last stop

hi peeps from st. john, US Virgin islands. it's so beautiful here (even though it rained today, didnt matter...still beautiful) but it is really odd being at a resort like this without my family. i never trust our restaurant choices without our resident expert vacation-restaurant-finder, and there isnt even a TV to gorge on trashy movies.

I finished SIX FEET UNDER yesterday, such an amazing series. you all must watch it. i also took my last red-eye of tour...hopefully last one in a long time.

i will be home in 3 days and 5 hours. yay.
not that anyone's counting...

i´m alive i swear

leaving buenos aires. it was nice. im surprised how much spanish i remembered and its been fun practicing. off to santiago.
ready to come home.

saw anna ho! so fun. she is craycray and i love her,

and so I return to the Western Hemisphere

Just finishing our stay in Sayn, chillin with Princess Alexander, Princess Gabriella, and family. It's been a pretty eye-opening experience living with them and hearing all the history that surrounds their family. I won't go into too much detail as I have to eat before our plane leaves, but they own this entire museum (former palace) dedicated to preserving their family's memory, in addition to a castle/tower/restaurant, and abbey etc. And despite being from a completely different walk of life as me, they are all incredibly down to earth and nice people. They really LOVE the Kroks. like...they all know the choreo and do it with us. and give us performance critiques after each show. can't say i understand it but it is nice to have. it's great to feel a part of a family for a few days when we're away from our own for so long.

a note on Princess Sophia. she looks like nicole kidman. i explained "exquisitie" and told her that since NKids hasnt been looking so stellar lately i would expand the term to include her as well. she laughed and continued to puff on her cigarette and be fabulous.

now we're off to buenos aires, 2 iberia flights away. pray for me?
so ready to go home.

also, i think i have the black lung. i've been coughing up a storm for the past few weeks. I thought it might just be due to the constant climate change but it's pretty relentless. ah well...can't have everything. i'll have 2 weeks to get healthy before school starts.

~Barry

my life happens (part 2)

so our train leaves in 5 hours (it's 2am now. do the math). but i know i wont have wifi where we're going so i feel compelled to blog now. in the words of one of our former krokhosts "oh yes i forgot. you kroks are obsessed with the internet"

so it was actually worth going to italy, even for only 20 hours. we had lunch at Alexandra and Stefano's house. Alexandra is one of the many Sayn-Wittgenstein children...ie a princess of Germany. Now I've never seen "Under the Tuscan Sun" but I would imagine that's excatly what this villa looked like. Seriously, like something out of the movie set, it was hard to believe it was real. Then everyone went to the beach, and I stayed home to plan the dinner. It was kind of a martyr thing to do b/c I could have gone to the beach for a little bit, but I ended up spending the full 2.5 hours doing one friggin thing so i guess it was good that i didnt go. and have fun instead. of sitting alone on my computer and ordering things. then we sang at this dinner and went to our nighttime accomodations: a castle. like an actual castle. the family has this castle atop a mountain that seriously noone lives in all year. it's just an empty castle. so the kroks stayed there. crazy. i would go into more detail about what it looks like...but just imagine a castle. that's what it was.

then off to munich, which required a plane a train and an automobile. I got really excited when we stopped at the "Firenze" trainstop. Because I am one huge dork. And if you know why you are a bigger dork. I cannot really attest whether florence was in fact "made of statues and stories," from my vantage point it seemed more like it was made of "airports and cleavage." we also passed through LIVORNO...which show has a song about livorno!?!? i cannot for the life of me figure it out. and it's probably NINE, which is gonna make me feel real dumb. speaking of which, it was exciting hearing people briefly speak the language of NINE. so excited!

then we arrived in Munich, where we are staying with the US consul general. lemme tell you, the consul general here is a whole lot more fabulous than judith fergin of sydney. rather than portraits of bush and chainey, his house is filled with INCREDIBLE works of art. apparently his partner is an art dealer, the personal dealer for David LaChappelle (who is pretty well-established contemporary artist). they also have a frank stella and a koonz in their living room. their collection of books ABOUT art is way better than any collection of actual art i could ever hope to own. sadly it rained a lot so our brief expedition into the city was not too exciting. but munich seems really beautiful. i highly recommend anyone looking for a vacation consider a german tour. so much history! you've got all the classy oldness of munich, and the unbeatable culture of berlin, and many other beautiful small towns to check out. DO IT!

