I arrived in London after a super long haul flight from Oz, which had me first land in Guangzhou China, and have an 8 hour layover. One of the first things I noticed was that they had a Blenz coffee shop, which was kind of interesting since it's a Canadian coffee company based out of Vancouver, and I actually worked at one when I was living in Kelowna for a few months before my first European trip. Another thing you really notice when flying into China is how much crazy development and massive buildings there are, it was a pretty cool sight from the airplane.
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| Blenz in China, wtf! |
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| Macau I think...China from the air |
I ended up chatting up an Aussie beside me on the plane, and we hung out at the airport just chilling out, and I showed him the concert list for Roskilde, and he gave me a list of a few bands I should try and check out, much appreciated. Other than that, the only memorable thing from China was the absolutely worst bowl of Wonton soup I've ever had in my life...everything other than the mini squids was disgusting...I hope that Chinese food isn't all that bad if I ever do make it back there for a visit!
It was then off to Paris, and then London, and I was pretty jetlagged upon arrival. I managed to track down my friend Carmen and headed out for a lunch with her and grab the keys to her place, as she offered to let me crash there. She had to work so I just hung out and relaxed, and then we had some big feast with all these Irish people that she was living with or who were friends with the ones she was living with, but I was just so knackered from the flight that I had an early night.
The next day didn't have too much happening either, other than trying to secure some tickets for Wimbledon, but without success. I managed to get a hold of my friend Marleen who I met in Nepal, and we went and grabbed a lunch and coffee to have in Hyde Park, which was really nice. She was planning on having a party for the Friday night, so we made plans to meet up for that.Later on that evening I found out that Carmen was offered some free tickets to a filming session at Pinewood Studios for a comedian called Lee Mack and his AllStars cast, so that sounded like a pretty sweet idea. I figured I'd try and get down to Wimbledon to try and get in and watch some tennis in the morning and early afternoon, then go meet Carmen to catch a ride out to the studios.
I managed to get to Wimbledon around 11:30 the next morning, just as the place was opening up. Much to my surprise, the general admission queue moved quite quickly, so it was pretty sweet, and then I really lucked out when I picked the one turnstile and the girl working there let me know that tickets for court 2 had just opened up, which provided great views and better matches. Seeing as how it was only a few extra pounds for the ticket compared to the general admission one, I went for it.
Then of course as luck would have it, just before the first match was to start, the rain started...and continued...and took over 3 hours of rain delays before the matches were to resume....which really threw an issue into my plans, seeing as how I had to leave the grounds by about 5 to get to meet up with Carmen in time to catch the ride to the show filming....and of course I didn't have a mobile to call her and tell her that I couldn't make it if I chose to stay and watch tennis.....so I decided that since I committed to going with her, I would just leave the tennis grounds without seeing as many matches as I should have. Here's some pics from the grounds.
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| Hot Female tennis player...nice and intimate setting |
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| Rain, rain, rain, blah |
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| Court 2, nice seat |
So of course, after jumping trains and waiting and watching the clock, I managed to get to the station near Carmen's place of work, only to find that I was 15 minutes too late to even catch a ride, and that we would not make the show...shoot!
So I felt bad for causing Carmen to miss the show, although she wasn't terribly upset, since it was a free event. We decided to head into town and check out a Theatre Production, since I've always wanted to go to one ever since I saw all the advertisements for them last time I was in London. We managed to snag tickets to We Will Rock You, which is a futuristic musical which uses the music from Queen's albums, which obviously rock! The musical was all sorts of fun to watch, and it was highly worth the money, I'd definitely go again!!
The next day I made plans to head off to Oxford to visit a friend I had met up in Fort St. John. She was working with Shell as a Wellsite Geologist at that time, but was now doing her PhD in Oxford, crazy! We ended up meeting up and she showed me around the town and explained some of the unique traditions that go on there with the university. It's really an amazing city, and I believe it's also the 2nd oldest university in the world, dating back to the 1100s or so.
