Music: The Festival Diary - Friday

Friday

I wake up cause my phone rings feeling really terrible and in need of coffee. After getting changed in the tent (which turns out to be a bigger challenge than i remembered from camping trips before) I go outside and find that Marcus and Neupi have been awake for ages. The place that is supposed to sell breakfast (that means coffee!) is still not open, even though it should be and a lady walks by carrying a sort of backpack with paper cups and coffee. It's pretty over-priced, but in that moment she still seems like an angel to me. I brush my teeth with bottled water at the camp and try to have pot noodles for breakfast. There's just one problem: I don't have anything to cook the water with and I only have fizzy water. Nevermind, I try with cold fizzy water, the hard noodles are okay, but the fizziness is really really revolting and everybody seems to find it amusing, the story of me eating pot noodles with cold water and only complaining about the fizziness amuses a lot of people for the next few hours.
After what feels like a life time of waiting the festival ground is finally opened. We get a festival shirt  spend a lot of time trying to get a free shirt at the Converse stand and after about an hour and a half of standing around waiting for the girl to throw a shirt in my direction I get one. Loads and loads of people are standing around her, trying to get their hands on one. There are also free sun glasses (which turn out to be pretty handy, I'm happy I brought mine as the sun is actually shining and by saturday everybody's wearing sun glasses no matter what the weather is like) and whatnot. I didn't know they had this sort of stuff at festivals...
My first band that day is Portugal The Man and I end up meeting some girls from school in the crowd. After that I meet almost all my camp in the front row at Kashmir, there are four boys behind us that we start talking to and all decide to stay there till Arcade Fire have played. After Kashmir everybody from my camp suddenly disappears and I'm left with the four boys. We stay there and sit down and talk during the break before Elbow, they're all really nice and one of them, Hendrik, writes about music and has really great taste. Elbow are loads of fun, I never heard of them before, but they tell me about the music before the band starts playing, so I kind of know what to expect. Portishead play after Elbow, I never heard there music before either, but loads of people say they are really great and they were all wrong. They are amazing.
Sitting down before or after Portishead is impossible. Too many peopl are standing very close and when Arcade Fire start moving is pretty impossible. You just move in the direction the crowd pushes you. It's worth it though, we are standing at the front and Arcade Fire are wonderful. I was expecting a lot, but nothing this big. At 1 am I say bye to my four new aquaintances and stagger to the camp where we gush about how great the show was.