POR, 11.Aug.2008: BOOM

On 2008-08-20 01:46, vazu wrote:
The only clean drinking water was sold only in half llitre (branded) bottles for a Euro, but with normal water consumption this would amount to 6 to 10 Euros a day so many people couldn't afford it and had to poison themselves with the tap water.

On 2008-08-20 01:46, vazu wrote:
There are so many people here afraid of telling the truth because of being stuck in the pose of being positive and so on.

What this festival clearly shows is that the spirit of "love and peace" has been sold for pennies and thrown to the pigs. The organizers just use all of this as a gimmick.

This festival for the organizers was obviously about nothing but money making with no consideration or respect towards the people whom they made there money out of. This is very offensive towards the people who pay for the tickets, and towards the people who added so much intellectual and creative input to the festival.

First of all there was the queue; just to get in there was a long line of cars completely blocking the way to and from the festival which could have caused fatalities in case of an emergency, and there was nobody to control the traffic. People waited even a whole day to get inside with their cars, even just to walk from the nearest accessible point took three to four hours on the sun, and there were no toilets or access to water on the way. Only to get in and find more queues, lines for shower, lines for water lines for food and for toilets. I have seen festival of 400 000 people with no one having to wait more than two hours to get in in the first day, and it only had one entrance too. I feel for the people who were mislead by the organizers who only concentrated on selling their last tickets, but forgot to remind people that those are limited, and might not be enough for everybody.

The water supply inside of Boom was also horrible, there were taps of water with water coming from god knows where, but I'm sure it was not drinking water and it was full of chlorine, many kitchens cooked with water from the lake which was infected (no wonder since people used the lakes as toilets) and caused diarrhea for lots of people who didn't even get in the lakes. The only clean drinking water was sold only in half llitre (branded) bottles for a Euro, but with normal water consumption this would amount to 6 to 10 Euros a day so many people couldn't afford it and had to poison themselves with the tap water.

And after the first couple of days the toilets also became a major problem as most of them were not cleaned or otherwise maintained. There were three kind of toilets:
Urinals: for men it was a pipe cut in the half which they had to pee in, and a tube led the urine to a barrel, no privacy of course. The female urinals were bordered with improvised walls, but there were no divisions so you could watch eachother doing no. 1. These were also barrels filled with sawdust to wee on.
Toilets for no. 2:
These were improvised toilets leading to barrels as well, with kind of walls around them and a door that leaves five centimeter gap when it closes so you could catch eye with the passerbys while you are supposed to take shit with half a dozen of flies on your ass. Some of these toilets were regularly cleaned, however they were not an option for the fans of privacy.
So there were the mobile toilets which could have been an option if they give them a thorough clean at least once a day, but this didn't happen in many cases until the 5th day, so they had overflowing shit, shit on the seats, and even on the walls, you could smell them from sixty meters. Given that there were toilets on about every two hundred meters, most time you had to smell shit in the second half of the festival. This was really frustrating that there was no decent or at least acceptable way of going to toilet. People started peeing around and even craping into the showers.

I think the music was pretty shit too, but this is a subjective opinion, but pretty objectively they didn't spend much money on the line up either, I'm sure many of the people were playing for free. And the music also pretty objectively didn't start playing until the second evening of the theoretically seven day festival

And the Deco was poor too.

Maybe I look too demanding asking for free water and conditions that help me preserve my dignity as a human, but the fact is that the organizers were demanding too with the prices. They ask for so much money that would be enough for them to bring Michael Jackson and still have money for proper infrastructure.

How Boom got commercial you could see it by the people as well, a lot of people were turists or punks, and you could see many people who didn't even go there to have fun, but to steel, or to sell cocaine, which appeared to be the most and only commonly sold drug at boom.

- a R.I.P for the two guys that didn't make it out of boom alive...but hey...there are 40.000 people....someone is going to be really sick or die...the cycle of life doesn't stop at boom