Things we learned at Metropolis 2013: hydration is important, there’s never enough batteries and sunscreen is gold on a sunny day.

The sun is shining, the speakers are blaring and the Rockstone crew is ready. Metropolis festival 2013 is calling:

  • List of artists to interview and do sessions with: check!
  • Press bands on our wrists: check!
  • Sunscreen to avoid horrible farmer’s tan on a surprisingly sunny Dutch day: check!

It seems like we’ve got everything under control, right? However, just like a fun and exciting rollercoaster that we are…there are times that we think we’re about to fall flat on our faces.

Oh, the hunger

At one point our hunger got the best of us. This meant we had to hunt for food to feed our growling tummies. As lovely as the press area was (bitterballs and prosecco included), it did not have enough to satisfy The Hunger. Since our original plan (which was to stuff our faces in the press area) did not work out as planned, we decided to move on to plan B, which was to raid a nearby Albert Heijn. This is what we did: half of the team raids the Albert Heijn whilst the other half keeps guard of the car, whilst cooking like delicious bacon in a hot box.

Batteries not included

In the meantime, Mark is desperately trying to find somewhere to plug his battery charger in. Just as we think he’s succeeded at finding a power socket in one of those cardboard boxlike containers used for reception purposes in festival, he hasn’t. However, we don’t notice this until we’re just about to interview Deep Sea Arcade and Tessa Rose Jackson. Turns out the girl (who shall be kept anonymous mostly because we do not know who she is) who was manning the press box plugged in Mark’s battery charger into the only socket in that tiny trailer that didn’t work… Oh, the joy!

Persistent personalities

Of course we managed to fix all of our troubles. Like true professionals that we are, we juggle the batteries back and forth through video camera #1, video camera #2 and the digital camera. We used every little percentage of battery we had. All the while, we were running out of space on our memory cards to actually store the material… And then there was that time when we couldn’t find the artist we were supposed to interview! But with our persistent personalities we managed to find them in no time anyway.

All in all… our parking lot picnic, the friendly artists, our search for basic needs (water and electricity) made our hectic day a lot of fun. Be persistent, and you will succeed!

Lay Kuen Y.