Emergency Escape (label on exits/otherwise itd be confusing)

In stark contrast to the previous weekend, I did manage my way out of Belgrade this time.  And how.  Wednesday through Monday, I attended my very first EXIT Festival, in Novi Sad.  It was pretty epic times.

EXIT started a decade ago, as 100 days of music and protest against the Serbian government of the time.  Since then, it's become one of the premier Festivals in Europe, with attendance in the hundreds of thousands.  It takes place in an old fortress in Novi Sad, which is neat, 'cause you realize you're in a medieval moat, and there's some Romanian DJ or whatever spinning trance music for, like, a hundred people, and then you wander a little bit further along the moat, and you get to a hippie stage with steel drummers and fire dancers.  And then you get to the Main Stage and its like, fifty thousand people slamdancing to The Prodigy.  Yea, my idea of funnn.

I went up to Novi Sad the day before the festival, for the closing ceremony of the Oplaneti Se! bicycle caravan.  The caravan was a 600 km bike ride across Serbia, conducted as an environmental awareness-raising campaign by my organization ISC (tangent: hey, our website just went online!) and its implementing partner the Balkan Community Initiatives Fund.  The ceremony involved cyclists from Oplaneti Se! and a couple of other organizations congregating on the Novi Sad beach, and then some speeches by officials from USAID,the mayor of Nivi Sad, and more regional government.  During the soundcheck, I could tell that some of my colleagues from work were ready for the festival to start.

Another fun aspect of EXIT was the camping, one option for accomodation at the Festival, and in my opinion a necessary one. The EXIT campsite housed upwards of ten thousand people, and most of them were British.  Now, many Americans are not aware of How British Tourists Are.  But there exist, um, certain stereotypes.   If you have read Heart of Darkness, it is kind of like that, but with more alcohol.  In fact, I met several incredibly pleasant British people at EXIT, who were polite and cared about what country they were in, &c.  And I think the matter is best left there.

At the camp I stayed with some of my Oplaneti Se! firends, and in the afternoons they ran a game called, "Sort Your Wild Dump," involving campers attempting to throw rubber balls into recycling bins for paper, platic, or metal, depending on how the ball was labeled (hula hoop, bicycle, 1000 dinar note, &c).  A successful toss would net an attractive Oplaneti canvas bag.  The game proved a phenomenal hit with campers, presumably too bored of the reggae stage by this point, or something.  So, hopefully, some of them learned a little about recycling as well.  I know I enjoyed myself, chasing after stray balls, throwing them back, repeat for a few hours.  And by the time that was over each afternoon, it was nearly festival time.

At the festival itself, I spent the first couple hours of each night volunteering with its Green Guerrilla activities.  Losing a couple of hours of music really didn't matter, because things started at six or seven, and went till 8.  AM.  Green Guerrilla was part of EXIT's campaign this year to "Go Green," enacting various environmentally-friendly ways to power stages, encouraging more recycling, handing out more canvas bags (biodegradable, with toolkits for the Green Guerrilla including such useful supplies for a subversive eco-lifestyle as, say, a cardbaord wheel-thing to measure one's carbon footprint, or a stencil with the tri-arrow recycling symbol), and training Serbian youth to organize future Green Guerrilla activities in their communities.

When that was over, it was on to the music, which was always varied.  Though I had some fun sometimes at the mainstage, it was really large, and often crowded for the popular acts, so I think I had better experiences at smaller stages, closer to bands, usually.  Mainstage had a few good acts.  I was pretty crazy-excited to have the chance to see Kraftwerk live, who were robots wayy before Daft Punk decided to be.  They were pretty much everything I expected or could have hoped for, though by miscalculation I lost myexcelent forward position before they brought the robots onstage :(.  Grandmaster Flash, on the other hand, was kind of disappointing.  He sort of just played a bunch of mainstream popular songs from 1970-95, and kept calling it "Old School," but ended up sounding like Girl Talk if he moved realllly slooooowly and played One Sample At A Time.  I really liked this Croatian band called Lollobrigida that came on at like 4AM, and the music kept me warm.  My favorite, which I kinda expected, was Buraka Som Sistema, a Portuguese band that plays Kuduro, this Angolan subgenre of hiphop.  Portuguese is pretty much the best language to sing/rap in, period.  Madness was pretty fun, too.

I was usually pretty tired by whatever time I decided to go home in the mornings, despite the energy drinks consumed.  I never made it quite to the 8 o'clock closing, but anyway most stages ended before that, except for Dance Arena (this huge field that was kinda cool, but universally crowded after a certain hour, very British, and playing mediocre House most of the time) and a couple of smaller stages nearby that were a little chiller, but there's a limit to how much dance-y electronica can enter my brain at once.  And I was pretty tired by the end of teh festival, becausecamping tends to take a toll, especially, when youwake up at like 10 or 11 every morning because the tent has gotten too hot too breathe in.  To re-iterate, a fantastic and immensely enjoyable experience was had by all.

All photos by Nathan Gilbert.

EDIT: In case You would like to read another perspective of EXIT, here is a delightful article from Vice. I tried to find myself in any of the pictures, because seriously, it's Vice, but alas.  Next time, in the DOs n DON'Ts...?