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Thursday 27 December 2018

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!!

IT'S ALIVE~~~~!
Or at least in the middle of being revived.
Hello, I am back and hopefully staying!

Now, seeing how my last post was in...2015, it comes to nobody's surprise that even posts about amazing events will take some time for me to actually write (and post...). So am I two months late with this? Yes. Do I have an excuse? Yes! Laziness :)

The 'amazing event' in question was *drum roll* BTS' Love Yourself World Tour!
Now, you may not know this (yes, you do, because the only person who reads this blog is my sister, but let me pretend I have an audience), but I have been into Kpop for ten years now. First fell in love with Super Junior (let's just...kind of ignore that) and SHINee (my special bbs) and then, at the beginning of 2015 I gave Bangtan a listen and I do not regret it one bit.

I have always regretted not being able to go to one of the (very, very few) European concerts either SHINee or Bangtan appeared at, so when the LY tour in Europe was announced, I decided I'd go, no matter what.
When I first joined the fandom, we were ecstatic when we reached 1 million views on INU. Now Bangtan is the group with the most views on a music video in the first 24 hours on Youtube. So I knew getting tickets to their concert would be nearly impossible, and let me tell you, I do not want to go through it again. (Who am I kidding, as soon as Bangtan announce their next tour, I'll be sitting in front of my laptop, waiting for battle.)
It was actually my sister who kept refreshing and trying to buy the tickets (mostly because my laptop is a descendant of a potato) and because of the stupid ticketing site not working correctly (once you manage to put a ticket into your shopping cart, you're supposed to have three minutes to buy it, our ticket was gone after less than one), my dad actually ended up buying tickets from some third party site. Cue me almost having a mental breakdown because I was suddenly paying the price of the best tickets available...for the cheapest tickets of the venue. (To be fair, as of now, I still haven't actually paid for the ticket, because I have an amazing sister, but I still hope to pay her back in the near future)
Anyway, here we are, with stupidly expensive tickets-- wait. No, we didn't actually have any tickets yet. Do you know when we got them? On the day of the concert, in our hotel room, in Berlin! But I'll come back to that later.


Now, our journey to Berlin started...at a mobile phone shop down the street. Wait, what?
Well, you know how you need a passport to travel between countries? Yes, well, mine had expired in 2013. But hey, I'm just going to Germany, so that's okay, right? Wrong! Five years is actually the limit, and mine was just over. And of course we realized that bit a week before the concert, meaning I had to choose the express option, making everything even more expensive.
So, where does the mobile phone shop come in, you ask? Because I also had to have my picture taken! And for whatever reason, if you don't want to shell out all that money for a professional to take pictures of you, you go to a mobile phone shop.
Now, you may not know this, but my laptop isn't the only potato descendant. I have never seen a more potato-looking passport photo in my life. And not just any potato. A felon potato. Just...the pictures are horrible. Absolutely horrible.

                                  isn't my passport cover the cutest?
The actual journey started in the middle of the night on the 15th of October. A ten (?) hour bus journey from Vienna to Berlin. Now, most people would use this time to sleep, but not me. I tried to master the art of silent-potato-chip-eating.
                                                                                                                         
About five hours in came my biggest dilemma: I had to pee.
I have this thing, where I just absolutely hate using public toilets. That's just how it is. Now, a bus toilet doesn't sound all that more appealing to me. I held out to about eight or nine hours in, but it was no use. So I begrudgingly made my way down the stairs (no, the bus did not have a cellar, if you're wondering, it was a double decker)...and promptly turned around because I had no idea where the toilet was. My second time going downstairs, I figured out that, what I'd thought to be a closet, was actually the toilet. Joy. So I squeezed my body into that tiny cubicle, wondering how that giant of a  guy who'd used the toilet before me had even fit in there, seeing how my head had almost brushed the ceiling.
Pulling my pants back up was an event. Do you know the scene in The Princess Diaries where Mia tries to put on a pantyhose in the backseat of a moving car? That's what it was like, only with less space, and a toilet behind me.
And then the next challenge: how to flush. There were at least ten different buttons, and the only one labelled was the emergency one. Now, after pushing a few buttons, the bus did not self destruct, and I think I may have heard the sound of flushing, but I can't be sure. But seeing how gross the toilet had been before, I don't think it would have made much of a difference.

