way, they were only occupying like 1/4 of the stairs and out of the way of the crew and what we were later instructed was their parking lot. Shima and Shigeki left in search of a public bathroom open in the vicinity (not so many on a Sunday in North East Toronto...). They found one and came back with some Halloween toy props that looked like someone had a a Worlds of Warcraft themed party the previous evening. They used them to take silly pictures with the lion statues. Afterward, as Shigeki was bored and I didn't have time to do anything much with my face, I asked him to play MUA with me and he complied. We made a couple friends in the wait line, including Scott, the tall and leaf thin guy who had reached out and touched Miyavi's hand during the last show. I wouldn't have known, but Shima remembered him; Shima is such a people's person!!!
In the wait line, there was a girl who was kinda scantily clad considering the weather; her jeans were really cute but when it's near the freezing point and you have to wait for hours in the shade in a line, don't wear pants that have slit legs held together only by 3 bows on each side! I was cold for her! (Luckily, at some points, her parents came and gave her a huge velvety blanket to cover with). Another girl had bi-colored hair (fushia and purple) and she looked really cool, so I asked to snap her picture; she looked like she could have belonged to Tess, YumeNinja and all's bunch. Probably the sharpest dressed attendee, IMVHO. There were a few more people joining during the afternoon but the majority of the people arrived between 6PM and 8, time at which the doors FINALLY opened (we thought it was the time schedule for the show to begin!). The venue manager and the other employees we'd seen during the afternoon were totally useless, mean and misbehaved, but around 6, this nice security lady showed up and answered the questions we had been asking (and asked, too, oh my, very often!) about the VIP ticket pick up place and all. At 8, she let us in. For the first time ever in attending a Vkei-related concert, they let us in with our cameras (only Point-n-Shoots, though, not the DLSR type).
We landed ourselves some good spots RIGHT IN FRONT OF THE STAGE, first row. I got the left side (from the artist's perspective) speaker so I took a few videos to send Odore but unluckily, the vibes from the speaker made pictures too blurry, I only managed to snap two semi-good ones. Gen grabbed my shoulder and told me the people handling the VIP things also gave her a VIP pass for me, although I had bought just a regular ticket, they judged that the trek I took to go and my good behavior and usefulness (I helped the delivery guys understand that there was a doorbell to ring and the people in the line to remain calm by answering their questions with whatever little info I had and all), I deserved one. I was so thankful! I'm such a lucky bastard!
Miyavi came out and his Korean side was showing a lot, that night. He wore a white t-shirt over black pants and donned a black vest resembling a school uniform's in the cut. He also wore those geeky huge black framed glasses and his long hair was loose. He greeted us with "What's My Name?" and played a couple other tracks before his MC where he said it was good to be back in Toronto, that he and Bobo (his faithful only band member and drummer) swam across Lake Ontario and nearly drowned (and he stumbled quite a few times on the word "Ontario", probably from excitement/nervosity) and then, they had visited Niagara Falls and thought there were WAAAAAAAAAYY too many tourists there (funny, considering he HIMSELF was one...) taking pictures and all which seemed to surprise him considering the cold windy weather. Some fans handed him yet another Canadian flag (we've been signing them and giving them to him at this show and the previous one he did during summer 2010) and he read the stuff we had written and asked how many people in the crowd were from Toronto, then Montréal and Vancouver and he said he wanted to come and play in MTL and VAN but we needed to put him in contact with producers. I might be partially deaf, but I heard that quite clearly!
Then, he played some more of his songs off of his latest two albums and then he did another MC bit where he interacted with the crowd and then he said he knew we liked his older songs too and which ones would we like to hear and he ended up playing Selfish Love and Itoshii Ito and we sang along with him. He came over the speaker in front of me a few times and when he saw my camera was pointed at him, he stared into it; he's so cool. Near the end, he even ended up playing while doing a split in front of me and some idiot behind me reached out and touched... his privates! I thought it was kinda rude, but you never know, maybe he liked it... :P
At the end of the show, they made the VIPs line up near the bar and gave us instructions. We were split into groups of 5 people, which means I was on my own because I let the other ones be together. But it was actually good for me because I got my picture snapped with him by his lady assistant and got to talk to him a bit longer than them and ask him whom it was I should contact regarding the linking him with producers and venues in Montréal. And I wound up kissing him on the cheeks like I would a friend, because I didn't even think about it, I just kinda did it out of habit, which surprised him. I got 3 guitar picks with his logo and an autographed poster from the tour, which I promised I will give to Odore because I was sad she couldn't be with us this time around. I told Miyavi about her, actually... I must have spoken way too much for the little amount of time we were granted, especially considering we were at the front of a line of over 100 people and he had to leave to go to NYC were he was having another show the next night.
