Tuesday, November 23, 2004
The Hip concert:
First, a bit about the new arena. Wow is it even an improvement over the Old Barn. You can walk right in off the street and peruse the main concourse level without ever showing anyone a ticket. Then, when you walk up to your seating area, you present your ticket there. They have cool PDA devices which scan the barcode. No more ripping off a part of the ticket. The building itself is outstanding, it looks great from the outside, and bright and clean inside. The arena bowl is superb, with none of the pillars and such as the old arena had. The openness is quite something to behold, and it's less volumonous than the Old Barn, much more intimate. I look forward to seeing a hockey game there in the near future.
Second, a bit about parking. Everyone has been bitching about the lack of parking downtown. I'll tell you, that's crazy. I had prepaid for a parking ticket at City Place parkade (which is RIGHT across the friggin street from one of the arena entrances), and the time it took me to drive in to the parkade and walk out of the parkade to the arena was less than 5 minutes. Leaving was even easier, though we did skip out on the last half of the Hip's last encore song. Even if I hadn't paid for that parking ticket, I could have just left my car at the Forks and taken the free downtown shuttle to the arena.
Now, the Hip. My god, there's not much I can say about the concert except that you haven't heard the Hip if you've not seen them live. Gord Downie is amazing...from his rant at the microphone, to his rant about peace, to his INCREDIBLY fast bit of singing there. Wow. I was very glad they did Music @ Work and 100th Meridian, but a bit sad about the lack of The Darkest One. Take a look at the pics below for some....images, lol.
As for the pictures, I was limited in the numbers I could take due to some stupid stupid Richard Dreyfuss look-alike man who was just drunk on his own power and acting like an SS Officer, or something. It also seems that there was no purpose to me sneaking my camera in by way of my underwear, as they didn't even check anything on the way in.
