Archives for March 2nd, 2005

Top: A ticket to the U2 concert in Vienna this summer. (€60)
Bottom: My ticket from a U2 concert in Atlanta 13 years ago. (€22)

Thanks to my connections with the local mafia, I managed to get U2 tickets for the Vertigo tour this summer in Vienna. On July 2nd, I’ll be in the beautiful (and beautifully named) Ernst Happel Stadium shouting "Freeeebird!" together with 50.000 of my closest friends.

The last time I saw U2 was thirteen years ago. I know because I recently rummaged through some old junk and found my ticket stub from back then. (See picture above) Imagine how I felt when I realized how much time had passed between the two concerts. (Hint)

Luckily, Vienna is only a three-hour tour from here if everything goes well. Some people (you know the kind) insist that they can make the journey in just 15 minutes. (Even less if there’s no traffic.)

Either way, going to Austria for concerts is a pretty common thing here. Some big names (Anastacia, Rammstein, REM) have stopped in Ljubljana recently, but U2 won’t be one of them. In fact, their tour of Europe avoids every post-communist country except Poland. (Not even Bono could forget about Poland.)

To help illustrate this divide, here’s a table showing the European cities U2 will be playing in:

For those of you counting, that’s 30 shows in western Europe and one in the east, although I’m sure many people would strongly object to Poland being considered "eastern" instead of "central." So, by that line of reasoning, you could argue that U2’s European tour will have 31 shows — not one of them in eastern Europe.

Either way, I’m looking forward to it — so long as I can resist the urge to sell my tickets on ebay and make a tidy profit…