For the VIP event, he had changed into something more lounge wear-ish that seemed to be really oversized *harem pants* (or Saruel, if you call them the way Japanese fashion mooks do) and he wore a fedora. He wasn't wearing platform shoes so he seemed closer to my height as the previous two times I'd seen him and therefore, more accessible.
<>
The next day, our bus was at 3PM and we had to leave the hostels before 11am, so we ended up dropping our stuff at the terminal before going around town. They lockers were 5$ each so considering the amount of luggage we had (and how tired I was from walking around town with my broken handled suitcase), I decided to eat one of those meal in a chocobar things and wait for them, safekeeping the stuff. They were glad I did. I'm kinda jealous they got to try out that All-you-can-eat Japanese place with yukata wearing waitresses across the street from the terminal. They said it was really cheap and the food was even more delicious than the other place we tried on the first night. Then, they went to purchase stuff in Chinatown and Shelby came to join me because her feet were still sore. The bunch of them came back for 2PM and we lined up for the bus. We took the bad decision of sitting in the REAR top end of the bus because Shima and Shigeki complained that they had been overheating during the first way trip but it was worse this time. Plus, we were stuck in a traffic jam right outside Markham because it was a Monday night. So everybody wound up dizzy and woozy from the lack of fresh air and the excessive breaking and moving forward, inch by inch of the road for about 2 hours. I was sitting beside a high school student whom I ended up helping with her homework about La Grosse Femme d'à Côté Est Enceinte (a novel by world renown Montréal author Michel Tremblay). Luckily for me, she was getting off in Kingston so I got to sleep the rest of the way, letting my laptop to Shima and Shigeki so they could watch movies my workmate had loaned me.
We split up in Montréal as they were all northbound to Shima's place and I was going home on the South Shore. I slept most of the way and took a cab back home. I got home really late, like around midnight or so and I had to get up at around 7 to go to work. Short night it was, but I dreamt of all the plans I was making for Miyavi!">
Posted via m.livejournal.com.
Our bus left Montréal at 3PM. It was a double decker and we decided to enjoy the view by sitting at the top frontmost part of the bus. The view was great and I was very comfortable but after a while, Shima started complaining that it was much too hot because he was sitting spot in front of the heating vent. There was only a stop in Kingston -as it was an express bus- and then, three more hours of road. Shima and Shigeki were sitting left of the aisle with Shige's laptop, Juni and Shelby right behind them and Gen and me were sitting on the right side. I got the windows side so not only did I have a great view, but cool air and we also had cup holders, which the rest of the seats didn't have! All the way to Toronto, the Wi-fi was working fine so I did some catching up on FB, Tumblr and e-mails and then we watched a movie, Gen and I. It was a weird movie, SP Yabo Hen ; but it made for good jokes the next day in the wait line. When we got to the Toronto Greyhound Terminal, we walked to our hostel. It was a bit of a hassle with my broken suitcase (I had originally packed the suitcase I bought for Gabz and Pat's wedding, earlier this summer, but the zipper's cursor decided to slide off the track on one side and then I could do nothing useful with it for the 10 minutes I lost fixing it before giving up because Jf called to say he was waiting for me in the parking lot. ), but we got there quite easily, thanks to my sense of orientation and Gen's printed map (but had they been on their own, they didn't know the North from the South and would have gotten lost).
After going through registration and administrative hostels blablah, we drop our things in our room and walked to a nearby Japanese restaurant we'd seen on our way there. Shigeki was so over excited that he kept talking to Shelby about how HOOOOOT the waiter was until about mid-supper when he wound up saying well, you know, the more I see him; he's not THAT hot, finally... and I thought it was funny. Him and Shima made quite a lot of jokes with connotations that might be awkward to many other people at a dinner table. Juni and I skipped on the sake the others had ordered because Juni was on flu medication and I did not enjoy my last adventure with sake at my job's Xmas party a few years ago because it's a very treacherous alcohol to me. I can drink it and not really feel drunk... And the next morning, I'll have this splitting headache... It's the only alcohol my body reacts badly to, except for Tequila.
