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Published: September 12th 2007
I was never supposed to go to Serbia. Of course it was on the list of things to do, with just about every other place on earth. But I had been bugging my Croatian friend to hook me up with a free place to stay with one of his friends in Zagreb. He emailed me one day and said his friend is going to Serbia and I should go with her. This was a Tuesday, I left on Thursday. But on Wednesday I met a random friend, Rob from Canada, who was just visiting Budapest and had no intention of going to Serbia. So of course he went too.
Turns out my Croatian friend's friend, Sylvia, was going to a massive music festival featuring the Beastie Boys, Snoop Dogg, Basement Jaxx, Trentemoller, The Prodigy, and many more. What first gave it away though was the hundreds, maybe thousands, of drunken Brits on the train from Budapest to Belgrade. There was nowhere to sit, let alone stand, on the train until everyone was so drunk and up and dancing in the aisles...then I got a seat. But wait...there is a crisis in the Balkans...the bar car on the train has run
out of beer. No worry, they just got more during the hours long customs check at the border. Turns out I wasn't even going to Belgrade, but to Novi Sad, Serbia's second largest city.
Not sure really what I was getting myself into, we approached a large fortress looming large on the banks of the Danube river that supposedly held this festival of 70,000 people per day. We made our way up some steep and extremely narrow cobblestone streets towards the entrance of the fortress. What waited inside was rather spectacular. A maze of walkways past turrets, moat crossings, and arched passageways all leading to a semi-hidden stage. There were 23 stages in all and all different sorts of music was playing...from Reggae to punk rock to electronic dance music. Getting lost wasn't so much of an issue as it was the norm.
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