It was exam time at the uni, so you could see students wearing certain gowns which signaled if they were 1st, 2nd, 3rd, or 4th year students. The students also wore a certain coloured flower on their gowns to show how far into their exams were. If they were wearing a red flower, it meant they were on their last exam, and after the exam was finished, they would come out of this huge enclosed building and their friends would have a celebration similar to a hazing with them, including throwing confetti, or worse, eggs. It was a fun sight anyways to see the various students all excited and some of them covered in interesting celebratory junk.
The university also has several different colleges where students are placed into, and live amongst other students who are studying different subjects, so that they can encourage proper networking skills and the ability to open your mind to other studies. All in all, a very tradition college.
Tamara was doing her PhD so she was given a few more privileges than other students including access to these communal "thinking" rooms called MCRs, where the grad students could discuss politics, life, or just get drunk. It was pretty neat to hang out in her MCR for awhile, as there was even a Rhodes scholar in my presence, but everyone in the room was quite friendly and not really snobby like one would assume from some Oxfordians.
We just toured around the city for the day, seeing some of the different colleges including the one where the Harry Potter dinner hall is filmed. After touring around for awhile, we checked out some of the older pubs in the place, including the Turf Tavern which is supposedly the oldest pub in Oxford. We also stopped by the Eagle and Child, which is where J.R Tolkien and C.S Lewis would meet every Tuesday morning to drink beer and talk about their writing. After about 40 some years, the pub decided to ban them from smoking in the room, so in anger they went across the street and chose a different pub for their meetings. Here's some photos from the day trip.
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| Corner of the pub where Tolkien and Lewis would meet |
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| Harry Potter dining hall |
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| Oldest pub in Oxford or so they say...Bill Clinton supposedly had a marijuana cigarette here during his Oxford days |
The next day was Shave Day! ha ha ha.....and then I went out for a nice little walk to the Tower of London, and then I went down to the Kensington area to kill some time until Marleen's party that night. I hung out in a coffee shop for awhile having a nice little coffee and lunch, when I noticed a cute woman at a nearby table staring at me. We started chatting up a bit, and I found out she was from Italy, and was looking for an apartment to stay in for 12 days until she took possession of her other apartment after that, but she was having great difficulty. I gave her some websites to check for things, and she ended up giving me her number to maybe meet up later on in the evening.
After that I just wandered around the Chelsea/Kensington area, and started to make my way down to try and find Marleen's place for her party. Well that ended up in me getting absolutely lost in the rain for a good 2 hours...I'm quite stubborn when I travel, and often try to find my way without asking directions, and this often results in numerous hours spent lost in foreign cities. Well I eventually found my way, and got to Marleen's party. It was a pretty fun time, and there were some pretty cool people there. Eventually I sent a text to the Italian girl asking if she had found a place or not, and then she called me and said she wanted to come meet up with me and head out on the town. Since Marleen had to get up early, her party wasn't going to go too late, I decided I would head out with the Italian, so I told her to stop by and wait for me in the cab since I didn't feel comfortable with her coming into Marleen's house.
Well those damn Italians don't listen very well, and she showed up and rang the doorbell and invited herself in and came into the common room. Needless to say, Marleen wasn't too impressed, so we had to get out of there soon. We ended up finding some pub in the area and hanging out, and the Italian was all over me much to my surprise...crazy Europeans, but she eventually wanted to head home and sleep and we parted ways. This began my second adventure of the day in getting lost...I tried to figure out the nightbus schedules and eventually got on a bus that dropped me off to a place somewhat nearby to where I was staying. I tried to use my iPod touch and the wifi to map out where I needed to go from the dropoff point, but I was a bit tipsy and not very effective at navigating..well it took me until almost 5:30 am to get back to my bed.
