EXIT Festival July 7 - 13

Tuesday July 7 & Wednesday July 8

We landed at Budpest Airport, Hungary on Tuesday afternoon and decided that we really wanted to live in Serbia. So we went house hunting. We had something in mind from our last visit to Hungary and we returned to see if we could make a purchase. Upon arrival we discovered the sale that was on when were in Hungary last was still on, a whopping 57% off. It seems the housing market in Europe had crashed too. We made our purchase, signed our lives away and walked away the proud owners of our first home. We couldn't wait to get to Serbia and move in.

Just because our first home happened to be a tent detracts nothing from how excited we were... Serbia here we come baby!

We then headed to the train station to see about an overnight train to Novi Sad. We were heading to EXIT a day early to get a good camp site. Upon arrival to the train station, it seemed half the population of Europe had the same idea. We lined up for an hour and a half for a ticket and secured the midnight train. We me some Maltese guys, Mat, Steve and Pablo at the station and they shouted us beers while we waited. I love being able to drink everywhere in Eastern Europe. We had about 4 hours to kill so we decided to drop in to the hostel we had stayed at when we were in Budapest last time, the Backpack Guesthouse. When we got there we found that everyone who worked there had moved on, but Kevin (and Aussie) who was working there then welcomed us with open arms and so we used the net, chatted to people in the common room and made some new friends to kill the time. It's one of the coolest hostels, we are going to stay there again when we come back before we fly to the UK.

We left Backpack and headed to the station. When we reached the platform, I nearly fell over. Holy shit, how are all these people going to fit on the train? Well the easy answer is, they didn't.

When the train finally pulled up to the platform there was a massive cheer from the crowd. Everyone scrambled to get a seat. We didn't get seats (Eastern European trains have booths, with 6-8 seat per booth). It was to be the most uncomfortable train ride in history (at least, the history of my life). What should have been a sleep in your chair job, turned into sit in the aisles, or on the toilet, or where ever you can find space job.

When the train finally got moving there was an almighty cheer from the hundreds of punters squished into the train. We knew EXIT was going to be awesome. The atmosphere was electric, and we were still 6 hours away from Novi Sad.

These pics are the door way (and I nearly fell out when border control tried to get in to stamp our passports)



We finally made it to Novi Sad - man what a long night - at 5 something in the morning. We grabbed breakfast with the guys from Malta before saying goodbye and heading to set up our new home.

After setting up we crashed out for a few hours. It had been raining so it was cool enough to sleep. When we woke our sleeping bag mats were damp. So we decided to invest in some new furniture for our home - some foam mats (the EXIT shop had camping gear, even tents!). After that we went to check things out. Whilst EXIT hadn't started yet, they had 2 music stages set up inside the camp site to keep people entertained. There was a reggae stage and another random stage which played minimal most of the times I heard it. As it had been raining and the reggae stage had some rather muddy punters in attendance, or should I say lots of dirty girls. If I describe just how dirty they were, will you keep reading the blog Fudd?


We discovered the camp site was pretty well serviced. There were portable ATMs, internet cafes, safes, mobile phone charging stations, pretty much everything we needed. But most importantly, our tent was near the beer vendor. Beer in Serbia is cheap, really cheap. But we were at a festival, so it was expensive for Serbia, but for a festival? You would never get a schooner at a festival for $3 back home. In fact, you'd be hard pressed to find a schooner under $3 in any pub in Melbourne (if indeed you could find a schooner).

The porta loos, were, er, well pretty unsavoury. It seems they hadn't been cleaned for a few days. We were starting to dread camping there for the next 5 days. As it turned out once the festival got under way the cleaned the regularly, lucky, because we would have thrown up if they kept that up.

The food vendors were pretty good, there was a chinese take away place that had pretty nice veal, cabbage, carrot and rice stir fry, no onion (w00t!) which I would live on for the next few days, and for Steve there was pizza, hamburgers etc, the usual festival food.

After we had a feed, downed a few beers and hung out in the "chill out" area, which was more of a beer pavilion, we headed to bed. Just after we went to bed, we heard and almighty cheer go up, which "mexican waved" around the campsite. Some louder music fired up and we knew again, EXIT was going to be awesome.

Thursday July 9 - DAY 1 - EXIT Festival

We woke once the sun came up cos god damn our tent was roasting. We were looking forward to the day, as EXIT was kicking off at last...

We went for an explore and to collect our wrist band, there were street vendors lining the streets from the camp site to the fortress (for those of you that don't know, EXIT is in a fortress) and so if you didn't feel like paying $3 for a beer, you could buy them for even less on the street. The camp site staff permitted everyone to take their own beer in too, the rules were very relaxed... AWESOME.

We headed in to see Lily Allen play main stage that night. She was good but really not as good as I was hoping.

Roots Manuva were on after and the got boring very quickly so we headed to the dance arena.
It's a little hard to tell in the photos, but this is looking down on the dance arena. There were 3 different levels of dancefloor (different platforms of the fortress).