Arriving in Berlin, I was already...underwhelmed, to put it nicely, by what I was seeing through the bus window, but my sister told me, it's probably just the part we're in right now, and the rest was going to be nicer.
It wasn't.
Now, if you're reading this, and you're from Berlin, I apologize in advance. Because oh wow, have I never hated a city more than I've hated Berlin. Stuck in the wrong era, filthy, with too much mustard yellow and orange.
                                                                                                               
 We didn't spend all that much time looking around Berlin on our first day, mostly because my sister knew how much I didn't like it. Although I was happy about there being a Käthe Wohlfahrt (an all year round Christmas store). Last time I went in one was years ago in Rothenburg. Of course, I can't afford anything from them, but looking at the store's decorations is enough for me anyway.

Finding our hotel was another adventure. I have never seen such weirdly numbered streets. Some numbers suddenly changed directions, some were left out, some didn't fit in anywhere, it was rather strange.
When we got to our hotel, I decided to take a quick nap before the concert, since I hadn't slept on the bus, while my sister went out looking for a pharmacy to get something for her headache. (Where she also once again realized that German german is rather different to our German.)
Now, I was lying in bed, apparently already asleep, when suddenly...the concierge was standing at the foot of my bed, telling me that our tickets had arrived. O...kay. Thanks, lady, but could you not just unlock my room and come inside while I am sleeping? That would be super!

           My sister used my version 1 ARMY bomb :)
 Do you remember when I talked about the expensive tickets for the cheapest seats? Well, apparently the third party couldn't get those seats. Instead we got *drum roll* Entertainment Suite tickets! Which means we paid the actual price (maybe a few euros more) for our tickets, which was rather great.
Plus, Entertainment Suite tickets meant we could enter through the Premium entrance instead of waiting in line with thousands of other people. I mean, yes, we still had to wait in line, but it really didn't take long. And they sold merchandise right inside the venue, with no people waiting in line, so my sister quickly got me my ARMY bomb while I was still waiting at the metal detectors.








                                                                                                       Behold, our suite! (And our toilet! Woohoo!)
 We were second (and third :P) to arrive at our suite, so we immediately grabbed two seats in the front row (there were three rows with four seats each). We even had our own bathroom, which, as you now already know, was amazing to me, since I only had to share with 16 or so other people instead of the entire venue.

I couldn't get my ARMY Bomb to work properly, so my sister, nice as she is, went to the designated helpers and voilá, working lightstick! (Now the only problem is that my phone doesn't actually support the app, meaning I had to use someone else's. No random colour changing at home for me T-T)

When the concert started...I have to be honest, I barely remember anything! I have videos as proof that something happened, but my mind is mostly blank.
I definitely remember Bangtan talking in German though, which was super cute! And Taetae actually had a really great pronunciation!
At first I thought I'd 'save' my battery for the ments, but at one point I simply started filming everything. I only wish I had done so from the beginning, since now I don't have Hobis solo stage, and some other bits.

Most of my videos came out rather...wobbly, because I was filming with my phone in my left hand, while wildly shaking my ARMY Bomb with my right hand. I apologize for that.
At least I remembered not to screech into the microphone! The only time you can hear me is at the end of Outro: Tear, because...come on, they killed it.
ARMY time was also rather interesting, trying to film while also holding the slogan and the lightstick...


Now, like I said, I can't really remember all that much, but judging from my fancams, it was awesome! :D
When the concert was done and we were somewhere in front of the Arena, I'm pretty sure a car with Hobi and somebody else passed us, but I really can't be sure...

 Our suite! 

 Yoongi and the missing A 
 💜 
 💜💜💜


I would have been fine with going home right then and there, but we had extended our stay by one day beforehand, because we thought we'd go sight seeing in Berlin...I can really understand my grandma's incredulous 'Why?' now, when we told her we'd be going on a short holiday to Berlin.

                                                                                                                                                     OUF-pa-sen! 
Since the trip had already been expensive enough, my sister looked up free museums to visit.
One thing that's really popular in Berlin is Checkpoint Charlie, so we went to the (free) associated museum, which was okay. I'm just really not one for war and military stuff, so it wasn't really my thing. I did enjoy the American pronunciation for German words book though :D







       Is my sister tiny or is the lamp giant? Both! :D
The rest of the time we spent simply just walking around and looking at everything (and going to Primark!). At one point I'd had enough, the surroundings made me uncomfortable, my back was killing me, so my sister walked around on her own, while I was waiting on a bench. (And freezing my butt off since it was made of stone.)
We also made a little trip to the Brandenburger Tor (I looked at it from afar, once again from a bench, this time made of wood, while my sister took a closer look at the Tor) where we finally ate the food we had brought as snacks for the bus trip to Germany.

And well...that was it! I know, the part about the actual event is super short, but since my brain decided to apparently have selective amnesia, it can't be helped.










And now, have a playlist of all my wobbly fancams! :D