I thought my flight was at 5 pm the next day, so when I awoke at 1:45 pm, I figured I had plenty of time to get to the airport...well I realized it was actually at 4 pm, and I had a fairly long train ride to the airport so I had to rush rush rush....well needless to say I nearly missed that flight, as I got to the check in counter 40 minutes before it left, and managed to still get my bags checked and clear security. I got to the gate in time, but then realized the flight was delayed anyways, so that was a win! But all these people were hanging around and they weren't boarding so I went for a wander to find some food, but kept checking the board, and it just continued to say "go to gate" so I kept going by and finding no one boarding...I eventually wandered around sampling some of the free shots at the Duty Free stores, and looked up at the screen and it said "Final Call"! So I ran over to the gate and found that I was the last person to arrive and they were just about to close the gate...damn that's the second time on this trip I've almost missed!!
But I was on my way, and got to Copenhagen, found my hostel and just crashed. I managed to find a tent the next day and was off to Roskilde!! I got a hold of the girls and they brought my ticket and I set up camp with them. The place was absolutely nuts, with thousands of themed campsites including some favourites like "The Rebecca Black camp" that played that Friday song over and over and over, the Baywatch Camp, the Doctor's camp, and so so so many others..great fun. We started doing shots and had our funny Nepal hat reunion, as the girls had also purchased hats in Kathmandu Nepal, similar to my Yeti hat. The first night was a bit blurry, as were the rest of the 7 days, as a typical day was wake up around 10 am because the tent was too bloody hot, have some water, drink some beer, and then just start listening to music or wandering around. I do recall making out with some Swedish girl the first night, but then ended up crashing around 5 am.
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| First Pic of Roskilde...a smoking skunk |
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| Midgets! |
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| Meeting Baby Bass, the girls' stereo mascot that couldn't produce any bass |
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| Sexy Danish spooning! |
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| Random naked dancing men |
I do recall some bits of the second day, including walking by a campsite made up of Doctors who were putting sun lotion on anyone. They had a huge row of them lined up in cheers, and they asked me to walk through while they all squirted lotion all over me, and seeing as how I was at a festival and willing to try anything, I obliged, and was completely covered head to toe in sunscreen...and as I was walking around the grounds that day, people kept laughing and saying things in Danish, which I had no clue what they were saying, but it was good for a laugh.
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| The doctors tent, they set up a slip and slide on this day |
After a few too many beers, and too much sun, I had to have a little nap, which turned into a 7 hour sleep, which lead to me awakening at 1 am and wandering out to find several parties and keeping it going until 8 am or so...Before I fell asleep I had asked the girls to draw on my back something that said I don't speak Danish so that people would know I was English speaking, but they took that a bit further and had a bit more fun with me while I slept, oh well! Here's some pics of my back.
The next fun thing that happened, was that Anne-Kirsten, one of the Danish girls I was staying with, stole some hilarious plastic bird from one of the nearby camp sites. I nicknamed him Pedro, and he became our camp mascot :) We had lots of fun wandering around with him and goofing off. My favourite moments were when Pedro would spoon with the girls, or have a wild day in the sun and have too much to drink. At one point, the younger brother of a guy that Anne knew, stole Pedro and went running off with him. I ended up chasing him down and tackling him and stealing the bird back. This happened at like 8 in the morning, and I'm sure to any people who were up and witnessing the site, seeing a Danish dude with a bird being chased by an English speaking dude, swearing at him to give Pedro back, it was likely a hilarious scene!
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| Laura, Pedro, and I at the beach after the Blue ppl got me |
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| Cheeky bugger who stole Pedro in the early hours of the day |
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| Sometimes Pedro likes to chill out and drink Vodka in the hot sun |
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| Pedro also likes spooning with sexy Danish girls |
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| He really gets around |
Another fun day was a "beach" day, as there was a swimming lake on the grounds, and we wandered down there. There was numerous creative stereo systems wandering around the area on trolleys, wagons, and even bikes..the creativity was amazing. We enjoyed hanging around the lake for several hours, and I even ended up making it onto the Danish MSN site for a photo at the pier, as they were wandering around the festival taking photos...they probably took thousands of photos, and with that many people, it was pretty cool to make it onto their site. Here's the link, and if you have time, you should take a look at the other photos they've posted, to get a real feel for what the festival was really like!!
