These strange explosions hit me...
I can report that I've survived my first music festival, even at my advanced age, and the advanced temperature in southern Germany. First of all, thanks to Laura-of-no-LJ-account for providing the camping expertise, for pooling brainpower on musical research (and brains really were in a pool, believe me), and above all for giving me the social facilitation/donut/excuse to go in the first place. Cheers.
Getting there was definitely not half the fun. We'd underestimated how long it'd take to get into Munich from the airport, got a later train than we'd bargained on (a rather nice "EC" consist heading to Strasbourg, though not great on the catering front), and when we had to change trains at Ulm, it turned out to be a teeny little regional number, which of course was absolutely packed with festival-goers. And I don't mean "busy" packed, or "standing room only" packed -- I mean "Boyle's law" packed. We gave up trying to get on, and then tried to work out when the next one would be, which seemed on the face of it to be "not until tomorrow". Eventually it transpired that another train was being rerouted (we think) to cope with the demand, and this left about another hour later. Total chaos at Tuttlingen -- mobs of kids, piles of trash, oceans of beer. Very few transfer buses. When we did get on one, I ended up talking to a girl from Lower Bavaria, who'd had an even longer train journey than hours, and who'd been on the train we'd missed, such was the length of time people had been milling around waiting at that end. Lots more jollity pitching the tent, in the pitch dark.
The next day it was distinctly hot, and scorchingly sunny, and given the transfer bus chaos, decided to give up on the idea of going back into town to shop and such, and to just subsist on on-site concession. This created something of a nicotine crunch for L, since evidently one ciggy company had the exclusive rights, but didn't have their act together enough to be selling any at this time, the "stadium" area not being open until just before the first band came on. (Later on, they had pushers wandering around selling from trays, and at least one small stand in the camping area, but seemingly not at that point.) Eventually she was saved by an extraordinarily helpful -- and trusting! -- Russian-German security guard who told us where there was a vending machine, let me go in (to what I think was technically part of the backstage area), and then when my debit and credit cards (required to age-verify) wouldn't work, actually _lent me his own_. Missed a perfect opportunity to go cold turkey, if you ask me.
Then the small matter of the actual music. I'll do this in either a separate post, or a later edit. In brief, pretty darn great! Predictably, one rapidly reaches saturation, and later ends up kicking oneself over bands one has missed due to needing to eat, sit down, or just plain gasp for breath.
Coming back we had similar fun as arriving, in reverse. On the plus side, the queues for the showers were gone, and there was even both pressure and warmth to the water, the former especially be a real first. On the minus, the vendors had packed up and gone home, and we'd no camping supplies of food at all. The previous morning's successful plan of stashing a couple of cheesy pretzels from the night before also couldn't be repeated, sadly. So we had to queue for a transfer bus, in yet-again-blazing sun, with no breakfast. Chaos at the railway station as they tried to both cater for all the hungry arrivals like ourselves, and get them on trains to... somewhere. And "get on a train to somewhere" is pretty much the plan we decided to go with, getting a regional pass so that we'd be able to jump on whichever train looked feasible. On that basis, we seized on Stuttgart. We might have been better going to Ulm instead, and giving ourselves an extra hour to wander (or laze) the next day, but the urge to actually get a seat on the train won out, together with the thought that we were unlikely to be doing anything very adventurous, wherever it was we did end up.
Hotel room! Proper shower! And a lovely Spanish(ish) meal, with some delicious Wuerttembergish dunkel. Yum! While I'd been able to get wheat beer during the festival -- Franziskaner, ironically a Bavarian variety -- they were only selling the hel there, which is OK, but not nearly as tasty. Darn sight better than the backwash out Glorious Sponsors Beck's sell, though. Had a chat with a local bar-owner downstairs in the hotel, while catching up on a fragment of a Guardian, who explained to me why I ought not to abbreviate B-W to "Baden" while in Stuttgart -- oops! -- and how Irish and Scottish football fans were grand, but as for the English... And thence to bed, back to Muenchen the next day (on a train headed to Salzburg, though confusingly, not an "EC" this time, just an "IC"), and home to Caaaaark -- and rain. At that point, it felt as much like industrial coolant as it did a climatic come-down. After all the cigarette-related shenanigans in smoking-friendly Germany, seeing L. confined to the smoking "pen" at the airport here reminded me strongly of the "Moss and the German" episode of The IT Crowd.