not too much else to report. tomorrow we're off to Sayn, a tiny town in northern germany where we stay with the royal family. they have a castle. and a palace. and a mansion. which i'm told are all separate buildings. and a "SMEDELINGE HAUS" (sp? butterfly house). theyve been hosting kroks for over 2 decades. again...we have crazy contacts. and then back overseas to BUENOS AIRES (back in our hemisphere! so close to home!). it's an iberia flight...so wish us luck oy.

how are you?
~Barry

what a week. (pt 1)

So much has happened. This is gonna be a long post, so I will form it in bulletts so that you can pick the parts that most interest you to read. It will be like a choose-your-own-adventure novel, except I had to do all the things before you picked and chose.

1. SAFARI: So we went on this 2 hour drive into South Africa which had some amazing vistas of snowcapped mountains and genuine African terrain. I think one of my favorite parts of tour is the constantly changing landscapes. Earth is pretty sweet (as if we didn't already realize that from BBC's PLANET EARTH! Or being from Milwaukee...most impressive landscape of ALL). We approached our destination via a 30-min ride on a dirt road literally in the middle of nowhere. Seriously, if "The Middle of Nowhere" were to be an actual place, it would be that road we drove down. I contemplated stuffing my valuables in my socks in case it was really a tourist trap and we were being left in the desert to starve. But it turns out that the Safari/Resort place we wound up was surprisingly nice! We each shared little cabins and got meals and then went out in a truck that evening and the following morning to gaze at the aminals. Here are some reactions:
- Contrary to popular belief, Africa is really cold. I don't know why those Sally Strothers commercials always show the children half-naked, because in actuality African nights are comparable to Wisconsin winters. Well, nothing is comparable to WI winters. Anywho...it was freezing and we all looked like marshmallows layering all our sweatshirts on top of each other.
- While exploring our resort, we came upon a fenced in area...where 2 cheetahs were just chillin. Apparently they had been fully domesticated and were kept like cats. Giant, fangy cats. Pretty sweet!
- On safari we saw: Springbuck, Wildabeast (you killed Mufassa!), Water Buffalo (glad my 4th grade campaign to save the endangered water buffalo was such a success!), lions, cheetahs, rhinos, zebras, many other deer-like things, giraffes. It turns out it wasn't a safari but was a "game park" meaning the animals were actually contained in enormous fences which did take out the excitement and surprise of safari. But it was cool to see the animals and now I have an excuse to go back to Africa and go on a real safari.

2. THE FLIGHT FROM HELL.
We've all had bad travel experiences. But I think I win. Learn from our mistake, if you ever want to fly to Spain, DO NOT TAKE IBERIA. Take British Airways. Or drive. I know there is an ocean in the way but TRUST ME, figuring out how to cross that is a modest feat compared to figuring out how to make sense of Iberia employees. So after a 2 hour flight from Cape Town to Jo'berg, our flight was supposed to take off at 9:30 for Madrid (yay red-eye. on a flight with no entertainment or legroom. off to a good start, Iberia). We sit on the plane until about midnight getting various updates from the pilot, at which point we are informed that the engine is damaged without repair and we all have to deplane b/c the flight is cancelled. Oy. So all 400-ish of us rush back through customs (i may be one of the only people to be stamped out of a country and back in in the same day) and get our bags. Which take almost an hour to appear. Iberia claims they will put us up in a hotel, but navigating that is (again) more complicated than driving across the Atlantic. Steve was the FIRST person at the counter and it still took them well over an hour to get us a single voucher for all twelve of us.
ANYWHO...all 80ish of us out-of-towners arrive at our hotel finally around 3am. Luckily they do pay for meals and the room is fine, but in the process our group lost 2 bags (how do you lose a bag when you havent even flown anywhere!?), a connecting flight to Italy, and a good deal of sanity.
Sorry, there is still more. The next day a bus leaves the hotel at 4pm for the airport. The plan is that we are supposed to all get onto the NEXT day's Iberia flight to Madrid, but obviously when we get there they realize that they don't have space for 2 flights on 1 plane. I can't even go into the details of Iberia's repeated stupidity, but the moral is that we waited in line for over 4 hours to get checked in, realizing that no one at Iberia had even been alerted that we would be coming. Our flight wizard (I wrote "travel agent" first but remembered that she hates being called that) back in the states says that our flight was coded as having taken off successfully, so it's a disaster trying to accommodate everyone. PLUS trying to make our connection to Pisa work takes Dan almost the entire afternoon. Because even though we now were only going to be in Italy for a single night (less than 24 hours) and all of us wanted to just fly to Munich and spent an extra day there, our hosts in Italy DEMAND that we instead find a way to make it there. People love the Kroks so much it is maddening and confusing!
It was fun, though, while we were in line this little boy started talking to me in Spanish and I was really excited how well I could keep up with him. I havent really spoken since freshman fall (and that was Spanish 30, where you really do nothing) but it felt so good to be semi-fluent in a language. I'm so jealous of Linds and co. and how good their spanish must be now. Sad that I was useful for only a few hours before we wound up in Pisa and then Munich...where I offer no skills. Also, when I finally get to the check-in desk, all these spanish families decide that they are done waiting and just step to the counter and hand them their passports, rightfully angering the other spanish families. I literally wind up in the middle of this brawl where 4 different men are screaming at each other ("QUE COJONES!" is a key catchphrase). Spanish men get quite heated. It's a frightening sight for my polite, midwestern self.

