Wow, what a whirlwind of a week.
Having only ever attended 2 festivals in the past, both of which were one day, Swedish pop concerts in the centre of towns, why not drop myself in the deep end by working them?! I don't know why my friendship group has never leant towards festivals. I don't even think it's ever been discussed as an option. But I though if ever I was to do anything like this, it should be when I'm 19 and the most impressionable I can be. Doing Events Management at uni has only ever taught me which events I don't want to touch with a 10 foot pole, so maybe if I do these things by myself, I can slag uni off even more. Surprise, surprise, I had the best time at Hyde Park and T in the Park, no thanks to uni.
I was on my way to London when I wrote my last post, and stayed two nights because why not.
London is so huge compared to Newcastle. You always forget how piddly (for want of a better word) the Tyne and Wear Metro is compared to the London Underground. Tubes ride around with 7 or 8 cars, Metro, 2. The scale of the underground is just immense compared to the metro, and stations like St. Peters, which consist of 2 platforms and some stairs to get to them. Crazy.
Not sure if I like London. It's nice to visit for a few days, and to go sightseeing like a proper real tourist, but not to live there. I don't know how anyone can afford to live there, even on London wages. It just seems outrageously expensive. I paid £8 for a hotdog, bottle of water and a chocolate muffin. £8. In Newcastle I could bet you it would be half of that. For the exact same meal, it would cost half the price.
A lot of takeaways too had minimum order £15. How can one person justify spending £15 on their evening meal, even if it is a takeaway, it's extortionate. This was £12 I think, and the cheapest I could find. Wasn't even that nice… :(
I met someone I had previously met online through Festaff who was looking for someone to go with to Hyde Park at about 9:30, and we practically circumnavigated the whole of Hyde Park before finding where we needed to be haha. We got our little wristbands, and hi-vis, and were taken into the arena for a little briefing.
We had a little bit of time to walk around after the briefing to get lunch, before the hardcore McBusted and Vamps fans got in, and it's my favourite part about every event. The calm before the storm. Being able to anticipate what it's going to be like later on, and enjoying it whilst it's quiet. It sort of makes you appreciate it more when McBusted are on, playing Air Hostess for the second time, and despite not having helped put the thing together, it's still nice to be a part of both stages.
I worked with a company called Festaff, who are basically just a volunteering company who recruit anyone interested in going to the festival to work a percentage of the festival, in return for a very cheap ticket to the actual event. Actually, they're a very very good company to work for, and I recommend anyone to try a festival with them at least once. They look after you and are all nice people. Both supervisors and volunteers are there for the same reason and it's nice that there are very few restrictions on who can work with them. To be able to get to T in the Park for about £15 and a returnable £20 bond is preeetttyyyy good. Will definitely work with them again next summer.
The ticket stubs I was ripping off for Hyde Park were saying around £55 for a ticket, but I got mine for £10, I think. Not only that, you get a staff wristband too, which says Arena on it. It doesn't get you a lot further than the public, but you can still use certain entrances that they can't use to get in, and it's the best feeling in the world walking straight into the arena past queues of girls who've been camped out all night to get in. Been here half an hour and still in before you…
They actually all sprinted towards the lanes, only to be held there for another 5 minutes hahaha. So funny watching them try to leg it out of their lane to try and camp at the front of the stage for 8 hours, and getting absolutely screamed at by security on bikes not to run. Speedwalking it is then…
I worked on these lanes from about 1pm until 6:30, 7pm, when we were finished, since the majority of general admissions were through by then. Because of that, we managed to have time to get some food, and a little listen to the end of the Backstreet Boys' set on the main stage. There was plenty of time to wriggle your way into the crowd if you wanted to be closer to the stage. We stood pretty close to it all, which was nice for such an enormous stage!
Then the heavens opened. I have genuinely only seen rain this bad once before, and even then I was inside! It was just absolutely torrential. I was so miserable in my soaked skinny jeans that just weren't going to dry any time soon.
