March 1 (Sunday) Sweden, Ytterjarna Unloading
We can even unload our own equipment onto the stage.
We are unloading. We do all kinds of work by ourselves. Our techie is Takaoki Masui! Our sound guy is Gen Hidaka! Lights: Midori Tamai!!! We are getting better and better at setting up the stage.  
March 2 (Monday) Sweden, Ytterjarna First Concert Day
SOLD　OUT！
At the end of last year’s “Shin-on” tour, we could set up our stage in about 90 minutes. But we are not used to our new “Matsuri” program and it still takes about 2.5 hours to get set up. Too long. If we could shorten that preparation time a little, we could have a little bit more practice time. We could polish up some spots on the program and eliminate all the unnecessary movements. We are working on improving our set-up efficiency every day so that we can increase our practice time. Because every day is SOLD OUT!  
March 3 (Tuesday) Sweden, Ytterjarna Second Concert Day
Oryaaa!!!!
No traveling or loading/unloading today, so we had a workshop!! One hour is hardly enough time to accomplish much. Tickets to our show are pretty expensive for students, though, and they begged to see us perform at least one song so we performed “Rakuda”. Yamato members will keep working hard until you guys can afford tickets to our show!  
March 4 (Wednesday) Sweden, Traveling Day to Ostersund
The theater
We just spent eight hours traveling by bus! The landscape was covered in snow the whole way. I am not really that comfortable around a lot of snow. I felt kind of quiet for the whole trip.  
March 5 (Thursday) Sweden, Ostersund Unloading
love French fries!
Traveling around Sweden and loading/unloading here is more work than usual, so our number of concerts is less than usual. We are not really that excited about it. I mean, we still get hungry, you know. The most convenient place to eat is McDonald’s. We hardly ever eat there when we are in Japan, but during tours we seem to eat there quite frequently.  
March 5, 6 (Thursday, Friday) Sweden, Ostersund - Concert
Uuhhh! – Tuning shime taiko
We only have one concert in this town and it’s today. The theater is not that large and the stage setting for our final number, “Hanabi” has us packed pretty tightly on stage. I guess there is always something that is not perfect. In the meantime, we need to tune up our shime taiko. Time to get to work. Let’s put all our strength and spirit into tuning up these drums.  
March 7 (Saturday) Day Off
It’s pretty cold.
Yesterday we had a great concert in a hall surrounded by wooden walls in a small theater where we could easily see the happy expressions of the audience members. Today we have a day off in this friendly town. Right next to our hotel is a market, so went to check it out. Of course, we are interested in the food. Guess what we found! Swedish salmon! We thought it would taste great with rice! Right away we got out the rice cooker. We brought along our own bowls and chopsticks so we could enjoy lunch outdoors.  
March 8 (Sunday) Sweden, On our way to Umea
Rice is really great, isn’t it.

We are on our way to Umea. This is the furthest north we will get for our 2009 EU tour. As we watched the snow getting deeper and deeper from our car windows, we got off the highway for a break in a small town.

Since we are Japanese, rice is a staple food for us, but it is not always easy to find Japanese rice here. We went to a supermarket and began looking for rice. We try to find rice that is similar to Japanese style rice and when we find it, we buy the lot. Now we can make tasty onigiri (rice balls) again.		  
March 9 (Monday) Sweden, Umea - Unloading day

 
Last week, we hear that the temperature in Umea got down to 25 degrees below zero (C). As a result the big river that we can see from our hotel window is completely frozen over.  
March 10 (Tuesday) Sweden, Umea - First concert day
It’s a cooking papa!
We’ll have three days of concerts in Umea. We always rent the kitchen at the theaters and do our own cooking. Usually the crew has sandwiches or eats out, but the family of our sound engineer, Eric, has come to visit all the way from Holland. For his family, Eric has put on Tamai Midori’s ladybug apron... Look at his knife skills!