so it's been quite a sushi grade romance that we've had with the land of the rising sun :) yes indeed a raw adventure every time... and this being our 4th jaunt through the green lush misty mountains and tall mirrored riddle high rise skylines of Japan, well we sort of think we're getting the hang of it... i guess it's because we know how to say really important things like Utay (shoot!) or Magiday (oh really?) or moto popocon kudesai (more popcorn please!) that is giving us a new sense of confidence as we remember the glories and laughs of this tour... yea, we're almost locals...

so the first few days of our tour were spent at the surf, skate, and snow convention called Interstyle where we played and hung out with our sponsors (Jedidiah, Cobian, Keen, Surftech, Christian Surfers) and ogle over all the up and coming gear for riding the waves, mountains, and sidewalks... life is truly a ride :) and then after that we headed right out to the countryside beach town Ichinomiya where we bunked up with our buddies at the Surf Garden for a few days... just chilling, sleeping through our jetlag, and surfing was such a great restful break for us... and then we headed to Kanazawa where we played an incredible show at a really viby place called Cajon! yea, a place in Japan named after rey's favorite piece of percussion?? it was too cool... surf shop up front, amazing restaurant inside, and a beautiful all wood listening room w a stage... so we played there to about 90 people who bought tickets to come? we had no idea that it was a ticketed event, and we also didn't know that anyone knew our music... so it was really cool when everyone showed up and man were they stoked? we were fired up because of it and we'll be going back there every time now from here on in to reconnect w Yuki, Miho, and the rest of our Cajon family!

next was a show outside Bros Surf shop in a parking lot where these 2 pit bulls were running all over the place... sort of fliiped me out at first, but then i realized that they were lovers... i guess not all pits are scary :) anyway, the Cobian guys sponsored this show for us and it was a blast... grassroots parking lot rock and roll! an the beach was super close and a huge harvest moon rose as we played... Five For Rose was really fun and furious and Fare thee Well made us smile too... (Fare thee Well really seems to be a japanese hit for some reason??? everyone sang along at nearly all the shows we played?)

then we headed for the Navy base and hung out with our good friends the Rhineharts and their 2 little groms Gavin and Taylor... such a sweet family and they always take such amazing care of us that it's brutal to leave... tatami floors, endless royal milk tea, and Nashi???? oh my gosh it's my new favorite fruti in the world FOR SURE... Japanese pears?? who out there knows what i'm talking about? amen. unbelievable. our shows at the navy base were really cool, met a bunch of dispatch fans, played with marc broussard, and it's always great to be able to hang and bless the sailors that are over there serving...

last stop Okinawa... paradise for sure! mr mayagi's home in karate kid? yea you know it... it's really the hawaii of japan... it's about 3 hours south of tokyo by plane and man is the water amazing- it's just super laid back, the island is lush and the reefs make the water look turquoise. we went there to play our first Japanese Festival, the Blue Lagoon Fest... it was a really good experience for us to roll into a place where no one knew us and to just play to try to win new fans one at a time! we only had 25 minutes to play but we loved the challenge, and that there were palm trees everywhere, and a gorgeous sandy beach right behind us :) made some great friends, had some hilarious lost in translation moments, and managed to get ourselves really lost driving on the wrong side of the road a few times... yea i'm a japanese driver now. it was crazy trying to rewire my head that the turn signal and wiper blades were backwards and that the stick was on the left side... but we survived the adventure with a couple "watch out, watch out, WATCH OUT! WRONG SIDE!" or with me getting perturbed that i always turned on the windshield wipers whenever we wanted to turn...

anyway, clearly Okinawa is going to be a new home for us as the entire culture there seems to love our style of music, and the place is as restful as they come... God spent a little extra time there lingering over the sunset paintings and clouds... i absolutely promise you i saw a perfect little bear staring down on us, eyes, nose, ears and all in the clouds there... i mean every night it was the cloud show? amazing...

so thank you to names like Momo, Youichi, Yuki, and Tomi... and still dreams of meeting a girl named Koyuki over there :) and many mmany sushi and sake memories until next time...

oh and i broke my first board ever over there. yea! "nice attack" said Youichi with a smile...

Labels: concert, japan, tour

Beleza! Valeu Valeu a todos :) yea that's as far as my portuguese goes after a week rolling through the hills of Brazil... & what a beautiful country? unreal. mountains, trees, every shade of green, cliffs, beaches, & little towns scattered like gravel all over the countryside with some of the warmest smiles you've ever seen wherever we went...

so i've got to rewind the tapes a bit here - back to the the first time i heard mention of this amazing bass player from Brazil... i was in Hawaii hanging with some friends at YWAM when i overheard some of the local musician guys talking about this guy Tiago Machado who was set to return from a few months travels... they said he was a great bass player and remember wondering why that i'd try to cross paths with this guy before heading back to CO... i knew when i heard a friend in Hawaii mention this bass player from Brazil.

Sao Paulo was such a wild experience... i flew in from Nicaragua, 10 hours total of flight time, and arrived at Sao Paulo's Int'l airport at 8:30pm - well we had a gig scheduled for 9:30pm the same night as it turns out and when i got there at 9:20pm we found 1,500 people waiting there for us... it was epic! such a killer cool crew of people and such a warm welcome to Brazil... it really set the tone for the trip, such grace and warmth - i mean we've never played there before, we've not paid our dues in any way, and people were lining up around the block to come in and see us play... really because of three things: 1. Walking on Water's films are big down there and so our music has been there a little ahead of us 2. any int'l band is celebrated down there bc they're super hungry for new music 3. there are a crazy core group of Dispatch fans down there too... unreal - but yea, what a crazy first hour in Brazil being whisked off to an "i must be dreaming" show that was there waiting for us...

so we left the sprawling city of Sao Paulo and headed off into the countryside in our tiny little hatchback of a tour bus! it was hilarious... we were supposed to have a van reserved but the rental shop just shrugged their shoulders and gave us our little turtle of a car... she was a speedy little number though and we must have put in about 400-600km a day - Piritininga, Curitiba, Floripa (Florianopolis), & Guaruja were our stops on this test the waters tour... Rio was on the docket but we had to can it in favor of some other towns... but we'll be back there for sure in January ...

Check out a cool video Rey put together and some photos from Tiago and some friends down there...
-Braddigan

UPDATE: Our friends at Plywood Surfboards wrote a post with photos from our visit (in portuguese). And our friends who came to the show in Floripa serenaded us when we arrived!

Labels: brazil, concert, dispatch, nicaragua, tour