After the rain finished though, it was a beautiful golden hour. It kept on raining on and off though, but it was really pretty whilst it stopped.
Fairly pretty fireworks too. It's strange though, how the pyrotechnics during the actual set were directly underneath the line array. Not trying to sound technical, or cleverer than I am or anything, but I wouldn't have put fire underneath your sound system. It did actually affect the sound, and muffled it for a few seconds whilst the gas cleared or whatever. I'd laugh if it had melted into one big block hahaha.
We decided to walk to another tube station since 50000 people were going to try and go through Hyde Park Corner. On our magical mystery tour of London to find Waterloo station, we passed Buckingham Palace, like wtf, there's Buckingham Palace. You always go to Buckingham Palace, not past it. For someone from Newcastle, this is a difficult concept to grasp; that you can just stroll past the Queen whilst she's in bed.
Ended up at Westminster Station instead. I was only about 10 minutes away from where I was staying, but my feet have never been in so much pain, after I stood all day, then walked 2 miles across central London, I couldn't have walked home. Westminster is my favourite tube station so far though. It's like being in Monsters inc., since all of the building structure is visible, and you can see the underside of escalators etc, it was pretty cool. They also have the automatic doors between the track and the platform. Imagine if they didn't open hahahaha.
Even worse, I've just typed my postcode into the Pizza Hut delivery website, and there isn't a Pizza Hut close enough to deliver to us :'( This is the worst news ever, I'm moving back to Sunderland.
So then I came back from London. It's funny going to loads of places in quick succession, like Manchester and York with work, then London and Scotland for festivals, you get to meet a lot of people. I like meeting people, or at least I thought I did. It's hard. Not so much when you don't like them, that's not too difficult, but when you do actually like the people you meet, and suddenly you have to leave them for either a very long time or forever. 2 days of becoming friends, amounts to nothing afterwards. It's tiring to keep doing that with new people. I don't know how many people I've told the story of how I speak Swedish. I don't mind telling it… takes a little while, but… but when you have to keep doing it, then the next day you say bye forever, what's the point? That's not me saying I don't want to keep on meeting people, but the capacity isn't there to maintain contact with everyone you meet. Even people I love to death, I can't keep up contact with them, that's hard.
But 2 days after I get back from London, I'm on my way again, northwards to T in the Park. Ironic to the above, meeting someone there I met in London haha.
We got to Kinross at about 3pm on the Wednesday, which was just after we stopped at Burger King at Kinross services to have our last supper. The picture above is our briefing in the tent at the top of the hill, and we were allocated roles just outside. It's nice to be able to coordinate which shifts you want based on which days you'd like free the most. I knew my favourite day would be Saturday so I deliberately made sure I didn't get a Saturday shift… (basically for the sole reason that I think I would actually have cried if I didn't get to see The 1975 haha) I also managed to get the same shifts as the guy I met at Hyde Park who I managed to find in the campsite earlier on, and we worked together for the rest of the festival :)
I'm pretty sure Wednesday night was then spend foraging / scrimping with food, since no stalls were open yet, oh, whilst trying to put the remainder of my tent up. More difficult than it looks when you don't bother to read the instructions! I had no idea who the people I was camping with were, and it was nice to sit and chat all night, making new friends with your neighbours for the next week.
By this point, my hair hadn't been washed for a few days. By the end, I didn't actually wash it for 5 days. I didn't know what it would smell like after 5 days, but I can reveal to you now. It smells like the dirty, greasy carpet in the mens toilets of a pub. Yeah. It dunt look too bad because I suffocated it with dry shampoo, but it didn't help the feel or smell. It didn't help when it rained on Saturday, so now it's like if a wet dog rolled around in those toilets.
I didn't take many pictures on my phone, because I didn't have it with me when I went out. We had a free phone charging tent, but it meant waiting with it whilst it charged, and I had better things to do. I had two disposable cameras with me though, which are mighty indestructible little things and I love them. Although I have just looked online and THEY'RE NOT THERE. If they've stopped selling them I'll be so upset. I have 4 left, but that's just not enough…
We had a barbecue and it was genuinely the nicest barbecue I've ever had. Burger with cheese and bacon. I've never put bacon on the barbecue before, but I've clearly been missing out… It was just gorgeous.