i still havent brought my faithful readers up to present time but i need to do something else for a bit. sorry for the lag in posting, we've been without internet for awhile. also, the kroks "discovered" my blog and have continually mentioned it awkwardly, making me consider discontinuing it. apparently conveying my feelings and experiences to my friends and family back home is not an acceptable activity. but then again, i don't really care. so i blog on. i shouldnt have to police myself and my thoughts, especially for my 11 best friends. the whole reason i wrote this in blog form as opposed to email is that i didn't want to have to chose who were they people i was staying in touch with this summer, so i will continue. i guess if my thoughts on tour are so interesting that people who are already on it want to read about it too, they can be my guest.

coming home in 2 weeks and 3 days!
visiting NYC in 4 weeks and 6 days (it's official, i got my ticket yesterday. and for $105, mind you).
~Barry

surprise trip

we're going on safari!!!!
so no posts for the next few days, unless they have wireless in the wilderness (here's hoping).

talk to you in italy!

also - go see WALL-E!!!! so good.

~Barry

a day

today was a good day. a gold star day, some might say.

wally and i got up and had our breakfast room service which we had ordered the night before waiting for us. then we all got into this van and began our journey towards the southern tip of the continent. on the way we saw gazelles, ostriches, mountain zebras, whales, and lots of baboons. the Cape Point park, where you can walk to the southernmost point for amazing views of the atlantic and indian oceans meeting, is also a Baboon reserve...so they just run free around the parking lot. in fact, they are viscious animals so one essentially chased us into the van, at which point our guide/driver Nathan screamed "shut the door, shut the door!" which we did. hilarious and terrifying. photos pending. we also went to this penguin park. and penguins are really cute. now i understand why they have like 19 animated movies about them.

THEN we went to the nearby mall to get some food. walter and i brought our pizza to a bench outside and notices how aggressive the birds were, landing right on our table. and then one flew down and ate walter's pizza...out of his mouth! he literally flew down and bit the end of the pizza sticking out of walter's eating hole. crazy. i immediately ran away screaming...much to the delight of the local girls who were laughing hysterically at the stupid americans. well excuse me for not having the sense to protect myself from predatory animals. walter equated it with a really terrifying version of the lady and the tramp.

as if that werent enough, as we were walking home we saw this ENORMOUS rainbow. now i know we all see rainbows so all you jaded assholes are thinking "meh"...but just believe me...it was HUGE. like really big and bright. and as we got closer it got brighter adn soon you could see the ENTIRE arc! and a secondary rainbow! it was unbelievable. wikipedia tells us what we saw was a supernumerary rainbow with a secondary arc. it looked like this:

jealous? yeah i thought so. pictures of me with the rainbow also pending.

off to watch some 6 FEET UNDER and then after our hour set we are all going to see WALL-E!!!!!!!!!!!!! so excited, we were all pissed it wasnt out in australia and i am really happy to see it.