Our sushis were yummy, but maybe the dishes were overpriced for the amount of food we had. The desserts were also semi-expensive for their sizes, but considering how good they were, I guess it was not so bad and I'm just too spoiled now because of that place in Chicoutimi with the yummy desserts for 2$/piece we went to the night before Gabz's wedding.
The decoration was really cute, with the room being framed by Plexiglas frame-like things that were light a pinkish
shade of red from within and displaying cute sakura motifs in a lighter shade. The bar was very modern looking and the tap for the Sapporo brand beer was a katana handle, so I had to take a picture and send it to my friend JF because he loves katanas in home deco!
After our meal, we went to shower and sleep and talk about the plans for the next morning. Shima, Shigeki and Gen woke up at dawn to go and keep the spots in the wait line in front of the venue. They got there at like 8am and there were 3-4 other people who'd been sitting there since as early as 3! Juni, Shelby and I got to leave at 10am because we were tired/sick/had a longer way to the bus terminal. We walked to the venue which wound up being way further north than we had anticipated from the map. About 1/3 of the way from the hostel, Shelby's feet were already killing her. Later on, we thought we had walked past the street we were looking for, but it turns out we were just around the bed from it because it has 2 names.... When we finally got there, we switched shifts and the first bunch went out for lunch and then it was our turn. We ate at Harvey's located just a couple corners away and it felt great to be warm and their onion rings are really good!!!! We went back to wait in line...
At about 1PM, the venue manager showed up and threw a tantrum at the people sitting in the stairs in front of the venue and he was kinda pissed for nothing and he was really impatient. Like, when you ask people to move over, you should at least give them a minute or two to get up and gather their stuff that's scattered around them. It's not like they had been blocking the way, they were only occupying like 1/4 of the stairs and out of the way of the crew and what we were later instructed was their parking lot. Shima and Shigeki left in search of a public bathroom open in the vicinity (not so many on a Sunday in North East Toronto...). They found one and came back with some Halloween toy props that looked like someone had a a Worlds of Warcraft themed party the previous evening. They used them to take silly pictures with the lion statues. Afterward, as Shigeki was bored and I didn't have time to do anything much with my face, I asked him to play MUA with me and he complied. We made a couple friends in the wait line, including Scott, the tall and leaf thin guy who had reached out and touched Miyavi's hand during the last show. I wouldn't have known, but Shima remembered him; Shima is such a people's person!!!
In the wait line, there was a girl who was kinda scantily clad considering the weather; her jeans were really cute but when it's near the freezing point and you have to wait for hours in the shade in a line, don't wear pants that have slit legs held together only by 3 bows on each side! I was cold for her! (Luckily, at some points, her parents came and gave her a huge velvety blanket to cover with). Another girl had bi-colored hair (fushia and purple) and she looked really cool, so I asked to snap her picture; she looked like she could have belonged to Tess, YumeNinja and all's bunch. Probably the sharpest dressed attendee, IMVHO. There were a few more people joining during the afternoon but the majority of the people arrived between 6PM and 8, time at which the doors FINALLY opened (we thought it was the time schedule for the show to begin!). The venue manager and the other employees we'd seen during the afternoon were totally useless, mean and misbehaved, but around 6, this nice security lady showed up and answered the questions we had been asking (and asked, too, oh my, very often!) about the VIP ticket pick up place and all. At 8, she let us in. For the first time ever in attending a Vkei-related concert, they let us in with our cameras (only Point-n-Shoots, though, not the DLSR type).
We landed ourselves some good spots RIGHT IN FRONT OF THE STAGE, first row. I got the left side (from the artist's perspective) speaker so I took a few videos to send Odore but unluckily, the vibes from the speaker made pictures too blurry, I only managed to snap two semi-good ones. Gen grabbed my shoulder and told me the people handling the VIP things also gave her a VIP pass for me, although I had bought just a regular ticket, they judged that the trek I took to go and my good behavior and usefulness (I helped the delivery guys understand that there was a doorbell to ring and the people in the line to remain calm by answering their questions with whatever little info I had and all), I deserved one. I was so thankful! I'm such a lucky bastard!