http://entertainment.dk.msn.com/special/roskildefestival/galleri.aspx?cp-documentid=158452421&page=23
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| One of the many crazy portable stereo systems at the festival |
After swimming around, I found the Baywatch dudes and went over to their camp for a few beers, and some good laughs. Earlier in the day, some Danish songwriter had popped by and written them some songs in Danish, which were apparently super super dirty and raunchy. So to have a good laugh, I would ask random hot Danish girls to come over and translate the lyrics for me, telling them that I had paid a songwriter to write some love songs for me...this lead to some pretty funny and awkward faces, as well as some girls playfully slapping me and walking away...I can recall some of what they said, but I won't write it on here, you can ask me in person if you're really curious. Also, during the Baywatch camp hangout, a massive group of blue painted people wandered through, putting blue paint on anyone who would let them, so I let them mark me up a bit, fun times. Also, one of the more random things happened when some police officers came to the camp and randomly searched all of our pockets for cannibis....I don't use it, so I had nothing to hide, but I found it a bit odd that they could just come up and search all of our bodies without really having any reason, but I obliged since I had nothing to hide. One other funny thing that day, was I was using the toilet and washing my hands when I witnessed several people try to enter one toilet and there were two people in it just standing there scaring people. I thought it was absolutely hilarious, so I grabbed a picture of them and met them. Pretty funny seeing two hot dogs in a toilet.
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| Blue Man Crew |
The next interesting thing I came across was some tryouts for the naked race. Every year the festival holds a naked race where the winner receives a free ticket to the next year's festival. I was actually keen on entering the race, but found out that it was full, and that there were only qualifiers going on since so many people had signed up for it. Apparently the last 2 or 3 races have been won by the same guy who is known for having extremely small genitalia ha ha ha. So anyways, they had these tryouts which I managed to check out a few of the events..they were absolutely hilarious. One involved a race course where the men had to spin a pole on their forehead, do several jumping jacks, do 5 "cock twirls", submerge their genitals into a cold bath and rap several lines from a snoop dogg song, and then chug a beer....Another contest involved 2 guys in a ring with giant boxing gloves, having to knock one of them out of the ring, this contest was called "cock fighting". Ha ha so hilarious. These contests played out on the first rainy day of the festival, which brought miserable cold, and MUD! It was so muddy everywhere, that people were just covered with it...it made for an uncomfortable sleep in the tents too because of the cold, and some of the girls' tents were leaking water as well.
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| The Title of this tryout was Cockfighting ha ha ha |
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| The Teletubby crew cheering on their friend in the Naked Race tryouts |
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| The Muddy nights |
After all the shenanigans of the first few "warm up" days, it was time to get on with the real music. Some of the bands I managed to check out were: Chase and Status, Oh Lund, M.I.A, Destroyer, Magnetic Man, Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All, Arctic Monkeys, The Strokes, Kings of Leon, Timbuktu & Damn, My Chemical Romance, and Kitchie Kitchie Ki Me. A lot of these groups I haven't heard of, but they all put on some pretty great shows.