My shifts were fairly easy. Festaff aren't ones to make you do all their dirty work, and there's no 'security' positions for us. We were basically points of contact, and a welcome fountain of knowledge when you're blind drunk and forgotten which direction your campsite is in. Or if you didn't even get that far, and you don't know where the arena is anymore. There's a load of positions available though, from stewarding the staff campsite, which was one of my other shifts, to wrist banding the public, the VIPs, and the artists if you're lucky. Carpark stewards, info point stewards, recycling teams… there's lots of positions available, but you're with people who don't know anyone either, and everyones in the same lonely boat. But because everyone's of the same mindset, you make friends really quickly and suddenly you're off to see Imagine Dragons with a bunch of people you'd only met 2 hours ago.
The staff campsite is lush. Much better than the normal campsites. It's FLAT, has showers, phone chargers, clean toilets WITH toilet roll… I don't think I ever went to the toilet in our campsite without having any toilet paper already there. It was fab! It was also fairly quiet most of the time, so if you did actually want to get some sleep because you had to be up early the next day, they you could actually sleep in peace! And whilst no, I didn't go in the shower, it was nice to always have the option to!
Very classic disposable camera looking photos. I really like the way they're just completely flat, with very little life about them, as though the scene's been frozen for 100 years. These are just some of the good ones though. There are a lot of blurry, out of focus, grey shots that must just be painful to process. Obviously nobody wants to keep the picture of just 'grey', but they still print them anyway. That ink is expensive man. Whilst trying my hardest to keep Jessops in business still, I'm also driving them out of business by printing pictures of just 'grey'.
But yeah, all in all a very very positive experience at both festivals, really hoping to go back next year to do even more. I thought I might not like it, but actually it was the opposite, and hopefully next year I'll be able to drive to T in the Park, so that will be even better! I definitely recommend going to one of these festivals with Festaff, even if it's just the one day Hyde Park gigs, because you'll just meet some of the best people, and have a really great time for such a small amount of money, compared to what it would be if you went as a punter.
They change their tune every week though. This week it was 'errrrm, you know these cameras are standard 2 days processing? But it's errr, it'll be erm, £1 extra for 1 hour processing. Yeah, £1 per camera.' They seriously just make it up on the spot in that Jessops haha. I used to get them developed straight away as I stood and chatted to them. Then it turned to about an afternoon to process, then a day, and now two days. There wasn't even anything on that day haha, and he struggled to put it through the till (because £1 processing doesn't exist hahaha). I remember him, but he doesn't remember me, and I didn't see 'Danny', so we're good so far. I still have another 4 cameras though… hahahaha. Maybe it'll be £2 per camera for 1 hour processing next week… who knows…
Got back to five sixths of my cats being in the same room. Ecstatic.
And then went ice skating in July.
It was surprisingly busy, actually. Did not expect as many people to be there.
I've really missed my friends. Haven't seen them for so long, but nothing changes when we all get back together. It's been hard not seeing them every day like I used to, but the times we do get back together is just the best.
Found out Wetherspoons now do not 2, but 3 Bakewellbombs for £5. That is a whole extra Bakewellbomb for no extra cost. Do u understand how excited I am. This is heaven. Disaronno is just the nicest ever.
Also got home to find the garage had been tidied whilst I was away, and my 8 year old bike was there. I still fit it. My bigger bike, which I guess is my 'current' bike is still too big for me, since it was bought for me to grow into, but I didn't do a lot of growing. This pink one is only just a little bit too small. And I've found I quite like riding bikes along our street haha.