Miyavi came out and his Korean side was showing a lot, that night. He wore a white t-shirt over black pants and donned a black vest resembling a school uniform's in the cut. He also wore those geeky huge black framed glasses and his long hair was loose. He greeted us with "What's My Name?" and played a couple other tracks before his MC where he said it was good to be back in Toronto, that he and Bobo (his faithful only band member and drummer) swam across Lake Ontario and nearly drowned (and he stumbled quite a few times on the word "Ontario", probably from excitement/nervosity) and then, they had visited Niagara Falls and thought there were WAAAAAAAAAYY too many tourists there (funny, considering he HIMSELF was one...) taking pictures and all which seemed to surprise him considering the cold windy weather. Some fans handed him yet another Canadian flag (we've been signing them and giving them to him at this show and the previous one he did during summer 2010) and he read the stuff we had written and asked how many people in the crowd were from Toronto, then Montréal and Vancouver and he said he wanted to come and play in MTL and VAN but we needed to put him in contact with producers. I might be partially deaf, but I heard that quite clearly!
Then, he played some more of his songs off of his latest two albums and then he did another MC bit where he interacted with the crowd and then he said he knew we liked his older songs too and which ones would we like to hear and he ended up playing Selfish Love and Itoshii Ito and we sang along with him. He came over the speaker in front of me a few times and when he saw my camera was pointed at him, he stared into it; he's so cool. Near the end, he even ended up playing while doing a split in front of me and some idiot behind me reached out and touched... his privates! I thought it was kinda rude, but you never know, maybe he liked it... :P
At the end of the show, they made the VIPs line up near the bar and gave us instructions. We were split into groups of 5 people, which means I was on my own because I let the other ones be together. But it was actually good for me because I got my picture snapped with him by his lady assistant and got to talk to him a bit longer than them and ask him whom it was I should contact regarding the linking him with producers and venues in Montréal. And I wound up kissing him on the cheeks like I would a friend, because I didn't even think about it, I just kinda did it out of habit, which surprised him. I got 3 guitar picks with his logo and an autographed poster from the tour, which I promised I will give to Odore because I was sad she couldn't be with us this time around. I told Miyavi about her, actually... I must have spoken way too much for the little amount of time we were granted, especially considering we were at the front of a line of over 100 people and he had to leave to go to NYC were he was having another show the next night.
For the VIP event, he had changed into something more lounge wear-ish that seemed to be really oversized *harem pants* (or Saruel, if you call them the way Japanese fashion mooks do) and he wore a fedora. He wasn't wearing platform shoes so he seemed closer to my height as the previous two times I'd seen him and therefore, more accessible.
<>
The next day, our bus was at 3PM and we had to leave the hostels before 11am, so we ended up dropping our stuff at the terminal before going around town. They lockers were 5$ each so considering the amount of luggage we had (and how tired I was from walking around town with my broken handled suitcase), I decided to eat one of those meal in a chocobar things and wait for them, safekeeping the stuff. They were glad I did. I'm kinda jealous they got to try out that All-you-can-eat Japanese place with yukata wearing waitresses across the street from the terminal. They said it was really cheap and the food was even more delicious than the other place we tried on the first night. Then, they went to purchase stuff in Chinatown and Shelby came to join me because her feet were still sore. The bunch of them came back for 2PM and we lined up for the bus. We took the bad decision of sitting in the REAR top end of the bus because Shima and Shigeki complained that they had been overheating during the first way trip but it was worse this time. Plus, we were stuck in a traffic jam right outside Markham because it was a Monday night. So everybody wound up dizzy and woozy from the lack of fresh air and the excessive breaking and moving forward, inch by inch of the road for about 2 hours. I was sitting beside a high school student whom I ended up helping with her homework about La Grosse Femme d'à Côté Est Enceinte (a novel by world renown Montréal author Michel Tremblay). Luckily for me, she was getting off in Kingston so I got to sleep the rest of the way, letting my laptop to Shima and Shigeki so they could watch movies my workmate had loaned me.
We split up in Montréal as they were all northbound to Shima's place and I was going home on the South Shore. I slept most of the way and took a cab back home. I got home really late, like around midnight or so and I had to get up at around 7 to go to work. Short night it was, but I dreamt of all the plans I was making for Miyavi!">
Posted via m.livejournal.com.