Day 28: Zürich
Nau mai
Yesterday we played a show at Plaza Club in Zurich.
The shower bath is a difficult concept to execute well. As someone who is currently scheming about a bathroom renovation it was great to try out this twin pane design, a fixed and a folding leaf with a combined width of around 700mm, surely plenty of glass to deflect any badly vectored water jets. Several factors contributed to the failure of this design. A broken clip meant that the shower head could not be firmly mounted, and due to the anticlockwise torque from a tensioned hose it had an aiming point that was around 40° off centre. The bottom of the hinged door had not been fitted with a rubber seal and the 10mm air gap caught the full brunt of the 100 nozzles of the Hansgrohe Raindance Select S150, more than enough egress for a fully soaked bathmat.
“⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️”
The buffet breakfast at Hotel NH Munich was guarded by the digital video wall when I arrived at 9:30am yesterday morning, a quartet of suited musicians up on the screens discharging the patter of some very limp sounding soft bop. For my first course I served myself a bowl of pineapple, watermelon, and orange, and drenched it in Greek yoghurt. I followed this with a savoury course, tiny cubes of roasted sweet potato, roasted cherry tomatoes, spinach salad, buttered brown bread, and a hard-boiled egg.
We left Munich and headed west and were fortunate enough to be granted a view of the Olympiaturm, the 291m engineering triumph whose observation deck and revolving restaurant offer views of southern Bavaria all the way to the alps. I was glad to tick this great structure off my Sky Needle Bingo (SNINGO) list, and at the same time I would love to go back for a closer look. Drop into the comments and let me know if you manage to strike the Olympiaturm from your Sningo list!
After a few hours on the road the landscape began to transition from rolling plainland into more mountainous terrain, and we were able to enjoy the pleasing scenery of richly forested hillsides and valley walls smattered with old rural settlements. We crossed the Swiss Border and continued towards Zürich, making sure to admire the quality of the grass in the passing fields, which we have heard is the best in the world. There were many tunnels to pass through, also of an extremely high quality, helping us bypass the tectonic obstacles of northern Switzerland with a minimum of effort.
Plaza Club was our venue for the night. Formerly a movie theatre, this was now a 450-capacity music space that felt ready to transition into a club at a moment’s notice. There was a large dance floor and booths around the walls that looked fit to host a champagne bucket of any size. The décor felt slightly aggressive with gold bauble lampshades and sparkly silver drapes hanging from the ceiling. Once the lighting rig was engaged though, it all made sense as the mirror ball cast radiant droplets that tied all the elements together
Our dressing room was a club of its own, one of the upstairs rooms that was equipped with an entire rig of disco balls, as well as a light-up dance floor.
The 2025 Munich New Zealand music showcase was ready to try its luck in Zürich for one night only. Though not one of the great nights of the week on which to play a rock show, Monday night was the night we were given, and we did our utmost to make it successful. This was easily the best show we have put on in Switzerland, and I must give the credit to our friends in Dateline and Hans Pucket who played with such joy and exuberance that the crowd were won over instantly.
Here we are at the end of the night posing for celebratory photograph before we all part ways, Hans Pucket travelling the way to Sheffield for a show the next day, and Dateline to meet us a couple of days later in Barcelona.
