The small report from The first meeting of Czechoslovak fans of Mike Oldfield |
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| This page is a part of Taurus II - The Czechoslovak website dedicated to Mike Oldfield. You can find this website here, but its content is in Czech and Slovak only. If you have any comments, send us an e-mail to taurus2@centrum.cz. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Report by: Jiri 'Taurus2' Smoldas |
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It was just a matter of time before the Czech fans of Mike Oldfield arranged themself a meeting to become familiar with one another
personally, not only by e-mail addresses or nicks from internet discussion forums. This meeting happened at the weekend between 19. 4. and 21. 4. 2002
and it was really fine. Thanks to the effort of one of these fans, the meeting took place at a really dignified place - the medieval Gothic-Renaissance
castle at Velhartice. There, many people met new friends with the same interest. Unfortunately, despite the fact meeting was intended for both Czech
and Slovak fans, nobody from Slovakia came, probably due to lack of leisure time or considerable distance. After the arrival all members moved to a selected room at the castle that was both dedicated and accurately technically equipped for this meeting. The first point of our programme was a little collective dinner inspired by On Horseback's lyrics I like beer and I like cheese. Then the 'meeting poster' was introduced and the evening advanced to a multimedia part - projection of videos and playing both rare and well known pieces of Mike's music. We also had a small exchange of records. Members able to play a musical instrument performed pieces of Mike Oldfield's work in breaks between videos or music. Then, after this first evening, which was accompanied by a harsh castle cold, we went to sleep. The offer we received was a very broad-minded one: both the performance room and place to sleep were free of charge. On the other hand, we made a promise to dedicate Saturday morning and a part of the afternoon for supporting and maintaining work at the castle and its surroundings. So many Czech fans could be seen working with wheelbarrows, grinding benches or on the stepladders in the Saturday. The pure Mike Oldfield part of the meeting started again at about 17 o'clock. We'd begun with lecture about Amarok (music analysis, making, trivia, sales numbers and charts positions etc.) followed by listening to the whole record. It was quite impressive due to the fact that all of us were sitting in the dark room and the sound quality was really good. The consequences of this were positive; those who hadn't been interested in Amarok before mostly changed their opinion. There was a little break after Amarok for a breath of fresh air (really neccessary after such an experience :o). Then the programme continued again with videos and other music. As midnight passed, most of us found themselves very tired and left to the bed. The last day of the weekend started with departure preparations. Then the time for castle sightseeing tour (quite special one when compared to a tour for ordinary visitors of the castle) came. Some photos of the whole group were of course taken. The last thing we planned was to climb up the nearest hill and pronounced it to be 'Czech Hergest Ridge'. But we hadn't time enough to do it so maybe next time. Conclusion? Although the weather wasn't very nice (according to our organizer, it couldn't have been better in that area in that part of year) the meeting was really fine and successful. We are already looking for the next one. The first magnificient meeting of (Czech) fans of Mike Oldfield Place: The Velhartice castle (the region of Pilsen, in the Sumava mountains near the Czech-Austria border) Total attendace: 23 (20 boys, 3 girls, 0 other) A few photos: Click for larger (in the most cases 800x600) version
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