So I’m going to a Canadian festival roughly modeled after Burning Man alone this week. I’ve never gone to something like this before, but expect to have a weird time (hopefully in a good sense).
Have you ever gone to something kinda like this (BM itself, a regional burn, outdoor multi-day music festival with that kind of vibe)? I’d love to hear people’s stories/hard-earned wisdom.
Nowhere near as exciting as Burning Man. But I was at Reading '05 in the UK. The year of the Reading camping riots. It was insane. All out debauched celebration alongside morons being in charge of camping equipment whilst inebriated. This amounted to gas canisters and fireworks placed casually on the tops of campfires, leading to one guy having his balls shredded by shrapnel as he walked too close to one of the pires.
I witnessed a few walking wounded, stumbling to make their way to medical help, dripping with blood, being hindered by the utter chaos that filled the ‘roads’ between campsites. People were clinging to the sides of fire engines as they tried to wade through the drunken zombies, a group pushed an ice cream truck over with the operator still inside and the marshals all got trapped in their crows nests and pelted with all sorts of projectiles (including flaming) whilst people set their tents and remaining equipment on fire below instead of having to clean them up and cart them home.
I’ve never been in a situation like it. Utterly surreal, super scary but also kinda dumb fun at the time when you’re 17… I can remember the festival being quite good before all hell broke loose on the last night!
me trying to find an article about 2005 specifically, only finding comments on forums and inferior social media platforms saying “Oh yeah, that’s just the Sunday at Reading, flaming tents and explosions are the norm, happens every year”
That’s a hell of an experience!
Yeah I’ve been hearing that it kind of repeats itself every few years. I can’t comment on any other year, but witnessing 2005 was an eye opener. I was trying to find an article to link too but only came across one from 2022 that referenced 2005 (and apparently 2002) being exceptionally bad, comparing them to 2022.
I used to go a lot around then, idk why (youth maybe?) but we weren’t that scared… maybe because it was a tradition of our group after the music on Sunday night to go on an adventure around the campsite, making friends with random other camps sharing drinks, uh various substances and generally chilling with randoms. So even though we were aware of all the chaos and mayhem going on around, we just cared about chatting gods-knows what to people we’d never met before
Now I do remember the bottling 50 Cent got in '04, my mate threw a camping chair on the stage. Funny back then, still funny now