After a good night of sleep in the
River Side (motherfucker) hostel, we packed our stuff to head for the Heineken Open'er Festival in Gdynia. In the pouring rain, and after a quick stop at a monument
which remembers the beginning of the end of communism and a picture next to a
piece of the Berlin Wall, we took the train to Sopot, where we walked around
for a while and enjoyed a nice hot chocolate. We met up with Pawel, my Polish
Erasmus friend from Warsaw, who gave us tents for the festival and we hit the
train again for Gdynia!
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| Piece of the Berlin Wall |
Barely inside the camping site, we
met up with three West-Vlamingen (Flemish guys with an accent we barely
understood) and we decided to put up our tents next to each other. I’m not going to write too much about the
festival itself, most of you who know me, know how we roll: sleeping until the
heat of the sun chases you out of your tent, having a beer for breakfast and
chilling on the camping site until we want to see the first group. Not this
time! Basically it was raining every morning when we woke up, and then 30°C for
the rest of the day… Beer, except for
Heineken (but since when is that beer), and other alcohol is not allowed on the
camping site. You’re not allowed to cook on the camping site either. Bands only
start playing around 17hr, so except for a theater, a museum and a movie
theater, there’s nothing to do around the festival until 17hr. A festival site so big, that it takes
literally 30minutes (without crowd traffic or whatsoever) to get from the main stage
to the second biggest stage. And the worst is yet to come: on the festival site
you cannot drink alcohol in front of a stage, you have to stay behind ‘Heras’-fences
until you finish your glass. Who
invented that sh*t?
One thing they couldn’t help: rain,
so much rain…: Mud was the bummer of the weekend
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| Anyone needs mud? |
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| You need to wash? |
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| Festival, belgian style |
Good things are: International and
local top artists for only 95euros for a four days festival, camping included.
1,5euros per 0,4liter of Heineken/ Desperados. A festival on a airfield, so
plenty of space. Little crowd for all the gigs and big screens at all major
stages, so you can easily be in the front to see your favorite artist or band. Two
stages which are located INSIDE an old bunker where airplanes used to be put,
camouflaged from radars and satellites: epic moments indeed. [And yes, they do
know the Tetris dubstep remix here, as well as Gotye’s Somebody I Used To Know].
After realizing there was nothing to
do around the festival during the day, we decided to do some sightseeing in the
cities located around the festival site every day, before heading for the
concerts at night. Our first stop was, yet again, SOPOT, known for its 513m
long pier, it’s a quiet holiday town in the north of Poland. We chilled on the
pier for a couple of hours before taking the boat to …. HEL! Yes, ladies and
gentlemen this trio went on a boat to Hel and back! It was a 1,5hr trip to get
there and unfortunately we only had 30mins to be in Hel –yes, it even was kind
of hot there- -I even went for a quick swim in Hel, and then 1,5hr back. A
successive excursion if you ask us.
We went to Hel and came back alive.
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| Biggest pier of Poland - official start of EEET 2012 |
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| Port Hel - " we went by boat to Hel and back!! " |
The next day, we just stayed at the
camping site. We were going to sleep for a bit in the afternoon as we were still
tired of the travelling etc., and Liesbeth and me were still exhausted from
Rock Werchter festival in Belgium. But then again, we were on a festival… We
met a nice Canadian (so nice Canadians do exist!) and chatted for like two
hours about a lot of stuff. He and his brother have this pact with each other
that they do one different festival every year. They’ve been going to a
different festival every year for 13 years now. After all that chitchat, it was
already time to hit the festival again, so no napping for us…
The last day of the festival we went
to GDYNIA and mainly visited the beach, the port etc. Nice to see that in so
little time, since the fall of the Berlin Wall, some cities have become so
touristic and pretty – not that they weren’t pretty before of course-.
Sunday morning, we got up at 6.45
(!!), packed up our bags and tents and dragged ourselves to the train station
of Gdynia where we took the train to Warsaw, together with Pawel. In Warsaw we then
met up with Justyna, Silke (BE) and Wojciech, but that’s for the next post!
peace out_
Toon,Liesbeth&Thibault
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| Off to the next city w. Tony Starr |
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