Tuesday the 19th -> Monday the 25th of August, 2008 – Barcelona is a party town with little regret.

Our time spent in Barcelona was surely the most relaxing of our entire trip.

Picture unabashed sleep-ins, a lot cheap sangria and supermarket-bought tortilla, going out ‘on the town’, taking advantage of the free internets at our lovely hostel, meeting people, getting drunk at the zoo, and days literally spent wandering aimlessly and unguided around the streets of the city.

Because of this, I’m going to do a wrap-up of our time in Barcelona in just one blog post.

A skeptic could say that I found the city to be worth so little that I could wrap up the place in its entirety in just the one post (and I dedicated a whole post just to traveling there! Sucks to be you, Barcelona, you douche!).

This, however, would not be true. I loved that city.

The real truth is that (a) I am writing this almost three weeks into the future,
(b) I have very little motivation to account for every day, but mostly because
(c) there were a lot of really great, incidental happenings that aren’t worth writing lengthy prose about.

You know the saying “a picture’s worth a thousand words”? Well, I have one hundred and one great photos from our stay in Barcelona already uploaded to my beloved Flickr photostream. Many of them with highly amusing titles, fabulous captions and witty retorts.

If you honestly expected me to write up my Barcelona trip in full, it would work out as something like this:
111 photos x 1000 words = 111, 000 words.

Fuck you for expecting me to write you 111, 000 words on Barcelona.
Who do you think I am - George Orwell?

Actually, now I don’t even want to write any more on the subject.
For you see, here in the future, I am sitting on my bed back in London, nursing a spot of the flu that I seemed to have picked up somewhere, self-medicating with coffee and biscuits I brought back from the Haage, and I honestly just can’t be bothered.

That being said, please check out my completely awesome photos from our great time spent in Barcelona. You’ll love it.

Monday the 18th of August, 2008 - Everyone is a douchebag but me.

Instead of describing the next 24 hours of our trip in lucrative detail, I will simply ctrl+c//ctrl+v what I wrote in a Facebook message to my friend back home:

"Travels are going awesome. The best times are when stuff happens that throws you off course (Emm and Josh don´t agree with me on this though). For example, we just arrived in Barcelona 26 hours after we´d originally planned to get here,due to the train we´d wanted to take being fully booked. We´d just trained from a music festival in rural Belgium to Paris, then taken an overnight train to a little French town on the border of Spain,where they speak Spanish (Emma is awesome at Spanish, by the way).

So anyway, the train we want is booked up, so we have to wait 7 hours (it´ś 6am by this point) ´til the next one. We haven´t showered in 5 days, so we try find a cheap hotel room to hang out in and do our washing.

Eventually we get on the train to Madrid, which we arrive at at half-past midnight. The station is closed so we hail a taxi and drag along our backpacks and camping crap to this famous all-night chocolate bar, where they make the most amazing thick, thick, thick hot chocolate and churros (long, deep-fried Spanish pastry-doughnuts). We hang out there until 3am when we can take no more.

Then we slept outside the train station for a few hours, then inside the station when it opened at 5am,then on the train to Barcelona when it finally boarded.

ADVENTURES!"



Please visit my siblings´ excellent blogs here and here if you want any semblance of explanation on the subject.

Sunday the 17th of August, 2008 - We say goodbye to Belgium.

By the time we leave the Pukkelpop campsite, it resembles a cross between a toxic waste dump and a warzone. The latter even more so because some kids eerily close to our tents decided to light a leftover camping chair on fire.



Eventually we got all bags packed up and tents dismantled. As many of you know, I hit festivals with my trademark cow-print tent. The Cow (as it was originally known) housed Sam and I during Pukkelpop ´06. Then it was washed away during Novak´s Roskilde experience of ´07. So then I got another - The Cow Mach 2 - which took me to Latitude ´07 and now, Pukkelpop ´08. Everyone loves The Cow. It´s known far and wide.

Unfortunately, Someone fell onto my tent on the first night of this festival and broke one of the tent poles. It was fixable with Emma´s crazily strong medical tape (that she "borrowed" from the hospital) but I decided to leave it because it didn´t make sense to lug it all around Spain and Holland with me for a month, and it was going to be a lot more expensive to mail it back to London than to just buy a new one.

So...onwards to The Cow Mach 3!