This is the dance arena stage off to the right, the people and 3 platforms full of punters extend out to the left

We saw Reboot (Live), Lee Burridge and Steve Lawler, but left to go see some of Artic Monkeys main stage and so missed Sasha and Digweed and James Zabiela and Nic Fanciulli. When we arrived at the dance arena for Reboot, they let off several minutes of large fireworks over the crowd.


We only saw a bit of Arctic Monkeys before heading back for sleep - the tent was too hot to sleep in during the day. I woke up and heard Zabiela and Fanciulli from my tent and was really pissed for missing it - it sounded fucking awesome.

Friday July 10 - DAY 2 - EXIT Festival

It was way too hot for people to sleep in tents so everyone got their sleeping mats and crashed under trees, in the beer tent, where ever they could that was in the shade. I think I slept with my head out of the tent with the zip for the front done up around my neck so mozzies didn't get in. It was not raining and very hot. Still annoyed about missing Z&F.

We met some cool Irish guys and headed down to the 'beach' with them. The beach was an artificial beach created on the banks of the Danube. We took our sleeping mats so we could doze in the shade if we wanted to. We drank beer all day and Steve crashed eventually while I stayed up drinking.

That night we went out and it was uber cold. We were wearing shorts and so when it got cold we found it rather bad. We saw all of Korn's set, which was awesome, one of the highlights of the festival for us.
It rained the whole time, Korn was playing so our jumpers got wet and the wind cut straight through us. We saw the start of Andy C - there were 2 DnB sets after the bands finished on main stage each night, as a warm up for people to transition to the dance arena (main arena closed at 4am). We crossed over to the dance arena to see Richie Hawtin vs Dubfire, but alas, the cold got the better of us and we bailed just half an hour before they were due to start. Walking home we stopped at a pub and had a beer and thaw, and we heard some of his set and tbh (Brian & Julie: to be honest) it didn't sound that good. We continued home and got some sleep in the cold.

Saturday July 11 - DAY 3 - EXIT Festival

That night we were trying to make it down for Kraftwerk but we met up with a guy we knew from our last visit in Serbia and missed them. We watched Moby who was really good, really different to the last time I saw him. Steve was really tired and falling asleep in my lap so we called it a night really early. Missed Adam Beyer which was a bit of a bummer.


Sunday July 12 - DAY 4 - EXIT Festival

By morning I was too hot again so I moved my mat into the entry of our tent where it was cooler. During the day we caught up with some Scots we met over the course of the festival, and hung out with them at the Scottish Embassy - the only place in Eastern Europe that accepts Scottish money.


We first met one of the guys at the airport in Hungary, his bags went missing so he didn't get the night train with us but we randomly met him again at EXIT. These are the guys we spent the most time with at the festival.

We all headed in to the fortress together that night and saw Madness, then the Prodigy. The numbers at the festival that night were crazy, it seemed there were twice as many people, I'm guessing the got day passes rather than for the whole festival. It was slow going going anywhere.


Before the Prodigy ended we headed to the dance arena to watch Valentino Kanzyani & Marco Nastic


We headed to a smaller arena after that to see the guys playing psy (from the club we visited on our last trip to Serbia). Then we headed back to the dance arena and saw the end of Sander Kleinenberg and Darren Emerson's set which was way cooler than I thought it would be. I expected really commercial electro but it wasn't.

While it was still dark a guy came through the crowd dressed all in black on stilts, he had a helmet covering his face which was black, and wound around him from head to toe was a thin plastic tube of green lights. He stopped right next to us to 'perform'. He had a pack on his back and was firing a fire extinguisher (or something similiar) over everyones heads. He then let off fire works from his hands, the sort that fire short range and continuously, like a massive sparkler. We were literally right next to him and I felt the sparks on my head. It was really fucking cool. The sun started to come up and the it was time for Carl Cox & Green Velvet to start the festival closer. We met back up with the Scottish embassy again and danced with them for the next 2 hours. Steve's camera batteries died so we didn't get any pics :( It was insane tho, so packed out. Green Velvet sung La La Land live... Half way through we moved from the bottom level to the top level, so we were looking down over several packed out levels of the dance floor. Going nuts in a fortress to Carl Cox and Green Velvet was the perfect way to finish our weekend and we were glad that we'd managed to stay all night at last.

Monday July 13 - EXIT Festival is over...

We all walked back to the Scottish embassy and hung out there for the morning and kept drinking. Brody passed out and so we piled stuff on top of him so you couldn't see him anymore, then put a plum in his mouth and made him close his mouth so it stayed there by it's self. Then we put a whole tent on him and pushed the pegs into the ground, so only his head way sticking out. Of course pictures were taken but not on our camera, so alas I cannot post pics here.

We packed down our tent and got ready to leave. We decided to leave and head for Belgrade again rather than camp the extra day so we headed to the station and caught the train late afternoon. It was only a 90 minute trip but we passed out as we hadn't slept. We stumbled back to the Star Hostel to see if they had room which they did, thank god. We had a quick feed and shower (hooray a real shower!) and went to bed.