Magu Bee at World's End

A travel blog of one crazy Magu Bee traveling the globe.

Roskilde was my first music festival and I must admit in a lot of ways it surprised me. Mostly on the negative side.





Hi guys,
So the time has come for me to move on to a new domain, so please come join Magu Bee on Facebook from now on. 
You'll see new pictures from around the globe, get travel updates, links to my articles and more :)
See you soon and thanks for being here with me.
Love,
Magu



Don't get me wrong - I enjoyed myself and my newly met company tremendously, got to learn some new things and other's ways, discovered some new bands I like. However, the technical part of it?..
I mean, isn't a 'music festival' supposed to be about music? I guess I'm very naive to think so - 80% of other people consider it to be a 'beer/alcohol in general festival' or 'let go/act crazy' festival. For about 1% it's a 'working festival', but that's a different story for a different day.
Myself, I called it the 'piss festival'.



However you call it though, the thing is impressive. There's over 100 000 participants each year (visitors, staff) and the festival grounds are huge. I arrived there on Wednesday, the camp site had been opened for a couple of days by then and so I was welcomed by seemingly endless lines of tents.





From the outside it all looks nice and peachy - colourful and lively with music pouring out of every corner. As I soon realised, to my huge surprise, it was all but nice.


The camping grounds were divided into two parts - the East and the West, which further split into sectors, each crossed with numerous paths. In the beginning it was not THAT bad - of course, when you have thousands of people camping out you're bound to have some garbage around. I never expected it to be dumpster grounds though.. Another thing was the smell. Again - so many people and hectoliters of beer and other earthly beverages don't help your bladder's case. Although there were quite a few toilets at visitors' disposal, not many people cared to use them - the fence or the bars separating different sectors turned out to be far more appealing, at least to a huge percentage of the male population. Just as beer doesn't help one's bladder, it doesn't make their piss any bit less smelly, on the contrary. It seems like the Scandinavians have not heard this well know fact (to be honest, it's not only Scandinavians - there are just as many foreigners peeing at the festival)


I talked to a few friends about what happens to those nice, well -mannered people once they reach Roskilde. The only answer is: they're away on holiday. Who comes to Roskilde is the barely ever sober, sleeping in the trash and living in the filth loud moroanish person, instead.


In the mornings the inside of the tents tends to get really hot, and I'd suppose even smellier in some cases, so many people are seen taking their matts/mattresses outside and sleeping out in the open.


By the time the festival was in full swing, thus Friday, the camp site looked more like a refugee camp, a war zone or a hastily abandoned tent village, than a place people came to spend time at while enjoying some good music.


In the background you can see the tower the German girl commited suecide from. Oh, have I mentioned whom I got a ride with back to Berlin? Yup, was lucky enough to get one ride from Roskilde straight to Germany. Yup, with the dead girl's best friend. It was kinda freakish to be sitting in a spot where the girl was supposed to be sitting. But most of all, it was very sad - the friend was in a bad shape and thinking about how she could help 2 little children, who had been left without family, wasn't helping her cope with the situation.


The weather was very nice apart from 2 days I, during which everything was not  only not washed away, but brought back up to the ground level, which in turn resulted in quite some mud and a lot of smell. The previous  day I was convinced it couldn't get worse - never say never!On the  last day of the festival they had people distribute hay, so that others could walk without getting trapped in the mud or falling flat on their faces. And so the smell got unbearable.


The camp on the last day, evidence that  people have loads of money in this part of the world - who else would mistreat and abandon so many of their belongings?

0 komentarze: