For the second show of this tour, we had planned for Dublin and then Belfast as I’m familiar with Ireland, having lived there for two years, but a couple days after the Prague show, we randomly decided we wanted to go to Cologne as well. Hopefully there were still some tickets left, so on Monday, February 25th, we took a train to Liège, near the border to Germany, where my friend lives. Her mother kindly drove the hour and a half to Cologne, and by the afternoon we were roaming the city streets.
We had parked at the Lanxess Arena and walked all the way to the Dom to take some pretty pictures. To go towards the city centre, we used the Hohenzollern Bridge, then we walked along the Deutzer Bridge to go back to the venue. We’d already seen the Dom and the centre of Cologne but had never been on that side of the bridge so it was nice to discover something new, and with the sun setting, we had the prettiest lighting to create a nice atmosphere.
Since we had booked our tickets last minute, we had to pick them up at the box office and panicked a little bit when we saw the size of the queue when we arrived. Luckily we managed to find box office pretty easily and were inside the arena in a matter of minutes.
I won’t go into much detail regarding the show because I have to admit most of it is similar from night to night, but I have to say that, personally, I enjoyed this show even more than the last one. I felt much more into it than in Prague. On the contrary, I also felt that the audience was not the same, a little slower, a little quieter (at least from the seats, maybe it felt different in the pit). I also noticed a major difference from a couple years ago: most people were cheering so much more for the single hits like Stressed Out, Heathens, Ride or weirdly Chlorine, but seemed a bit more confused when it came to other, less known songs. I guess that’s what happens with success, and I’m not claiming it’s a bad thing, it’s just a little bit surprising when I was used to the whole rooms screaming every single word of every single song.
When the show was over and we had finally managed to grab onto some yellow and green confetti as souvenirs, we headed over to the merch tables where we knew The Regrettes were meeting fans. We got to take a fun group picture with them and our friends before leaving the venue. We didn’t hang outside for too long as we needed to get back on the road and I needed to wake up early to visit my mom in the hospital (which is another story I may or may not talk about later).
And that was the end of Show #2 of our Bandito Tour.
Emma's Culture Corner 