Watermark 2004

Ihre Tour führte sie von Minneapolis über die Ostküste der USA nach Tschechien, von Februar bis April ging es durch Deutschland. Im Mai führte die Reise noch durch Tschechien und Rumänien, bis die Tournee schließlich in den USA im Juli abgeschlossen wurde.

Hier ein Auszug aus Steves Tour-Tagebuch auf youthencounter.org:

I've been thinking a lot lately about familiarity and the "fishbowl effect." Over the last few days we have been in the Vogtland region of Germany, on the northwestern border of Sachsen (Saxony) where it meets up with our former location of Thueringen. We spent Wednesday through Saturday based in the town of Reichenbach, just outside of Plauen and home to the Goeltzschtalbruecke, the largest stone bridge in the world. We had the usual drill of school visits for question-and-answer sessions, although this time one of the teachers had a board game to direct the conversation, which helps when the students have trouble thinking of questions or are too shy or nervous to ask them in English. On the other hand, a few of us also visited an after-school program at Reichenbach's Goethe-Gymnasium called the Cambridge Club, which is a group of students working through a special English course with the goal of eventually studying in or making an extended visit to an English-speaking country. As such, these students were interested in speaking English and a little more practiced at it, which made it a lot of fun for us. Our concert was not in the church but a sort of hall for hire called the Begegungsstaette, which is convenient since we have just discovered that Begegung is the German word for Encounter. This was one of the handful of concerts we have where we really feel like a "rock band" – lights down in the hall, colored lights on us (fortunately no smoke machine this time), a very youth-focused atmosphere. It seems odd to think of ourselves as "rock stars," which we still don't consider ourselves, but it was fun for that night. Saturday morning we walked around the Reichenbach town square, a local castle formerly used by Kaiser Karl IV and the Goeltzschtalbruecke taking our overseas publicity photos which will be used on our return tour. [..]

We're into the part of our tour where many things and people have been and will be familiar to me. I have visited the Goeltzschtalbruecke in Reichenbach and the Rathaus in Pausa, and the schools in both towns as well. I have vivid memories of the Reichenbach Begegungsstaette and Pausa Jugendclub and can visualize the school in Zeulenroda we don't visit until tomorrow and the church in Oelsnitz/Erzgebirge we won't see until Wednesday, even though two years have passed. The strange, slightly exciting and more than a little scary thing is that people remember me as well. In many of the places we have been to – the Gemeinschaft in Reichenbach, the youth group in Pausa, people in Gotha and Jena before that – at least a few people come up to me without my having said anything and mention that they were at one of our concerts, saw me in their school, etc. two years ago. It amazes me that people would remember me two years after a few days' (or even one day's) visit – I've never thought of myself as being that memorable – but it's an example of the "fishbowl effect" common to all teams.