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.
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