Summer Breeze and Round 2 of the apartment hunt

Yup, from the title you might have guessed it, but here is the bad news first: I have heard back from all of the rooms I was interested in in Hamburg and Lübeck and struck out with all three of them. So I will be starting my whole search routine over again immediately. I am going to change a few things in my profile and my little introductory letter, and am going to concentrate on ads with telephone numbers, as it is harder to ignore a phone call than an email or text message. That has been the most frustrating aspect of my time in Germany so far, the fact that I send out scores of Emails and never get responses. I must have written at least 50 emails in the past few weeks, and I think I got maybe 3 responses!! Anyway, I just hope that all this craziness and stress will lead to me finding the perfect place to live!

Anyway, on to fun stuff, like Summer Breeze! After getting an unexpected message from my friend Flo, saying that there was a seat left in his car and he knew of a a guy in Kreuznach who wanted to sell his ticket (Festival was already sold out). As I was already looking for an excuse to head south to familiar territory, I jumped at the chance, and jumped on a train to Kreuznach the very next morning. I didn't have much time to prepare for this little adventure as Flo and co. were leaving on Wednesday morning, and I didn't hear from him until Monday night, and didn't really have a chance to get filled in on all the details until I got to Kreuznach. Not even knowing where I was going to sleep, I got off the train at the ugliest train station in Germany (I'm serious, Kreuznach won this distinct honor several times from TV-Personality Stefan Raab) only to run into none other than my old friend Jan Seidel, who not only happened to also be going to Summer Breeze, but offered to put me up for the night and take me shopping for the festival! It was as if perfectly planned, but Jan didn't even know I was coming, and I didn't even have his cell number, so there is no way we could have planned it! Guess someone was looking out for me^^

I had been trying to get in contact with Flo for a while now to straighten things out with the ticket, so we went to go visit Flo at work at the gas station. Between him waiting on customers, I found out that the ticket he essentially promised me was from some guy that his his ex-girlfriend knew. Luckily enough, I know the girl, so I called her up, only to find out that she didn't even know the guy personally, she just heard over some internet community that he had a ticket he wanted to sell. In disbelief, I hung up the phone and immediately began to scour the internet looking for a ticket. At around 22:30, after several hours of searching, I managed to find a guy in Bavaria who was selling his ticket because he couldn't make it to the festival. We worked it out so that he would send the ticket to Dinkelsbühl with his buddy, who would meet me there and sell it to me. I was kind of worried that ti wouldn't work out, but it actually came off without a hitch, and I was able to get a ticket for the same price as if I had bought it 6 months ago!

Our 11 man team set out for Dinkelsbühl the next day in 2 very German cars, a Ford station wagon (Degen, Christina, Schum, Jan, Laura) and a Ford Transit bus (moi, Flo, Andy, Maria, Mandy, Toby) both stuffed to the gills with groceries (i.e. meat and beer), tents, combat boots, and T-shirts from various metal bands. A guy Flo knew from last year saved us a nice spot next to his. Little did we know, though, that he (23-24) was travelling with his 17yr old girlfriend and her entire possie of teeny-boppers. They definitely grated on our nerves, constantly making a racket and often using/abusing our grill and camping chairs, but we managed to make it through the whole Festival without killing them, so they can't have been that bad!

On Wednesday, there were a few bands that played in the party tent, but nothing I was interested in, so I stayed back at the campground unpacking and setting up. On Thursday the Festival really got started. Waking up to the sound of hundreds of car stereos blaring various types of metal, we sat around and complained about how poorly we slept. This would become a habit throughout the festival, as we were rarely able to sleep past 9am due to the noise and the bands we were interested in seeing rarely starting before 2pm. So after sitting around and complaining for a while, someone would get hungry and we would set off to eat brunch. We hit all the major food groups such as steaks, pork steaks, turkey steaks, sausages, and ground beef Frikadellen, with canned ravioli, spaghetti, and various types of soup. All this was washed down with "5,0" beer in cans, because glass was verboten on the campground. Don't bother trying to find 5,0 on the internet, their whole schtick is that they have a really simple logo and don't advertise and use the money they save to deliver a quality product for cheap. Well, quality is not exactly the first word I would use to describe the taste of 5,0, but I have definitely had worse!

