Melbourne Maja!

This is our first visit to Australia and our first show ever in Australia was for the Melbourne Kannada Sangha, Melbourne and what a lovely introduction it was to this beautiful country! It seemed like a herculean task on paper, we travel for 24 hours, get to Melbourne and then head straight for the show and play a mammoth 2 hour session. But it ended up being the most fun we’ve had.

If you live in India all your life, you never get used to different time zones and this trip to Australia was quite a lesson in time zones! We left at the stroke of midnight from Bangalore and headed into Singapore and had a rush between 2 terminals to make our Qantas flight to Perth 2 hours later. Got into Perth just after lunch and then had a mini – adventure before we took our mid night flight again to Melbourne.

We landed in Melbourne in the morning, the day that daylight savings time was into effect and all clocks were reset or rather advanced by an hour so everyone else running an hour later than us, that we never knew about! But once we got past that slight confusion, it was smooth sailing all the way!

Bhavya and Archana and later Daya, came by to the airport with flowers (a first for us for a long time!) and whisked us off to where we were put up, a combination of houses, which incidentally, is the best way to travel! made sure we got enough sleep and a LOT of food and we were ready to head to the venue.

Once at the venue it was smooth sailing, Gary was on the job with sound and the rest of us did a quick set up and check as the merch stall got set up and in a couple of hours we were all set to go. The hall was slowly getting filled and by the time we got started, I think there were about 600 people in there, and though it took them a couple of songs to get started, once they did, there was no stopping!

We ran through all the songs in our set and did a couple of them again and there was much dancing and screaming and whistling and revelry and it was a great feeling playing to our home crowd, in a brand new country, and it didn’t feel that way at all.

The better part of the deal was the next day when we were taken for dinner with the whole committee and their families and that was a party! it was a bunch of us catching up on various things including the politics in Karnataka, the food in Australia, touring musicians and the whole lot. It was a night of great Indian food, lots of drink and tons of photos with everyone. A great bonding exercise that was very special for both us and them!

A HUGE round of thanks to Bhavya, Archana, Uma, Daya, their families and everyone else from the MKS who made this possible and for getting us into Melbourne, we completely loved it and would definitely do it again!

Watch this space for more photos and videos from the show! Also – check out Bhargav’s pictures from that night here – http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=240433&id=551474619