~ Barry

ps - i still dont want to plan final dinner

pps - hi Mrs. Kehler!

capetown

we travled for 28 hours. that's more than a day.
we took a 6:30am flight from melbourne back to sydney (2 hours). then an hour and a half layover (and customs, which we all love).
then a 14 hour flight to johannesberg. which was delayed 2 hours. so we missed our connection.
once we got there we had to pick up our luggage and recheck it, which was complicated b/c of our delay and rebooking and no one knew who could validate this change. so we ran between 2 different terminals twice so as to not miss the last flight out to cape town (2 more hours of flying).
though i shouldnt complain b/c on the flight to cape town i was next to this woman with 2 kids under 4 who had flown from orlando for almost 18 and the airline had forgotten their kosher meal. so they ate fruit for 18 hours. yeesh.

from now on i will only travel by private jet of flew powder.

but it's the morning and i am recovered, slightly. great breakfast, amazing hotel. when you ask for a wakeup call, you get a simultaneous phonecall and knock at your door, where there is a man waiting with coffee and tea. wally and i wondered what the "snooze" equivalent for that is, so we figured we'd just punch the guy.

i'm currently in the business center hogging a computer. wireless is 15 dollars a day, so i will likely not be able to skype any of you for the next few days. but know that i am alive! i'm also here doing my job as krokslave. many of you know this, but i was unvoluntarily selected to be the person who plans evening of our final night of tour. meaning that while everyone else is cavorting around on the beaches of St. John, i'll likely be in the hotel lobby arguing with the catering guy. it's just annoying b/c i feel it's going to end tour on a terrible, bitter note. part of me is inclined to do it by invitation only and make it a small affair for the people i like and don't mind planning dinner for. so if anyone has any ideas for sentimental things to do or other ways to help plan a final evening or gifts to give out...let me know. or just be on gmail while i'm here working.

:)

longest day of tour

So as a Krok, I have important duties besides singing. Primarly: Shmoozing. Shmoozing is of utmost important to the Kroks; shmoozing with fans, shmoozing with hosts, shmoozing with potential hosts, shmoozing with assorted other wealthy people. And during my 4-week tenure on tour, I must say my shmoozing skills have greatly improved. I can shmooze with the young and the old, the rich and the only mildly less rich, those who speak no english and the australians (though that barely counts as english. seriously, what are these people talking about here?). Unfortunately, shmoozing really sucks. After a long day, the last things you want to do is put on a tux and a smile and shmooze. The worst is when they divide us amongst tables so we have to shmooze all with people we don't know and get no backup.

At least I thought that was the worst. But tonight I discovered something worse than having to talk to all the strangers at your table: having the strangers at your table display no interest in talking to you. It was the craziest thing! Maybe I'm just spoiled b/c usually people are coming to see us and thus are very excited to talk to us, but today I joined this table and they were just like "what brings you here tonight"
oh i'm one of the kroks.
"oh is your group involved in the children's hospital too?'
...no. we're the entertainment. you know how the poster says "a night with the krokodiloes to benefit the children's hospital? yeah. we represent the 'krokodiloes' part"
and then they went back to their dinner

needless to say, it was a long meal. finally i started chatting with the woman next to me with the most ridiculous hairstyle known to man (it was as if she just pushed her hair ontop of her head and then clipped it exactly where it bunched, allowing some clumps to strategically fall out of place and into her face and NEVER MOVING THEM OUT OF THE WAY. what is that!!?!?!). she was a "very important doctor" of psychology (so our host, also named Barry, told us). But when I asked what she focused on she went off on this whole thinga bout "ancestor psychology" which is apparently this phenomenon where if your granpa died on a certain day you are more likely to die on that day too. oy. and she works with dysfunctional children! red flag, your voodoo psychobabble isnt likely to stop their parents from abusing them. it all sounded very lamarkian to me (score 1: snobby psych concentrator comment of the evening. see mom and dad, i did learn something at harvard!)

anyway, it was an especially long day b/c we got up at 8am to go on a winery tour. it was really beautiful to see tha Yara countryside, and we drove through a temperate rainforest. and got lots of free booze in small portions. but we were all so tired it was hard to enjoy it (and by all i mean the 6 that were brave enough to get out of bed at 8am. or maybe just the 6 who couldnt say no to free things). Can't say I know any more about wine, but after the second winery everything starts to taste a whole lot better.

