I decided on an artist name, made a website, chose a distribution service and created social media accounts. All together this took a lot of time but I liked it.
Apart from the social media stuff. But I thought I’ll try if I can keep doing it and in the beginning I did a lot of postings. Soon I’ll continue, I guess.
In January I had to do a border run to Armenia with Rosinante. Because of customs regulations.
It was actually super nice to spend some time in a mild climate and just hanging around outside. And it was super nice to experience Armenian hospitality again. After a couple of minutes at a nice spot at a river, some guys started a barbeque and invited me to join. We had a great time together.
After a night in Armenia, I went to Tbilisi, visited a nice bazaar with Whoopy and met Racki who went down from the mountain with a Minibus. Together we went to the airport to pick up a friend of her who came to visit us. We spent a nice time in Tbilisi sight seeing and in the evening we went for dinner and a cocktail bar.
In the cocktail bar we met friends who we had met in Gudauri. Our time in the bar was crazy. The waitress and bar keeper was absolutely drunk and maybe on some other drugs and we had weird but funny conversations. After some time a Russian girl joined us. She was drunk as well, very funny, had a rich husband and in the end she paid all our drinks.
And the friend of Racki brought my snowboard and equipment that I had bought in Germany via Kleinanzeigen. It was super awesome to finally have my own stuff. My snowboard was pure red and I called it ZÀpfchen. The friend of Racki got late to the airport in Germany because of the public transport. He was so late that there was no time to check in the big bag with all my stuff properly and so the airline let him bring the big bag without paying.
After two days another friend of Racki joined us and together we had so much fun snowboarding, hanging around and spending time together.
After a couple of days in her new job in a small hotel in Gudauri Racki’s bosses offered us to move from Rosinante in a special apartment. For free.
The apartment was used mainly as a storage room. The owner had started to renovate it, ran out of money and so it was only partly renovated. There was no proper floor and because there was a lot of concrete dust, I put cardboard walls on the whole floor. That’s the reason why we called it the Pappartment. “Pappe” is a German word for these cardboard walls. We cleaned and reorganized a lot and then the place got our living space.
In a separate room with glass walls Racki and I established our small living space and after some work on the electric wires etc. we had light and electricity.
And after some installations in the bathroom we had a shower, a toilet with manual bucket-flush, and a shelf.
It was a very different way to live like that but it was very warm and for free. And we had a balcony pointing directly to all the lifts. So we could always check how the weather was and which lifts were running.
Directly under our Pappartment was a rock bar: Old Monkey. We had a lot of fun there but at some point we got a bit crazy about the loud music they were playing mostly every night. And the craziest thing about that was that the same songs got repeated over and over again. I guess for the ordinary guests that was no issue because most of them stay just a couple of days, but we stayed for months and so we developed a serious aversion to Queen songs.