Jordanavia :)
Having only ever attended 2 festivals in the past, both of which were one day, Swedish pop concerts in the centre of towns, why not drop myself in the deep end by working them?! I don't know why my friendship group has never leant towards festivals. I don't even think it's ever been discussed as an option. But I though if ever I was to do anything like this, it should be when I'm 19 and the most impressionable I can be. Doing Events Management at uni has only ever taught me which events I don't want to touch with a 10 foot pole, so maybe if I do these things by myself, I can slag uni off even more. Surprise, surprise, I had the best time at Hyde Park and T in the Park, no thanks to uni.
I was on my way to London when I wrote my last post, and stayed two nights because why not.
London is so huge compared to Newcastle. You always forget how piddly (for want of a better word) the Tyne and Wear Metro is compared to the London Underground. Tubes ride around with 7 or 8 cars, Metro, 2. The scale of the underground is just immense compared to the metro, and stations like St. Peters, which consist of 2 platforms and some stairs to get to them. Crazy.
Not sure if I like London. It's nice to visit for a few days, and to go sightseeing like a proper real tourist, but not to live there. I don't know how anyone can afford to live there, even on London wages. It just seems outrageously expensive. I paid £8 for a hotdog, bottle of water and a chocolate muffin. £8. In Newcastle I could bet you it would be half of that. For the exact same meal, it would cost half the price.
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| The biggest takeaway in the world |
A lot of takeaways too had minimum order £15. How can one person justify spending £15 on their evening meal, even if it is a takeaway, it's extortionate. This was £12 I think, and the cheapest I could find. Wasn't even that nice… :(
I met someone I had previously met online through Festaff who was looking for someone to go with to Hyde Park at about 9:30, and we practically circumnavigated the whole of Hyde Park before finding where we needed to be haha. We got our little wristbands, and hi-vis, and were taken into the arena for a little briefing.
We had a little bit of time to walk around after the briefing to get lunch, before the hardcore McBusted and Vamps fans got in, and it's my favourite part about every event. The calm before the storm. Being able to anticipate what it's going to be like later on, and enjoying it whilst it's quiet. It sort of makes you appreciate it more when McBusted are on, playing Air Hostess for the second time, and despite not having helped put the thing together, it's still nice to be a part of both stages.
I worked with a company called Festaff, who are basically just a volunteering company who recruit anyone interested in going to the festival to work a percentage of the festival, in return for a very cheap ticket to the actual event. Actually, they're a very very good company to work for, and I recommend anyone to try a festival with them at least once. They look after you and are all nice people. Both supervisors and volunteers are there for the same reason and it's nice that there are very few restrictions on who can work with them. To be able to get to T in the Park for about £15 and a returnable £20 bond is preeetttyyyy good. Will definitely work with them again next summer.
The ticket stubs I was ripping off for Hyde Park were saying around £55 for a ticket, but I got mine for £10, I think. Not only that, you get a staff wristband too, which says Arena on it. It doesn't get you a lot further than the public, but you can still use certain entrances that they can't use to get in, and it's the best feeling in the world walking straight into the arena past queues of girls who've been camped out all night to get in. Been here half an hour and still in before you…
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| Little scanner. My hands were too small to hold it properly. |
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| Another calm before the storm picture |
They actually all sprinted towards the lanes, only to be held there for another 5 minutes hahaha. So funny watching them try to leg it out of their lane to try and camp at the front of the stage for 8 hours, and getting absolutely screamed at by security on bikes not to run. Speedwalking it is then…
I worked on these lanes from about 1pm until 6:30, 7pm, when we were finished, since the majority of general admissions were through by then. Because of that, we managed to have time to get some food, and a little listen to the end of the Backstreet Boys' set on the main stage. There was plenty of time to wriggle your way into the crowd if you wanted to be closer to the stage. We stood pretty close to it all, which was nice for such an enormous stage!
Then the heavens opened. I have genuinely only seen rain this bad once before, and even then I was inside! It was just absolutely torrential. I was so miserable in my soaked skinny jeans that just weren't going to dry any time soon.
After the rain finished though, it was a beautiful golden hour. It kept on raining on and off though, but it was really pretty whilst it stopped.