We said our goodbyes as the tears freely flowed.



It was amazing that was once a lush, green expanse of field when we arrived, was now little more than a rubbish tip; balding from too much foot traffic, more mud than grass. It was hilariously sad.



We stopped for some food to escape the hoards of partyed out festival goers and eventually got on a train back to Brussels.



I made a new friend on the train.



We had to wait until near-midnight to catch our overnight train, so we occupied our time at the train station by eating ten times our body weight in Belgian chocolate.



We eventually caught the overnight train to tiny French town on the border of Spain.



It was nice to sleep on a surface that wasn´t barely covering lumps of grass, rock and dirt.

z z z

Saturday the 16th of August, 2008 - Pukkelpop Day #3, where we finally brave the Main Stage

One of the reasons why Pukkelpop is great - and I had completely forgotten this after my first time there - is that for the most part, everyone is very attractive. It´s those Flemmish. They are a beautiful people. I don´t just mean ´beautiful´ in the internal goodness way (which, incidentally, they also are) but in the superficial, outwards way. It´s all deep blue eyes, straight hair and angular faces.
This could all be wrapped up in my [not so] current obsession with beautiful Scandinavians.

Unfortunately, for the most part, the younger people of this place have chosen to stick two fingers to this win in the genetic lottery by perforating various areas of their faces with pieces of metal, shaving off random bits of their hair and then dyeing what´s left in a variety of mis-matched colours.

This isn´t a prelude to some story about my meeting a charming Norwegian boy in the crowd at Sigur Ros, falling in love and running away together to run a beet farm.
I didn´t meet anyone like that.
I just thought you should just how attractive everyone was.

So anyway.



Band #15 - Pivot - Caught exactly one of theirs before we headed off to get a good spot for the Black Kids. I really liked it. Bam bam thrash thrash. I lamented that I couldn´t have stayed for longer. Isn´t it funny how sometimes you only make an effort to see a band from your home country when you are in an entirely different country?

Band #16 - Black Kids - I´m going to complain again about the Marquee stage. If the Marquee stage was an amorous puppy, I would tap it on the snout with my rolled up newspaper, using my stern voice to say "no" repeatedly until it got the point. This stage never got the point. The sound was still pretty lame-o. The Black Kids were pretty good. Not dazzling, but good. They played their songs well and wooed the enthusiastic crowd in all the right ways. Emm and I did some awesome synchronized hand-dancing towards the end.

We were supposed to see Late Of The Pier but couldn't be bothered walking across the festival grounds to the stage they were playing. Neither could we be bothered staying exactly where we were to watch The National. Instead we walked a short distance and ate a lot of Ben & Jerrys.



Then we did one of the coolest things we did during our time at the festival: we stopped in at the 1 Euro Museum to check out the painted boards that artists and festival goers had been doing and displaying over the past couple of days. It turned out anyone could paint a board, so Josh, Emm and I grabbed a space as quick as we could and spray/painted away.



Our ´theme´ was to depict ourselves all together again, holding hands.
Aww.
I think it turned out ok. It made me think how much I should get off my behind and start experimenting with painting when I get back home to London. Surely it couldn´t hurt the portfolio I´m supposed to be putting together.



Band #17 - Yeasayer - I think we were all expecting a little more from their live performance. Again, don´t get me wrong - they were quite good - but we really love their recorded stuff and were anticipating an experience like what we got with The Dodos ("again with the frikking Dodos, geez why don´t you guys like get a room or something"). I did like the intensity of the lead singer though: lots of facial scrunching and hand-wringing.



Band #18 - MGMT - We couldn´t even get into that damn Marquee tent because people were spilling out it it from all corners in an attempt to hear the one song they knew from the ´band of the moment´. Puh! I knew at least three songs. I heard two of them, then left. Yes folks, I really am a douchebag musical tourist just like everyone else.

Band #19 - Bloc Party - We had managed to avoid the Main stage up until now but knew that we would have to concede to it´s harrowing crowds and poorly placed stage set-up if we wanted to see Bloc Party and Sigur Ros. I´m not kidding about the poor stage setup - it was the worst I´d ever seen...ever. Ever ever. Ever ever ever. Get this: on both sides of the stage (you know, where they usually place the camera men and main front speakers), there were huge blocks of stage sticking out, making visibility impossible unless you were directly in front of the band. In other words, from our typical position on the barrier towards the side of the stage, we could see nothing. Nada. Occasionally the head of a band member. It was pretty lame-o. So we watched the band on the screen above us instead, with our heads actually turned away from the band. Pretty ridiculous. If I hadn´t really wanted to ´see´ Sigur Ros perform, I probably would have left.

