Well, what a time to be away. Congrats to my co-contributors here at In Fact, Ah and to all the other award winners at the Blog Awards which took place while I was away snowboarding in Italy.

As for my holiday I can highly recommend Livigno. I went with a group of sixteen mates and we had a ball. Watch out for the long coach transfer time from the airport (4/5 hours) and after that you'll be fine. DirectSki.ie were very helpful right through from booking to after we got back when they got one of their reps to bring home a forgotten snowboard a few days after we returned.

In Livigno itself the nightlife is of the cheesy music variety and the single nightclub in the town is best avoided. In many of the bars we had great banter and craic with some Italians and other Europeans.

Despite all the tourists being a captive market up there eating out is extremely good value for money. The food on offer is really great and the prices are mind boggling. A Fillet Steak in posh surroundings comes to about 13 Euros for example. A beer in a pub goes for about 3 Euros while 1 Litre of premium spirits in the supermarket (Jameson, Smirnoff, etc.) goes for about 8.50 Eurons. If you want to buy equipment I'd say you'd be hard pushed to find better value anywhere in Europe, some of our party bought middle of the range Boards/Boots/Bindings at very low prices.

Last and most importantly, it's quite a high resort (highest lift goes to 3000 meters) so you can be confident of good conditions (well for what, another 20 years anyways?), there is an extremely wide variety of blue and red runs in particular with some blacks which I can't comment on. It never seemed crowded on the mountain.

While de-briefing my camera from the holiday I was pleasantly surprised to find a decent video of Au Revoir Simone's performance in Whelan's on Feb 28th last, so here it is. Great gig, big up to Nialler for the heads up on it. Get them in your ears.


Au Revoir Simone - Dark Halls



I unfortunately forgot to take the camera along to Michael Mayer on Fri 2nd March in the Temple Bar Music Centre (where a bunch of us went directly to the Airport from for a 6a.m. flight to Livigno, mucho fun!). So I was pleasantly surprised on my return to find that Una has a raft of snaps from the night here and here (any vid Una?) and enjoyed it as much as I did.

Mayer may not have the overbearing hard edged detonation-techno feel that some contributors around here with a Mc in their name feel is necessary to be of any worth and he certainly doesn't pursue the atonal sparsity of the minimal-meisters. There is a third way and Mayer, the co-founder of super-prolific Kompakt records and mother of its distinctive sound, has the undeniable Rolls-Royce skills with record selection and mixing abilities. There's no denying he has the touch of genius which was first trumpeted by his seminal mix Immer all those years ago.

tags: tagname

Published by Paul.