Rockin' Roskilde

OK, so I'm not exactly a heavy metal junkie, nor am I a total music nut. In fact, I don't know many other people (besides the friend I went with) who would quite happily book a ticket to a music festival without actually knowing who is playing on the day you're there. Then, once the schedule comes out, only recognising two of the bands (giving a total of no more than 5 familiar songs). No matter, the purpose of our one day expedition to the four day (plus a few pre-days) Roskilde festival was to enjoy ourselves, experience the Danish festival culture, chill out with some nice music, and hear some bands live that I would otherwise never hear. It didn't fail on any account.

Roskilde, home of the famous Viking Museum, is a small town in Zealand, which once a year hosts a multi-day music festival. Approximately 60,000 guests descend on the camp-grounds for up to a week. Another 15,000 or so day-trippers show up each day. I was one of the latter group.

My first impression of the festival? Urine. Yes, Roskilde is also famous for camp grounds that smell of pee, and as the entrance from the train station was through one of the camp grounds, we were greeted with the wonderful smell of fresh urine. But this was just the start of my urine education, not only is the festival home to the newly developed "4-place" female urinal stall, but even the male urinals are quite ingenious. Why waste money on rooms and walls? Danes have a thing about peeing in public, so what better way to do so than have mobile urinal stalls pre-fabricated?! Despite hundreds of these all over the ground, you could still find a gentleman peeing against a wall or a bush around nearly every corner.

Groups use flags (or random stuff on long poles) so they don't lose
each other in the crowds. The Aussie flag appeared a few times.

And then, there were the women. I had heard about this but had trouble believing it. For some reason it doesn't seem that bad for men to pee in public, even if they aren't as discreet about it here as you might find in other countries. But seeing women who were quite happy to squat in front of crowds of people walking by while they emptied their bladder - that was a new experience for me!

The festival grounds were huge. Upon arriving at lunch time I thought too big, but by the evening when there were approximately 100,000 people there (including volunteers), there wasn't much free space around. It really was a mini-city. 6 music stages, dozens of food stalls, dozens of bars and many more 'mobile bars' (people walking around with large containers on their back connected to a tap in their hand for pouring your drink). There were hundreds of foreigners walking around collecting empty cans and cups as soon as you'd finish the beer in your hand, at DKK 1/cup, apparently some of them would earn a few thousand kroner during the festival.

The Orange Stage is where all the lead acts play

The line-up consisted of a heck of a lot of Scandinavian bands. I got to hear a couple, one that I was particularly impressed with was Love Shop - very rhythmic and melodic music with some great vocals. Of the big bands I saw a bit of the Arctic Monkeys performance (which I can't say I was particularly impressed by) as well as The Strokes - which I especially enjoyed (as did I think everyone else there). The night ended with a wonderful African band playing a fusion of traditional African and more modern European music - with some great dancing in it as well.

Unfortunately the end of the evening was a little bit more eventful than planned. It all started a few hours earlier during the James Blake concert when the heavens opened up for the 'now famous' Copenhagen floods of 2011. Roskilde only got 1/3 of the rain that Copenhagen received, and thankfully we were under a tent during the downpour. But as a result, the already wet ground turned to mud with large puddles everywhere. The drizzle continued on and off for the rest of the evening, but it didn't seem to dampen the spirits of the party-goers. Unfortunately though, it did prevent the trains from running, and made things even more difficult upon our return to Copenhagen to get to our bikes. A 1 hour journey home ended up taking around 2.5 hours. Sigh...

When I experienced Carnival in Rio de Janeiro a number of years ago, I was amazed at how well alcohol and partying mixed together with the Latin Americans. People were friendly beyond belief, and there no hint of the nervous feeling I would have amongst random people drinking in Australia - where I would worry about knocking into someone and spilling a bit of their beer, or looking at them the wrong way, or anything else that would lead to violence (whether or not I was involved). This simply wasn't there amongst the party-goers in Rio. Similarly, the Roskilde festival showed me that in fact it is more 'normal' for alcohol and people to mix peacefully than violently. No longer is Rio the odd one out, but I think, sadly, it's countries like Australia. I'm not saying there's no violence here, but the whole attitude is different such that the feeling is so much warmer. Skal to that!