EXIT Festival 2008 in Serbia

So this is my brand new travel blog. A new blog is quite sad actually, because it's completely empty and useless. But very soon I'm starting my cycling trip to south east Europe, and then the blog entries should start coming in at some point, shouldn't they? Only time will tell how soon and how often I'll be able to find access to the internet, and getting myself to actually write something interesting (more interesting than what I'm writing right now, I hope).

To avoid starting with a completely empty blog, I thought I might just post an entry about my trip this summer to the EXIT Festival in Novi Sad, Serbia. I'm actually writing this in October, but backdating to when the festival actually happened. Back in the UK, I heard about some festival in Serbia called EXIT, which incidentally was voted Best European Festival at the Yourope Award in 2007. So as I had just quit my job in London and as I wanted to go travelling anyway, I said why not try and see for myself if it's really as good as they say! Of course nobody had time for such a long journey but hey travelling alone is more fun anyway!

So after flying from London to Berlin and a quick stop there to say hi to my friends, and to go to the Radiohead openair concert at Kindl Bühne Wuhlheide (great gig actually, they are still amazing and had quite a mind boggling light show), I took the 20 hours train trip from Berlin through Prague, Bratislava and Budapest and then on the night train to Belgrade, Serbia (Београд, Србија in cyrillic - they use the cyrillic alphabet in Serbia). I decided to spend the day there for a short visit of the Serbian capital before heading on to Novi Sad (Нови Сад) for the festival.

From there, four amazing festival nights waited for me and some 40,000 to 50,000 other visitors each night. Already the festival location is stunning - it takes place in the Petrovaradin Fortress sitting on a hill on the Danube river, at a site where a continuous settlement has existed for roughly 20,000 years. The fortress itself is a very cool locatioin for the festival, there are many different concert stages scattered around the fortress, hidden between some walls, with paths connecting the stages over stairs, walls and through tunnels.

Apart from the great location, the festival also offered a huge range of different concerts and music styles on some 20 stages. There was a bit of everything from Reggae to Heavy Metal, from Alternative Rock to Drum'n'Bass - with a slight bias towards electronic music. Particularly everybody who enjoys Drum'n'Bass was most certainly happy with the late night program on the main stage - the lineup of international top DJ's attracted many people until closing time each morning - which was long after sunrise. (The picture shows the crowded Dance Arena at sunrise).

The crowd at the festival was very nice too, with a very international mix of people. A good number of visitors from the UK (probably even more since the awards last year), mixing up with the local Serbian crowd and a lot of people from neighbouring countries as this is one of the biggest festivals in Eastern Europe. Everybody was friendly and happy about the festival - the English enjoying the cheap booze, and the locals seemed happy that somebody actually comes to visit their country. I was there on my own, but didn't spend much time alone each night before joining some group of people. The Serbian people were particularly warm and welcoming, they invited me to join them, took me around the festival, and seemed happy to spend some time with a foreign visitor and practise their English in real life. Some guys also invited me for a beer back home at their place in the afternoon, so I even got to see a real Serbian flat share. Cool folks!

The festival was starting each night at 6pm running through to 6am, which was quite clever given that in the afternoons it was over 35 degrees. So after catching some sleep for a few hours in the morning until it got too hot in the tent, the afternoon was spent at the Danube beach where cooling down is provided in the river (the water is not terribly clean anymore after having gone a couple thousand kilometers and through 3 countries' capitals before getting here, but hey it's good enough for a refreshing swim). Early evening was then time to reload on food (and restart on booze), it was also the most busy time in the camp showers before people go back up to the festival. I preferred waiting until the shower queues have closed in - I didn't mind getting to the festival a bit later as I wasn't going to leave before sunrise again anyway...

Summary: Brilliant festival, I fully agree with the Yourope award and I'd definitely go again! Ја волим Србију, Хвала EXIT!

More pictures on Flickr.
Link to EXIT Festival.