Grumble grumble grumble.

Oh, and Bloc Party did play a good set, by the way. But you already knew that.



Band #20 - Sigur Ros - Of course they were good. Obviously they were beautiful and amazing and soul-crushing and heart-uplifting and everything you´d always wanted them to be; and in the moment of the last song where they filled the air with white paper confetti, it was like getting a day pass into Puppy Heaven to be reunited with the childhood dog that was your first real best friend and died one day when someone left the front door open, and he ran out into the street and he got hit by a minivan.



Band #21 - M83 - We ran across the festival to catch the very last bit of his set. I love this band so much and have wanted to see them for years and years but have always missed them when they played London. So we hurried towards the Chateau stage and as we did, the bars of ´Don´t Save Us From The Flames´ - one of my favourite songs of all time - was wafting through the air, and we bolted it into the tent. Danced. Amazing. AMAZING. Jesus, this band is so very, very good.

Band #22 - Crystal Castles - They were equally as phenominal. My siblings had left for bed, so I stayed to see them with Anthony and Clinton, Perth boys that we met at the festival. It was too dark and crowded to see anything but again I indulged in one of those Dyonisian trances that you can only really do right when you have some fantastic thrashy electro to guide you. It was the perfect band to finish my festival with.

Considered staying up to do the last-night party thing for about five minutes before realising just how used up my body was. I made my way back to our tent, explored the outer reaches of the whole campsite for a while with Emm, then retreated to my own sleeping bag for my last night of sleeping on a flimsy blue mat.

Friday the 15th of August, 2008 - Pukkelpop Day #2 and we spend all day at the Chateau stage.

We awake feeling a whole lot better than the previous morning.

The greatest part was that Emm and Josh experienced their first case of festival temperature hell: going to sleep bundled up in all the clothes and blankets you own to stave off the shivering cold...only to wake up in a sauna of a tent, ripping off items of clothing in a fury as you grapple for the tent zipper so that you can suck in air and relieve yourself from the sweaty hades you´ve gotten yourself into.

It´s always very amusing watching from the outside as tent flaps hurridly open and heads pop out, mouths agape like fish sucking for air.



Band #9 - The Dodos - I cannot express just how great this band was. It was like seeing a baby giraffe walk for the first time: you´re pretty sure you´re never going to see such an endearingly grand performance from such a young creature. The Dodos are young and amazing. Rocking out with multiple percussion, disjointed lyrics, sweetly-sung vocals and acoustic guitars. Marry me.



Oh, and just to improve upon my point about how great their set was - the audience gave them multiple standing ovations. They just would not stop clapping. The band was taking apart their gear and for 10 minutes, the crowd was still there, clappign and cheering. They didn´t know what to do with themselves but smile shyly as the applause went on and on. In my 9 years of seeing bands, I have never, ever seen that happen. Especially not to the first band on stage.

Then we got some more kriek beer. Because by this point, we are all pretty obsessed with kriek beer. We kept taking turns to cart trayfuls back from the special beers tent while we were waiting for bands.



Band #10 - Caribou - I love Caribou. The first time I saw them, they were so-so (owing to a pretty crappy sound job at the venue). The next time, they were staggeringly good. This time even more so. I was in a Dyonisian trance; rapping my hands against the barrier, head nodding to-and-fro.
Oh, and I can never get over how one of the guitarists looks identical to a boy I used to have a thing with.



Band #11 - Los Campesinos! - Michael was pretty excited about this new favourite band of his. He´d seen them a few times before, so had I. My opinion was that it was pretty much the same as the other times. I mean yeah, they´re obviously fun and all but...y´know. They are no Dodos.



We were pretty much waiting at the Chateau stage the whole time because that´s where pretty much all of the bands we wanted to see that day were playing.



I made a mask out of a cardboard beer carrier and we took some photos with our new Dutch friends.



I am a creative genius.

