Nature One

A colleague invited me to go to an electronic music festival in Germany that he has gone to the last 6 years running and since I love electronic music I couldn’t turn him down.  It had an incredible lineup of the best DJs in the world and I was looking forward to spending a weekend with someone instead of travelling alone all of the time.  It was held at an old US military base in Germany, Pydna, and it is still setup like this with the barbed-wire fences everywhere and the huge bunkers that have been turned into clubs for the festival; which was typical European style meaning they didn’t start playing until 6 or 7 PM and played through the night until 8 AM.

Captions: Top - Remaining US Air Force Plane Model

Bottom - Bunker / Hangar turned into two clubs on the outsides

I was surprised with how many different stages and clubs they had set up, there were 4 larger stages and about 15-20 smaller ‘clubs’ playing different types of music so the main stage was not even all that busy except for Armin Van Buuren.  When we arrived to park our car at the camping site we were right next to the loudest stage, even with earplugs in it was still so loud.  We were not very happy because we knew that we would have zero chance of sleeping in the next two days with that playing all night long and it was overly excessive.  

Our camp site and two tents... right next to a stage....

Luckily, they were actually playing good music so it wasn’t all too bad to bear and after 5 hours of listening to it we found out that they were only playing 11 AM – 10 PM so we could actually sleep!  The Friday night crew was great but I was looking forward to Saturday night as the headliners were playing back-to-back-to-back.  

Caption: Open air main stage

But in the meantime I decided to be a little adventurous and do something I never said I would ever do; but the music and the atmosphere got me in the mood and I went ahead and went for it – I went bungee jumping! 

I figured if you can’t trust German engineering, then what can you trust?  I felt pretty comfortable except for the fact on the way up the guy was giving his directions in German for awhile until I said English please and the way I jumped was the opposite side of the safety mat, but when we got to the top the guy said ‘Jump’ and gave me a nudge on the back and I was free-falling which was an incredible feeling and the whiplash of the bungee cord was actually not painful at all!  We went to watch Filo & Peri play for the second time in one of the clubs later and we went to the back of it where they entered and talked to them for a few minutes!

Captions: Top - Picture with Filo & Peri, didn't turn out that well in the rain but trust me it's them!

Bottom - Standing next to the 2010 Theme Poster

Overall, a great event and I am even more a fan of the type of music and am looking forward to going to Electric Zoo in NYC in 2011!