a note on our host: Barry Novie is just the nicest man who ever lived. Unlike our other hosts who are all crazy and clearly love the kroks, but in a wierd fanatical way that makes you wonder why, Barry is just geniunely touched by our music (god knows why) and loves bringing us here to sing for his friends and entertain his charity events. the man made a ton of money in real estate and is now a professional philanthropist. he really took to me b/c i am his namesake and we are both jewish, so we spent a lot of time talking about what being jewish in australia is like. he also gave me the history of its progressive elections, putting jews into important gov. positions for centuries. woot woot. anyway, it's great to know him.

and thus we left the eastern half of the globe. tonight was our final for-pay show and from here out we mostly sing at hotels and for our host families in their palaces (sounds like a joke. only half a joke). it's now 1am, and we leave the Australian Club in 3 hours to get a plane to South Africa, which will take 16 hours. SIXTEEN HOURS!!!! so this combined with the fact that i slept very little last night means that you should all expect a pretty incoherent blog post in 30 hours when i finally arrive. i've uploaded the rest of SIX FEET UNDER season 3 and WEEDS onto my ipod so that should keep me busy at least for a tidbit. oy, wish me luck.

keep the comments and emails coming!!! i miss you all!!! and i'm probably going to NYC on august 21 so if you live there get excited (note to self - buy tickets to NYC).

mwah
~Barry

melbourne in the usa

this next song goes out to my friend, alison rich.
http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&VideoID=22690404
i'm sad the sand had to go but glad she integrated the snapping.


and this one's for my mom. i think we've all seen it but i've gotta have something for the parentals in this post as well: http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=Mrma76T5Wa4

australiya i'm still here

Hi people. Long time no discuss. Hello from melbourne. Just finished our stay in sydney, which was fun (no wireless, so no blog or skype). christian and i totally won homsestays. his name was ted and not only was his granpa a big famous general (see previous blog), he also started his own consulting firm and was president of the America Club, a counselor for the Harvard club, and a generally awesome guy. The first night he asked us to pick out music for dinner ("wow so much musical theater! and jack johnson and coldplay, this guy is really hip! and cher. wait...is this the BEACHES soundtrack? ok that answers that question"). But he knew a TON about theater and sydney theater, which I know nothing about and apparently is a pretty vibrant scene (did u know Cate Blanchett and her husband are the artistic directors of Sydney Rep? She's the best) so we had a great night drinking and chattin. We found out today that his brother is the manager and producer for none other than Kylie Minogue (the 2nd top-selling female artist in the world next to madonna) so he knows her pretty well. crazy! glad that i know him.

sadly, we did embarassingly little in sydney. it's just hard b/c you want to sleep late and you have to go back and change for shows in the early evening so there isn't a ton of time. but i did manage totake a ferry to Manly Beach (it was called soemthing else originally, but they changed the name after I visited...badumcha!) and watch some of the guys take surfing lessons...only to be mobbed by a swarm of dolphins! i was sad i got there too late to take a lesson but it was really cool to see. i also wandered around downtown a bunch and saw the opera house and went to the museum of contemporary art (yeesh...not sydney's finest site). this was the highlight of the museum:

most of our shows were for private clubs, so not wildly exciting. we did sing for the US Consul General, Judith Fergin, at her amazing home. She was wierd and seemed to have trouble emoting using the muscles in her face.

now in melbourne, which (form what i hear) is a low point of tour. there is not a ton to do, so we just had a mcdonalds picnic and watched Edward Scissorhands (people...someone needs to make this a musical. i'm serious it would make major bank and be awesome. if you are interested of have a few million to underwrite this project, lemme know). I have another embarrasing confession: this is the 3rd day in a row i've had mcdonalds. We eat it an embarassing amount. It's just really comforting to know that no matter where you are there is something that you can rely on! that is also cheap, as am i. the only difference is the katsup, which is sweeter in this side of the world. Australia also has this great "tastes of the world" menu in honor of the olympics where you can get different burgers representative of each country. the "McAmerica" has eggs, bacon, ham, and cheese...essentially a heart-attack on a plate which I think is fairly appropriate. There's also the "McAfrica" featuring 2 patties and "African sauce." If you have any idea what that means, let me know.

anyway glad to have wireless now, so hopefully we can skype soon.

let me knwo what is new with you!
~Barry