All throughout Thursday more and more people arrived. I'm not sure exactly how many, but it was somewhere between 35,000 and 45,000!! As the day went on, more and more of the festival-goers showed up at the concerts, until you really had the feeling that EVERYONE was there for the headlining bands. On Thursday I ended up seeing a bunch of bands, starting with Deadlock and Vader in the early afternoon, later J.B.O and a few songs by Walls of Jericho. We took a break for dinner, and I went to go check out Cantus Buranus, though I was not impressed, so I left early and got a decent spot for Katatonia on the other stage. A few songs in, I caught of a glimpse of Flo, but I couldn't be sure until I caught a glimpse of Mandy's red hair, and Toby's black arm (as one of maybe 4 black guys at the Festival, Toby made our group relatively easy to find^^). I tried to make my way over to them, but there were just too many people between us. I knew I only had one possibility to make it over there: I would have to wait for a mosh pit to break out and "ride" it over to them! Sure enough about 5 minutes later my opportunity arose, and within seconds I was standing with my friends! Friday was much more relaxed. I only went to see The Haunted, Schandmaul, Sabaton, and Amon Amarth, though seeing Amon alone was enough to tire me out to the point where I couldn't even stay awake during Firewind's concert afterwards! There must have been at least 25,000 people watching Amon Amarth, and when that many people are at a concert just standing up is feat. Add random mosh pits and tons of crowdsurfers to the mix, and it feels more like you are at the gym than at a concert!

Saturday came along and it was time for us to carry out our carefully crafted plan to be in the front row for Opeth, the biggest band playing the festival that year. We decided to head out during Moonspell, fight our way forward while people either left or moved over to the other stage for Legion of the Damned. We knew there would be a lot of Volbeat fans there, but figured if we were as far forward as possible during Volbeat, we could slip through to the front when they finished.We started off strong with Maria, Mandy, Andy, Jan, and Laura, but as the hours dragged on we began losing people to hunger, thirst, and nicotine addiction. In the end only Maria and I made it to the front row, with Andy close behind. Due to technical problems with one of the guitar amps, we got to see an Opeth jam session while the problems were being resolved. At first just noodling around, the various members took turns steering the song in certain directions, until it suddenly became a cover version of Deep Purple's "Soldier of Fortune." In the middle of the song, the other guitar was fixed and he jumped right in with a sweet solo. It's always cool to see a band do something that is not really characteristic of them, and despite the fact that almost 20minutes of their playing time was spent ironing out technical problems, it was highly enjoyable. An added bonus was the lack of crowdsurfing, which had reached truly aggravating heights during Volbeat.

Sunday came along and after quickly packing up the rest of our things, we hit the road towards Maria and Mandy's parents place near Abstgmünd/Schwäbisch Hall. There we were treated to an ungodly amount of food and we rejoiced at the return of amenities like running water and real toilets into our lives! 5 days of Porta-Potties is really too much... even though things did improve a bit when we discovered 3 of them that had an extremely strong and distinct smell of .... cinnamon! No matter how long it had been since they had been pumped out (which with several thousand people using each block of them was relatively often) they smelled only of cinnamon, which was a truly pleasant alternative. After climbing back into the Transit with our beltbuckles just a bit looser than before, we hit the Autobahn and were back in Kreuznach with in 3 hours. Well, that's a wrap on Summer Breeze 2009, I think. I'm happy to answer any and all questions people have; the comments here on Blogspot and on Facebbok have sparse recently though... If you are interested, reviews of the bands are up on www.summer-breeze.de in German, but haven't yet been translated.