Roskilde Festival

~ Madame Ghandi ~ The Weeknd ~ Bonobo ~ Rag'n'Bone Man ~ Justice ~ Future Islands ~

~ Royal Blood ~ The XX ~ Nas ~ NONAME ~ Tinashe ~ Father John Misty ~ Trentemøller ~

~ Foo Fighters ~ LORDE ~ The Lumineers ~ Halsey ~ Ice Cube ~ Arcade Fire ~

~ Moderat/Modeselektor ~ Freddie Gibbs ~

There were at least 175 concerts, but the ones I remember going to are listed above. People keep asking me what this festival and my experience at it was like. Summarizing it in any kind of cohesive or concise way is near impossible, so I'm going to try to break it up into days. 

Friday Night

We got there and, having set up our tents a week in advance, we had little to do in the ways of getting settled in. We went out to hit up the local Aldi for some booze/snacks, and to grabb dinner in town. Gauging how much alcohol was necessary for this trip was nearly impossible. From what we could gather, people were basically fucked up the whole time. Honestly, Aldi was 2.5 miles from our campsite, so it was hardly a quick trip. 

We grabbed dinner at a mediterranean place next door. It was not the best food I'd ever eaten, but the guy making the pizzas was gorgeous. This was the first place that I had gone where no one really spoke English at all. I just ordered a cheese pizza. 

We made the trek back home, but saw some fires on the way there. It was the summer solstice, which is some kind of "witch festival" here (i think?), so there were bonfires all over town. We spent an incredibly long time trying to find the bon fire party, but only managed to find the east city queue. 

The people who were in line to move in had already been there for 6 days at this point. It's essentially black friday shoppers level 10. The party started when they got there, and it was incredibly loud and right next to our campsite. I can't even believe how large the sound systems that people were hauling around with them on carts were.

We went to bed when we were informed that all of the bonfires were done for the night, since we had to get up so early for our volunteer shifts. Only the art zone and Benji were here this night, though, because others schedules didn't start for a while.

Saturday

I'm not sure what I was really expecting from the art zone. I knew it would be a significant amount of physical labor, but it was definitely more exhausting than I had accounted/prepared for.

We arrived ten minutes early for our first shift, and couldn't find where we were supposed to meet. We eventually stumbled upon a circle of people standing and moving their bodies erratically. Turns out it was the daily art zone warm up. I felt at home immediately. (lol) 

We did some general stretches and turned to massage our neighbors in preparation for the long day's work.  (Little did know how much I would come to appreciate these 45 second massages in the day to come.) Then we went to work.

I went off to start painting the walls black for incoming graffiti artists with a man named Christian. He was a Dane who worked as a teacher in a special needs school. He had started out as a house painter and changed career paths completely a decade or so later. (This is not uncommon in Denmark, where education is paid for by taxes.) To be honest, the guy gave off slightly creepy vibes, though (He was way older than me, and asking about my relationships and if I have a boyfriend, etc.). But he was nice enough.

After we finished painting, I started working with the plant trellises. We were cutting metal and hauling around plants to attach to them in wheel barrows. It ended up being one of my favorite tasks, honestly. The only downside was how cold it was, and how hard it was raining. After we had made a significant number of these, the time to start attaching them to the plain brown barns had come.

This wouldn't have been an issue, if we hadn't had 3 separate architects working on this at the same time. They all had completely different ideas of what it should look like at the end. There was a common theme, when volunteering in the art zone, of doing and undoing and redoing work. It was very organized and well-planned, but incredibly inefficiently executed. But I guess that can be expected of the creative art types.

Me with wall of plant trellises ft. George, the beautiful Parisian

It was like this, kind of. Or based on it.

We were invited to the work meeting that was later that evening (but, seeing as we had already worked approximately 2 hours over time, half of the DIS team opted out.) It was nice to hang out with them. The art zone and other volunteers had a cool little hang out room in the back of the Gloria venue. It had lots of old, funky couches, some coffee tables, lamps, and our bosses gave us a ton of free beer. 