Band #12 - Tunng - Emm was pretty excited about seeing Tunng again. We´s seen them just a few days before at Field Day. They were beautiful, of course, and this time we didn´t get rained on. I loved hearing Jenny Again, again. It´s definitely a new favourite.



We did some productive chilling out before braving the Chateau tent again.



Band #13 - Alphabeat - Nothing could have prepared us for this. The plan was to turn up half an hour before they played and watch their set to secure a good spot for Tokyo Police Club (who, incidentally, were my most-needed-to-see band of the festival). How could a plan go so terribly wrong? The tent was packed already when we got there. I´ve never seen so many fifteeen year-olds in my life. We were very quicky packed like sardines. It was like being magically transported back in time to an all-ages festival. They scared me. Teenagers scare me. I´m not ashamed to admit this. I find their youthful vigure and enthusiasm for life (and the magical natural energy they seem to posses without the aid of a good ol´ fashioned cup of coffee) unnerving. Alphabeat encapsulated all of this in their cloyingly energy-riffic power pop. Jesus.

Band #14 - Tokyo Police Club - Obviously these guys were going to be good for me. They thudered out song after song. A lot from the new album (which dissapointingly, I hadn´t heard much of before) but also a lot from the previous one. Oh, and they were so nice too! Doing that whole ´aw thanks you guys, we don´t deserve all this´ that we seem to lap up even though it´s been done on us a million times before. The highlight for me was their encore - ´Cheer It On´ - my rock-out song of the year. I bumped into Mark and his friend Tim before the set and it was unfortunate that the latter stood behind me because I pretty much head-banged the crap out of that song, and I was totally hitting him in the neck or lower face with my ponytail. Oh, the spendor of being young and alive.

The Sydney guys stopped by our tent before they had to catch the last shuttle bus, but the three of us were being totally un-fun and already in our pyjamas, and Michael had been passed out in his tent for quite some time already. So we decided to keep being un-fun and just go to sleep.

Thursday the 14th of August, 2008 - Pukkelpop Day #1 and everyone is hungover.

We all wake up on the first morning of Pukkelpop with a WHY-GOD-WHY mentality; mouths dry as sandpaper and heads booming like powerful bells. Hurray for us.

We say hello to our neighbours, swig some multi-vit juice from its bottle and brave the huge, crushing line to get into the festival. It´s hot and we are all feeling rather trashy. We grab some food tickets (bonnen) and drink tickets (drankenbon) and spend them on large Boston-style slices of mushroom pizza and about a gazillion cups of coke.

I forgot that they don´t serve redbull at this festival.
All they have is Coke. Oh, and Coke Lite. And Coke Zero.
The bastards.



Oh, by the way - in order to make this as painless as possible, I will just be summarizing my reviews of band sets. Ok, here we go.

Band #1 - Kaizers Orchestra - A strange Flemmish band. Watched them from outside the Marquee tent. Orchestra meets hard rock, maybe.

Then we had Flugel.



Band #2 - The Pigeon Detectives - from outside the Marquee stage, the White Lies sounded pretty awful and generic Brit-rock.

Band #3 - The Cribs - I liked ´Hey Scenesters´ and the last song of the set (which was pretty much post-rock played over a video/sound recording of a spoken word artist) but otherwise, it was pretty unimpressive. Also, the sound of the Marquee stage was fucking awful. Seriously, the bass was SO LOUD the whole time any band was in there. You couldn´t stand to be in front of any of the side speakers.

Much more exciting was the poffertjes we ate.



We also napped in the sun. We were still feeling a little seedy...



So we drank more beer. Because kriek makes all pain go away.



Band #4 - British Sea Power - Weeee! So good. Charismatic and musically on-form. They were, for many people, the highlight of the festival.



Band #5 - Henry Rollins (spoken word) - Ok, so I´ve been wanting to see Henry´s spoken word show for years. He is just...amazing. He didn´t stop for two hours. He just talked and talked. He is one of the most intelligent, well-read, widely-travelled, well-informed (in an autodidact kind of way), witty, angry and kind individuals I´ve ever have the pleasure of being in the presence of. Let´s face it, people; the man should be an elected official.



Band #6 - Mercury Rev - Middle-aged hippies making wonderful music while set in front of a screen with token 60s-esque psychedelic visuals (think babies crawling on globes, tie-dye and dolphins diving through solar systems). The lead singer is a little funny looking, which just makes them even better. I never did hear "Nite and Fog" though.



