Posts: 640
Posted: Sat Aug 11, 2007 1:17 am
Wow, what a disappointment. Does this stadium really have a 100k person capacity?
2/3 nights in the Rose Bowl done and I'm already wishing it was back in Madison, or even better Gilette.
Most people (including myself) have been forced to bring/buy a cushion of some sort as the seats are so hard. And anyone over 5 feet tall has to warp their legs into an unnatural position so that your knees don't jam into the seat in front of you. There's a single little grouping of rose bushes near one of the parking lots. The parking that most people have to use is on grass and it costs $15. The lights make a loud buzzing noise (which is really fucking annoying as I'm attending a drum corps show and it completely drowns out some of the softer pieces being played) and the field is in shambles. They didn't do any maintenance on the field since the last game, you could still see where they had the names of the teams in the grass (they just tore out the grass so there were giant holes all over the field) plus the regular holes that are created during a football game. I've watched at least a dozen people fall over the last 2 days, all in the exact same area. They didn't even repaint the yard markers/hash marks before the first show, one of the corps had to walk off the field and demand that the field be patched up for the safety of the kids. As for the concessions, fucking expensive and I've eaten better food at high school stadiums around the United States (Allentown, PA, Battle Creek, MI among others). I'll be damned if I'm paying $3 for a fucking bottle of water, luckily you can bring in A bottle if it's unopened.
As for Pasadena, it's really nothing special. The downtown is okay to walk around for a bit, but they're in no way prepared for a musical even such as this, and I don't know how they handle the football games that fill up the whole stadium (one one side is used by spectators at DCI shows), there's maybe 50k-60k people here for this event, every hotel that's within an hours drive is booked. For Individuals they had the events scattered through five buildings, some that were a good 10 minute walk away from the others, and they fucked up the scheduling, making it even more complicated and confusing. By the time I figured out the system I was able to see 5 performances, I was there for over 5 hours, each performance was at most 12 minutes long. And many of the restaurants refuse to take reservations from the corps, screwing up many traditional pre-finals bashes. "a few of us will arrive early to stake a multi-table claim" - the description of the event I'm attending at the Yard House (which has a really nice spicy chicken breast sammich, ate there on individuals night). As for the mayor of Pasadena, he declared the 6-11th Drum Corps week, of course, he announced that on the 10th so all could know! And apparently when he came to the show and saw the horns and colour guard he became confused as he thought it was "drum corps," which is used by all Drum Corps fans as a short form for Drum and Bugle Corps.
Oh well... At least there's no large overhang, those can create some mighty fine echoes, especially from the drums.
Forum Junkie 
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