Exit Activity Week Novi Sad 2010

Exit Activity Week - 08-11/07/2010

Together with 7 other ESTIEM-ers from Eindhoven we started our trip to Novi-Sad a little bit hung-over from the party after the Half final match of The Netherlands  the day before. But because we had a travelling day of 20 hours in front of us we had enough time to recover from that. After a smooth flight to Budapest, spending the evening there, and a not so smooth train ride from Budapest to Novi-Sad we arrived at half past 5 in the morning at our final destination; the central station where a few ESTIEM-ers were crazy enough to wake up that early to pick us up. Nemanja and Uros brought us to our crib during the festival that was situated in Bukovac a small peaceful town just outside Novi-Sad. After some well deserved sleep and meeting up with Sonja from Belgrade and Dimitar from Skopje it was time to enter the Petrovaradin Fortress to experience my first EXIT-fest. But first we did some sightseeing in the Novi Sad city centre which of course ended sitting at a bar drinking Lav beer. Since I have been to lots of other festivals I kind of knew what to expect from a festival but the fact that this festival is held in an old fortress makes it incomparable to all other festivals. The atmosphere and energy hangs around the festival is really amazing.

With the headliners for the first day being: LCD soundsystem, Mika and Mike Snow the festival started out very good and of course every day after the program at the mainstage the opportunity was there to keep on partying through the night at the Dance Arena where Europe's most famous DJ’s were playing until the next morning. There at that part of the fortress lots of us watched the sunrise almost every morning.

The ritual during the day was mostly the same: Wake up on the middle of the day, then go to the local supermarket to buy some bread and all the beer they have. Play some Dutch card games (which we also thought to the Serbs and Dimi) to kill the time, drink beer at the roof terrace, play some football and chill out. Go to the festival around dinner time to eat something in the city centre and then go to the festival. The second day we gathered in the park before we went to the fortress there we met up with other ESTIEM-ers to get into the mood and drink some beer and of course Rakija. Since we went to the festival quite late it started out for us with the headliner of the day Placebo right after that we saw a British electronic rock band ‘Does it offend you yeah!’. That day the party ended at the ‘Silent Disco’ where you hear no music, you just see two DJ’s playing music and everybody wears headphones, these headphones have a switch with which you can choose to which DJ you want to listen. Which results in one half of the people listening to one song and the others listening to another, one can imagine that this results in a very strange but really cool party.
Day three we went to ‘Strand’, a beach at the side of the Danube to spend the day swimming and lying at the beach. After that we went straight to the fortress where Royksopp was performing this was for me the musical highlight of the whole festival, the combination of electric music together with a live performance was amazing. The oldschool punkrockers of The Exploited were performing right after them at another stage, considering that these guys must be somewhere in their fifties, they still give a pretty good show. David Guetta was playing at the dance arena later that night just before the sunrise which we watched together with thousands others and so came an end to the third day of EXIT.

And then there was sunday, the last, and for all the Dutchies the most important day: Match day! It was the day we all had been waiting for... the day of the world cup final; The Netherlands against Spain. All the orange stuff that we brought was pulled out of the suitcases and brought to the festival. To release some of the built up tension we first decided to take an introduction lesson of yoga in the chill out zone at the festival. Right after that it was time to reserve a good spot to watch the match at the reggae stage which they transformed into one big TV-screen. Together with about 500 other Dutchies (and Serbs who cheered for the Dutch) we sang the national anthem of The Netherlands (het Wilhelmus) and we watched the match in a great atmosphere drinking and singing Dutch football songs. Of course the outcome of the game wasn’t really what we expected and everybody was disappointed but the festival offered enough distraction to get over it pretty soon. Nevertheless the last day of the festival was still great with performances of Faith no More and the Chemical Brothers. It was so good that some of us (including me) decided to stay on the festival until there was no music left anywhere; this moment came on Monday morning at around 9 A.M. This lead to the fact that the last days we were in Novi Sad were all about recovering from the tiring festival. The last evening we spend hanging at a square in the city centre of Novi Sad where lots of young people gather to talk and drink, the next morning we exchanged some typical Dutch things (Stroopwafels and Goldstike) to thank all the organizers of this week and six out of the eight Dutch people went home. For Arjan and me this was just the beginning of a South-Eastern-Europe round trip we were going to make that holiday which turned out to be a really amazing experience.

Thanks for all the people involved, that made it possible for us to experience this great ESTIEM-event and awesome festival!! 

By Jeroen Hoeks
LG Eindhoven, The Netherlands