Band #7 - Flaming Lips - Well obviously they were going to be good. Wayne was out on stage the full hour before the set that it took to set up, obviously micromanaging the theatric displays to come. He did the ball thing...



...and they opened with ´Race For The Prize´(arguably the best song to open with - they pulled the same trick the first time I saw them, at Big Day Out ´05). And the rest of the set was great. Streamers filling the air, the works.

We were sated. We could have left the festival right them. Wham-bam-thank-you-ma´am. But we went to check out...



Band #8 - Holy Fuck - Yeeeeeaaaaaaaaaah. Yeah. Yeah. What else is there to say? How can you go wrong with a set of good, trashy electro?



Then sleep.
z z z

Wednesday the 13th of August, 2008 – Arriving at Pukkelpop.

Anticipating five days without a shower,we spent the morning before we left Brussels scouring our bodies, and washing and styling our hair.
Effort was also put into taking off our bed sheets and bundling them against the wall to hide they all had smudgy black stains that wouldn´t come off with scrubbing (on account of having drawn all over each other´s arms in sharpie before we went to bed the night before.

We had a hearty breakfast of whatever we had left at the hostel – including our deliciously inappropriate ´chocolate brownie´ breakfast cereal – and checked out of the hostel. We´d been checking the weather forecasts for Kieweit-Hassalt (where the festival is located) all week and it looked pretty dire. Rain, rain, rain, it predicted. We had no choice but to believe: as we walked to catch our regional train from the nearby station, the rain drizzled down on us and the wind through us about like marionettes.



The train itself was crammed with festival goers like it was an analogy for a can of tuna. Except it was tuna with luggage. And beer. And boom boxes. Some tuna were shirtless. Most tuna was between the ages of 15 and 22. There was nowhere to sit and some of the tuna was rather smelly, so we perched on the arms of chairs, in the aisles.



I anticipated it taking us an hour between swapping our e-tickets for festival wristbands and getting into the camp site (after all, I done it before – as I loved repeating whenever I could with a rather pretentious air, not forgetting to add how many Australians there were and how ¨when I was here TWO YEARS AGO, there was hardly anyone from English-speaking countries, no siree...¨).



It took just over two hours and it only rained slightly once. We managed to find a camp spot for the three tents (Emm and Josh in one, me in another, and a space for Michael-Masterplan, who was joining us later) just before it started raining a fucking gale. I dashed into my tent as girlish screams were heard all around us, and panicked slightly as the tent was blown about and strained against its newly-planted pegs. Then the sun came out, the rain vanquished and loud cheers echoed rose through the camp site. It rained once more that day – thundered down, actually – then didn´t rain again until we had packed up to go at the very end of the festival. It missed all three days of music.

It was a Christmas Miracle.

Another delightful thing to transpire was that another event that was supposed to happen that could have made the festival uncomfortable – namely my, er, ´womanly season´- held out until after we were out of Belgium. DOUBLE POINT SCORE!



Then:
- we made friends with our teenage neighbours from Gent,
- we went walking to find a store with supplies,
- we had dinner at one of the many temporary roadside ´cafes´ that the local residents had set up outside their houses,
- I took a lovely photograph of a rainbow,
- we bought some kriek, redbull and bottle of Jager,
- Michael arrived and set up his tent with us,
- we drank the kriek, then jager-redbulls,
- then met up with the Sydney boys from the hostel
- and drank some beers with them at the roadside cafe,
- then went back to our tent,
- where by that point, it was pretty much just swigging straight jager,
- which was evidently too much for me, so
- Michael and a random Belgian helped me back to our camp site, tripping on gy-ropes and dropping me a few times on random tents along the way.



Ba-bow.

Then sleep.

Tuesday the 12th of August, 2008 – Brugges is picturesque but overcrowded with tourists.

We left our hostel not that bright and early to take the train to Brugges. It didn´t take very long. I kind of wished that I seen the film In Bruges before I went, though that didn´t seem to matter much when I got there: apparently locals hate tourists coming into their town and talking about the movie.



I would have feared for my life had I stepped onto one of their bike baths – which incidentally are much wider than their pedestrian pavements – only to have gotten hit after hit by a deadly tirade of provincial bicycles.