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| They had the spaceship again though, yisss |
Fairly pretty fireworks too. It's strange though, how the pyrotechnics during the actual set were directly underneath the line array. Not trying to sound technical, or cleverer than I am or anything, but I wouldn't have put fire underneath your sound system. It did actually affect the sound, and muffled it for a few seconds whilst the gas cleared or whatever. I'd laugh if it had melted into one big block hahaha.
We decided to walk to another tube station since 50000 people were going to try and go through Hyde Park Corner. On our magical mystery tour of London to find Waterloo station, we passed Buckingham Palace, like wtf, there's Buckingham Palace. You always go to Buckingham Palace, not past it. For someone from Newcastle, this is a difficult concept to grasp; that you can just stroll past the Queen whilst she's in bed.
Ended up at Westminster Station instead. I was only about 10 minutes away from where I was staying, but my feet have never been in so much pain, after I stood all day, then walked 2 miles across central London, I couldn't have walked home. Westminster is my favourite tube station so far though. It's like being in Monsters inc., since all of the building structure is visible, and you can see the underside of escalators etc, it was pretty cool. They also have the automatic doors between the track and the platform. Imagine if they didn't open hahahaha.
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| So gorgeous. Looking at the picture makes me sad because I'm not currently eating it. |
So then I came back from London. It's funny going to loads of places in quick succession, like Manchester and York with work, then London and Scotland for festivals, you get to meet a lot of people. I like meeting people, or at least I thought I did. It's hard. Not so much when you don't like them, that's not too difficult, but when you do actually like the people you meet, and suddenly you have to leave them for either a very long time or forever. 2 days of becoming friends, amounts to nothing afterwards. It's tiring to keep doing that with new people. I don't know how many people I've told the story of how I speak Swedish. I don't mind telling it… takes a little while, but… but when you have to keep doing it, then the next day you say bye forever, what's the point? That's not me saying I don't want to keep on meeting people, but the capacity isn't there to maintain contact with everyone you meet. Even people I love to death, I can't keep up contact with them, that's hard.
But 2 days after I get back from London, I'm on my way again, northwards to T in the Park. Ironic to the above, meeting someone there I met in London haha.
We got to Kinross at about 3pm on the Wednesday, which was just after we stopped at Burger King at Kinross services to have our last supper. The picture above is our briefing in the tent at the top of the hill, and we were allocated roles just outside. It's nice to be able to coordinate which shifts you want based on which days you'd like free the most. I knew my favourite day would be Saturday so I deliberately made sure I didn't get a Saturday shift… (basically for the sole reason that I think I would actually have cried if I didn't get to see The 1975 haha) I also managed to get the same shifts as the guy I met at Hyde Park who I managed to find in the campsite earlier on, and we worked together for the rest of the festival :)
I'm pretty sure Wednesday night was then spend foraging / scrimping with food, since no stalls were open yet, oh, whilst trying to put the remainder of my tent up. More difficult than it looks when you don't bother to read the instructions! I had no idea who the people I was camping with were, and it was nice to sit and chat all night, making new friends with your neighbours for the next week.
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| Such festival. Very colour. |
By this point, my hair hadn't been washed for a few days. By the end, I didn't actually wash it for 5 days. I didn't know what it would smell like after 5 days, but I can reveal to you now. It smells like the dirty, greasy carpet in the mens toilets of a pub. Yeah. It dunt look too bad because I suffocated it with dry shampoo, but it didn't help the feel or smell. It didn't help when it rained on Saturday, so now it's like if a wet dog rolled around in those toilets.