Some of the highlights from the concerts were; meeting a huge group of Canadians for Destroyer and having a sweet Canada Day celebration, meeting some random Danish dudes in the Cigar and Rum bar and them taking me to go check out Chase and Sorrow which was a mega sweet Drum and Bass group. Also, at Wolfgang, the lead rapper was in a cast and had to sit in a wheelchair at times because of his broken leg, but he told the crowd that they weren't allowed to jump into the crowd, but "if, and if I was to jump into the crowd, and I'm just saying this, but if I do, it will be pretty soon and you all better catch me!" Of course, he ended up jumping into the crowd, which is against the Roskilde rules, so they shut them down, much to the crowd's dismay, as their performance was pretty sick. Another very funny moment occurred at the Kings of Leon concert, when I was wandering through with my Danish buddy Julian when some blonde Norwegian girl asked if I was feeling the love, and I said yes absolutely. She then said great, I love you, and began dancing with me, then asked me to feel the love, and grabbed my hand and put it up her shirt and onto her breasts...I was a bit shocked at this, although being Europe, I'm starting to expect the unexpected! Julian had this hilarious look to match mine, and ended up leaving me with the girl, but nothing else happened. I ended up in the front pit for the L.O.C concert with a bunch of the new Danish buddies I made, and it was also a cool experience, although all the rapping was done in Danish so I had no clue what was going on, but the crowd was going absolutely nuts, so it was fun to be part of that experience. We had to wait in the queue for 2 hours to get into the pit, but it was good fun since we had some lawn chairs and lots of beers. They also brought their ghetto blaster which was a bad idea as they had to leave it behind when we went into the mosh pit....well needless to say, it wasn't there after the show and it wasn't at the lost and found either, but I randomly did track it down later in the night, as one of the can picking dudes had it ha ha ha
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| Chilling out waiting in line for LOC with Rick Armstrong and Julien |
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| LOC the Danish Rapper..no clue what he was rapping about! |
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| The individual who took the Danish boy's stereo ha ha |
As far as the actual concerts go, Deadmau5 was the best, he just f**king rocked the crowd...when you have 70 some thousand people just dancing and rocking out to his hardcore electronica...well it was just amazing. The Strokes were also incredibly great, and I'm looking forward to listening to more of their music now. Of course Kings of Leon also put on a fantastic show, and they have that true Rockstar Vibe going on now!
As far as the more disappointing acts, probably M.I.A which was absolutely terrible, and the Arctic Monkeys were also a bit disappointing, as their sound engineer didn't provide the clearest vocals compared to some of the other acts. But all in all, the music was pretty awesome, and the crowds so lively.
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| Partying at Chase and Sorrow |
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| Deadmau5 with 72,000 fans rocking out |
I also managed to make a lot of new interesting friends at the festival, including the group of Danish dudes next to our campsite, as I wandered into their spot the one morning at like 9 am cause I couldn't sleep, so I had some beers with them, and they were all quite entertaining. I couldn't remember all their names, and they started giving me funny random names like Bryan Adams from Vancouver, and Brandon Walsh from Beverley Hills 90210....they were a hilarious lot, so I kept calling the one guy Rick Armstrong (I later found out his real name was Emil, but it's pronounced like Email so I asked if his email address was email@email.com), another guy was Peter James, and then there was Sebastien and Julian and Matthiasen the White Ni***r (their nickname for him because he loved hip hop). I made good mates with all them, and took in quite a few of the shows, since I always seemed to lose the girls who I was staying with. I also made friends with a group of Canadians and numerous other Danish people. Fun times and hopefully we'll all run into each other another year at the festival.
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| Random German dudes |
The last few days after all that partying and people lead to all the crazy destruction of the various camps. It was really quite amazing to witness how much of a mess that festival lead to. They say it takes at least 4 months to clean the entire place up, if not more. I took a video and some photos of the disaster that was left behind before I left. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K26VR76bQ74
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| Left over remains of broken Pavilions |
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| Tree of broken chairs |
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| Going to be hard to sleep in your tent when someone threw it up in the trees! |
After the festival it was time to head back to Copenhagen for 2 nights, where I just caught up on rest, and toured around the city. Copenhagen is a beautiful city, and I'm looking forward to going back and touring a bit more. I took so many pictures of the city, but I'll try and post only the best ones.
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| Had to remove the nail polish that got put on me one day at the festival before I could tour Copenhagen ha ha |
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| Some famous Mermaid statue eh |
I'm now back in Copenhagen after going to Scotland and Amsterdam with Pancho and Derek...I'll be writing that entry shortly!
Cheers,
Rye
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