Ding! Ding! Ding! would ring their bloodthirsty war cry.

Bruges is very pretty but the amount of tourists makes it practically unbearable, and it is for this reason that we didn´t stay long.

What we did do, however, was this:

- looked into the shop fronts of over-priced tourist trap chocolate and candy stores.

- bought and ate a bag of coffee bean-speckled white chocolate buttons for – wait for it – 1 euro. WIN.

- bought and drank a bottle of chocolate beer, bought from the same Chocolate café (getting the bottle open was another story...).



- visited the Friets Museum (this was pretty exciting as an idea but in practise, it was mainly just a lot of rooms of information about potatoes and only one room about chips....so in the guestbook by the door, I left a message that said ¨If I wanted to learn that much about potatoes, I would have gone to the Potato Museum¨).

- How´s them apples?



(PS- upon finding out that most chips are made in animal fat at any particular stage, I decided to quite chips. Like, for the forseeable future. No biggie. Plus, it´s probably a good move, health-wise. I grow unnervingly rounder and/or flabbier by the day.)



We had dinner at the hostel and talked a little with the three boys from Sydney who we´d kept bumping into during our stay (and who were also going to Pukkelpop but staying in a hostel instead of camping at the festival.

Oh, the highlight of our evening was when we bought every brand of kriek beer from the store in order to conduct a highly scientific taste ratings test. This is how they fared:



#1 Lindemans – Very smooth with a vivid cherry taste. At just 2.5% alcohol, it is the perfect drink for a lazy summers´ afternoon , providing you don´t want to fall asleep in the sun after a few glasses. Extra points for only being served in small bottles. Classy.

#2 Mort Subite Extreme – The ´extreme´ stands for extra fruity flavour. Apparently. Similar to Lindemans in taste but it has a cheaper feel to it, a bit more soda-like. Alcohol content is 4.5% and you can buy it in a can or a small bottle. This is the beer that I fell in love with after sampling it at Pukkelpop 2006.

#3 St Louis - Couldn´t quite put our finger on the taste of this. Sort of like Red Bull or some other energy drink. It pretty much just tastes like a can of soda, It only comes served in Red Bull-shaped cans too...hence, soda. Nothing special.

#4 Timmś Light - This tastes exactly like Dr Pepper. The others rated it higher than the diet kriek in their taste test but I can´t stand Dr Pepper, so here it sits at fourth place for me.

#5 Bellvue – This is the stuff they pass off for authentic kreik at the Belgium Beer Café in Perth. Boo! This just tastes like beer. Beer...possibly with some glazed cherries thrown in. Not worth the inflated import price.

#6 Mort Subite Kriek – Again, this just tastes like lager to me. This is probably what the original, authentic kriek is meant to taste like but fuck it – I´m a girl and they don´t call it a girl´s drink for nothing.

I would like to become a world authority on kriek pls. Employ me as a buyer for your tavern or international beer retailer. Pay me a salary and urge me to sample it all day long.

PS - I read Kafka´s Metamorphisis on the train there and wished to have a dialogue about it but nobody was interested. Uncultured swine. Though in all fairness, our attention was being wooed by chocolate and fries, so I forgive them.

Monday the 11th of August, 2008 – Brussels is still good but everything is closed on a Monday.

The hostel that we´d been staying in since the night before went by the name of 2GO4 Quality Hostel.
Despite this, it was actually a pretty cool place. It seemed to be run by three Flemish brothers (the youngest, attractive and charmingly helpful; the middle one even more attractive but snooty; the oldest, a little creepy) and had a big common room with a kitchen, tables, couches and free internets.



We spent the day seeing all the things we had circled in a great ´insiders´ guide to Brussels for young travellers´. When we started the highlights-to-see process, we assumed that we would need two, if not three, days to explore the city. Unfortunately, most of the cool design-y shops and spaces seemed to have closed for August. Nuts to that.



At least it meant that we had finished,tourist-wise, with Brussels and so could make it to Bruges the next day.



We had dinner at a recommended restaurant in the gay district that supposedly ´the boys go to with their mothers before heading out for the night´. We shared an excellent warm goats cheese salad and I had a rather bland, dry mixed vegetable pasta
BUT it did have brussel sprouts in it,
So I can now say that I have sampled brussel sprouts grown and prepared in Brussels.
And that is awesome.