I didn't take many pictures on my phone, because I didn't have it with me when I went out. We had a free phone charging tent, but it meant waiting with it whilst it charged, and I had better things to do. I had two disposable cameras with me though, which are mighty indestructible little things and I love them. Although I have just looked online and THEY'RE NOT THERE. If they've stopped selling them I'll be so upset. I have 4 left, but that's just not enough…
My shifts were fairly easy. Festaff aren't ones to make you do all their dirty work, and there's no 'security' positions for us. We were basically points of contact, and a welcome fountain of knowledge when you're blind drunk and forgotten which direction your campsite is in. Or if you didn't even get that far, and you don't know where the arena is anymore. There's a load of positions available though, from stewarding the staff campsite, which was one of my other shifts, to wrist banding the public, the VIPs, and the artists if you're lucky. Carpark stewards, info point stewards, recycling teams… there's lots of positions available, but you're with people who don't know anyone either, and everyones in the same lonely boat. But because everyone's of the same mindset, you make friends really quickly and suddenly you're off to see Imagine Dragons with a bunch of people you'd only met 2 hours ago.
The staff campsite is lush. Much better than the normal campsites. It's FLAT, has showers, phone chargers, clean toilets WITH toilet roll… I don't think I ever went to the toilet in our campsite without having any toilet paper already there. It was fab! It was also fairly quiet most of the time, so if you did actually want to get some sleep because you had to be up early the next day, they you could actually sleep in peace! And whilst no, I didn't go in the shower, it was nice to always have the option to!
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| Got a bit tanned. Burnt, actually, but now it's a nice colour. Wore my watch for 5 days straight though… you can probably tell… it's pretty severe |
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Another arena wristband. Got a nice white mark on this arm too.
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| TV coverage of The 1975. If y'all look to the bottom left, that blonde kid is me! |
Very classic disposable camera looking photos. I really like the way they're just completely flat, with very little life about them, as though the scene's been frozen for 100 years. These are just some of the good ones though. There are a lot of blurry, out of focus, grey shots that must just be painful to process. Obviously nobody wants to keep the picture of just 'grey', but they still print them anyway. That ink is expensive man. Whilst trying my hardest to keep Jessops in business still, I'm also driving them out of business by printing pictures of just 'grey'.
But yeah, all in all a very very positive experience at both festivals, really hoping to go back next year to do even more. I thought I might not like it, but actually it was the opposite, and hopefully next year I'll be able to drive to T in the Park, so that will be even better! I definitely recommend going to one of these festivals with Festaff, even if it's just the one day Hyde Park gigs, because you'll just meet some of the best people, and have a really great time for such a small amount of money, compared to what it would be if you went as a punter.
They change their tune every week though. This week it was 'errrrm, you know these cameras are standard 2 days processing? But it's errr, it'll be erm, £1 extra for 1 hour processing. Yeah, £1 per camera.' They seriously just make it up on the spot in that Jessops haha. I used to get them developed straight away as I stood and chatted to them. Then it turned to about an afternoon to process, then a day, and now two days. There wasn't even anything on that day haha, and he struggled to put it through the till (because £1 processing doesn't exist hahaha). I remember him, but he doesn't remember me, and I didn't see 'Danny', so we're good so far. I still have another 4 cameras though… hahahaha. Maybe it'll be £2 per camera for 1 hour processing next week… who knows…
Got back to five sixths of my cats being in the same room. Ecstatic.
And then went ice skating in July.
It was surprisingly busy, actually. Did not expect as many people to be there.
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| Front seeeeaaattt wwwwooowwwwww |
I've really missed my friends. Haven't seen them for so long, but nothing changes when we all get back together. It's been hard not seeing them every day like I used to, but the times we do get back together is just the best.
Found out Wetherspoons now do not 2, but 3 Bakewellbombs for £5. That is a whole extra Bakewellbomb for no extra cost. Do u understand how excited I am. This is heaven. Disaronno is just the nicest ever.
Also got home to find the garage had been tidied whilst I was away, and my 8 year old bike was there. I still fit it. My bigger bike, which I guess is my 'current' bike is still too big for me, since it was bought for me to grow into, but I didn't do a lot of growing. This pink one is only just a little bit too small. And I've found I quite like riding bikes along our street haha.
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| And got next year's tent sorted… |
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| And my little spoon is also lined up… |
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| I think he's glad to have me home too haha |
Jordanavia :)
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