Getting there was definitely not half the fun. We'd underestimated how long it'd take to get into Munich from the airport, got a later train than we'd bargained on (a rather nice "EC" consist heading to Strasbourg, though not great on the catering front), and when we had to change trains at Ulm, it turned out to be a teeny little regional number, which of course was absolutely packed with festival-goers. And I don't mean "busy" packed, or "standing room only" packed -- I mean "Boyle's law" packed. We gave up trying to get on, and then tried to work out when the next one would be, which seemed on the face of it to be "not until tomorrow". Eventually it transpired that another train was being rerouted (we think) to cope with the demand, and this left about another hour later. Total chaos at Tuttlingen -- mobs of kids, piles of trash, oceans of beer. Very few transfer buses. When we did get on one, I ended up talking to a girl from Lower Bavaria, who'd had an even longer train journey than hours, and who'd been on the train we'd missed, such was the length of time people had been milling around waiting at that end. Lots more jollity pitching the tent, in the pitch dark.
The next day it was distinctly hot, and scorchingly sunny, and given the transfer bus chaos, decided to give up on the idea of going back into town to shop and such, and to just subsist on on-site concession. This created something of a nicotine crunch for L, since evidently one ciggy company had the exclusive rights, but didn't have their act together enough to be selling any at this time, the "stadium" area not being open until just before the first band came on. (Later on, they had pushers wandering around selling from trays, and at least one small stand in the camping area, but seemingly not at that point.) Eventually she was saved by an extraordinarily helpful -- and trusting! -- Russian-German security guard who told us where there was a vending machine, let me go in (to what I think was technically part of the backstage area), and then when my debit and credit cards (required to age-verify) wouldn't work, actually _lent me his own_. Missed a perfect opportunity to go cold turkey, if you ask me.
Then the small matter of the actual music. I'll do this in either a separate post, or a later edit. In brief, pretty darn great! Predictably, one rapidly reaches saturation, and later ends up kicking oneself over bands one has missed due to needing to eat, sit down, or just plain gasp for breath.
Coming back we had similar fun as arriving, in reverse. On the plus side, the queues for the showers were gone, and there was even both pressure and warmth to the water, the former especially be a real first. On the minus, the vendors had packed up and gone home, and we'd no camping supplies of food at all. The previous morning's successful plan of stashing a couple of cheesy pretzels from the night before also couldn't be repeated, sadly. So we had to queue for a transfer bus, in yet-again-blazing sun, with no breakfast. Chaos at the railway station as they tried to both cater for all the hungry arrivals like ourselves, and get them on trains to... somewhere. And "get on a train to somewhere" is pretty much the plan we decided to go with, getting a regional pass so that we'd be able to jump on whichever train looked feasible. On that basis, we seized on Stuttgart. We might have been better going to Ulm instead, and giving ourselves an extra hour to wander (or laze) the next day, but the urge to actually get a seat on the train won out, together with the thought that we were unlikely to be doing anything very adventurous, wherever it was we did end up.
Hotel room! Proper shower! And a lovely Spanish(ish) meal, with some delicious Wuerttembergish dunkel. Yum! While I'd been able to get wheat beer during the festival -- Franziskaner, ironically a Bavarian variety -- they were only selling the hel there, which is OK, but not nearly as tasty. Darn sight better than the backwash out Glorious Sponsors Beck's sell, though. Had a chat with a local bar-owner downstairs in the hotel, while catching up on a fragment of a Guardian, who explained to me why I ought not to abbreviate B-W to "Baden" while in Stuttgart -- oops! -- and how Irish and Scottish football fans were grand, but as for the English... And thence to bed, back to Muenchen the next day (on a train headed to Salzburg, though confusingly, not an "EC" this time, just an "IC"), and home to Caaaaark -- and rain. At that point, it felt as much like industrial coolant as it did a climatic come-down. After all the cigarette-related shenanigans in smoking-friendly Germany, seeing L. confined to the smoking "pen" at the airport here reminded me strongly of the "Moss and the German" episode of The IT Crowd.