They also told us that we should tell the others to come after work next time, because we were going to be competing in a decathlon against the other stage crews. (Art zone is considered a "stage" as well.)

Sunday

At this point the exhaustion was setting in, and I was trying to fight off a severe case of FOMO (fear of missing out.) All of the others were staying out until 5 am partying in Dream City, and I was physically done for. The Art Zone fed us well with the volunteer buffet, but my body needed so much food to function at all. I was not sleeping well at night in the camp. I was too cold and the ground was hard and everything was noisy.

I was having fun in the Art Zone, though. Everyone there was in design school and making cool things. Famous artists were there. A Danish man was trying to get this giant inflatable jellyfish to stay in the sky. (It had LED lights and was basically a giant beach ball filled with helium.)

It was not working. Basically, no one took the danish winds into account. More than one person asked if it was a light up uterus (?) After work was fun, though.

We went to the work meeting and took a hike over to Arena for the decathlon. Them trying to explain a decathlon to me since they didn't know the english word for it was comical. "It's like in the olympics where you do more than one kind of competition????" Unfortunately, I don't really watch the olympics and was doing very little to be of assistance. 

There were five events. One was a beer chugging relay, then a blindfolded maze (our boss, Christopher, did this one), then a mystery box relay, then tug of war, then a mystery contest.

I was too intoxicated to really know who won the first ones, but the Danes can toss back a beer in approximately .3 seconds. It's astounding. 

We ended up winning the blindfold race. They were guided by two or three of their other team members verbally. 

I participated in the mystery box relay. Basically, you lined up and sprinted to the boxes, ate/drank something in it, and ran back. The first person to go (Imke, the architect) got a carton of whipping cream. She's lactose intolerant. Then Ally went and drank a can of coca cola. When I ran up, I had to eat a 16 ounce cup full of "sand cake," which you can get at convenience stores. I was basically gagging because there wasn't enough saliva in my mouth to swallow it. Zack finished up the race by eating 4 large pickles. I have no idea who won. It was a blast.

The final challenge was up next. We were handed a crow bar, a roll of duct tape, a knife, and a tent bag. Then, they announced that we had to make the best gladiator costume out of the bag's contents. The art zone was (obviously) very excited by this one because it was all about creativity, and almost all of the art zone volunteers were in artistic career fields outside of the festival. 

I'm attaching a couple of videos to illustrate what I mean.

We won. (apparently art zone never wins, so that was cool)

We took our 200+ free beers to the volunteer area and continued with the party. A norwegian girl named Jasmine that I had been working with offered to roll me my first cigarette. I smoked it, and regretted it the the next day. 

Monday

I had been up all night, because I was too cold and too drunk to sleep. I spent a while talking to my Erin before I had tried to sleep. My tent was cold, and my tent mate didn't get back until five am. I almost threw up but I was afraid to. It was miserable.

Monday was also the day that I missed a talk by Opal Tometu, the founder of Black Lives Matter, which I was pretty bummed about. The hangover didn't help with my negativity at all. We worked hard all day, ate a shit ton of food, got covered in bruises, and I went home to Copenhagen that night. The whole day is blurry because I was so exhausted. 

I showered, warmed up, and got a good six hour nap in before I hopped on the train back to the festival.

________________________________

I wrote this post a year and a half ago and never finished it. I guess I'll just publish it as is with the amendment that there were about five more days unaccounted for here. They were filled with awesome conversations with some people who have basically committed their lives to attending music festivals. They're all wildly interesting in different ways. (One of them is a model with an internship as the Pope's social media assistant at the Vatican, another grows shrooms and lives in New Orleans, and another good friend of mine is leading an anti-sexual assault/rape culture movement up in Wisconsin. They're all doing neat things, and I'm glad to have known them and had them be family when we literally knew nobody else in most of our first times out of the country alone. I remember that community more than I remember any of the partying now that time has passed, though the partying did happen in excess the entire festival.