OPEN'ER FESTIVAL, POLAND: OUR JOURNEY & FESTIVAL REVIEW

We’ve been going to festivals for years, mainly sticking to the same mundane routine year in and year out. But after five consecutive years at Reading Festival it was time to broaden the horizons of our fruitful curiosity. English festivals have a distinct notoriety about them, notably expressed in the hilarity of a Facebook meme or two. The imagery usually depicts a typically British looking fellow off his face on pills, half empty can of Fosters in hand taking a mud bath face down in a glum, wet and dreary looking field. Unfortunately in most cases this is the shameful reality, there is none of the glitz and glamour we see on TV and in music videos of US festivals. You know the ones with an idyllic setting, stars filling the sky people laughing and singing with those ridiculous red cups. Nope, take a deep breath and smell the great British air, you got it? Yep that is the scent of manure, uncontrollable piss rivers, shitty cesspit’s and a rotten half eaten pasty on your shoe. Wake up and smell the roses Britain, festivals in our glorious country can be a despicable and grimey occasion but would you have it any other way?

You can’t beat the character of a UK Festival, but the time had come, we needed to experience the long haul. Despite the lengthy queues when it comes to leaving the car park, travelling to and from a festival in England is never really an exhausting task. You sit in the back of your mate’s car in a right old state catching some much needed z’s and before you know it you’re being dropped off at your house, large big mac meal in hand, with the prospect of a hot shower and comfy bed, fucking piece of piss. Now rewind back a second to the moment you packed up your gear at the campsite and started the gruelling walk to your mates car. Now imagine if there was no car, the prospect of bed and a shower was still a long way off and instead of being a few 100 miles drive away from home you were 1000’s miles away with a plane to catch. Now that’s a test of character.

European festivals are renowned for being cleaner, cheaper and just generally nicer so we decided to check this old wives tale out for ourselves. We browsed around for a bit looking for the best priced festival with the best line up. Most festivals on the continent tend to have similar line up’s give or take a few alterations here and there. We stumbled across Open’er Festival in Poland. With Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Foals, Tame Impala and The Last Shadow Puppets on the bill it seemed like a dream come true. To add to our initial elation, the festival was also unbelievably priced. For 4 days camping it cost just shy of £110 (at the time of purchase). Considering a ticket for Reading & Leeds will set you back around £220 for 3 days of music and camping, Open’er is an absolute bargain. Our return flights from London Luton to Warsaw were £85, so for £195 we managed to land ourselves flights and a festival ticket. You can’t complain at that now can you? In hindsight we probably wouldn’t fly into Warsaw should we do the festival again but we will get to that story later on. Sticking to the topic of value, the icing on the cake was how cheap everything is once you’re there. Food, Drink and pretty much anything is so inexpensive! At about 5.2 Zloty to the £1 the exchange rate is very favourable for English festival goers. Let’s put this into some comparable examples, Heineken sponsored the festival and a pint at one of their tents would cost you 8 Zloty which is about £1.54. I know… this revelation almost brought me to tears aswell. They even had an extremely nifty cashless system, you could go to a number of cash desks dotted around the site and load cash onto a mastercard wrist band. None of the food/drink stalls accepted cash it was all contactless payment on these wristbands, handy because we didn’t accumulate ridiculous amount of change and didn’t run the risk of sleeping in a gutter should we lose our wallets. It’s an extremely clever system that despite some preconceptions ran very smoothly and didn’t actually malfunction once. The only downside is you obviously have no idea what you’re spending much like the day to day grind of contactless card payment you have no perception of handing over physical/ tangible cash so can’t really empathise with your actual outgoings.

The festival itself is on an airfield in Gdynia on the Baltic coast at the very north of Poland. It’s a great setting well connected with Gdansk only an hour away, right by the beach with festival buses running every ten minutes from outside the festival up to the beach and also into Gdynia city centre. The music doesn’t start until 3PM but goes on well into the night, at around 2AM the last act comes onto the main stage, which gives you the whole day to go down to the beach or into town. The night doesn’t end at 2AM though they have various other tents, stages, stalls open all night and an awesome silent disco in an old air bunker. One downside to the whole setup was the designated drinking areas, you couldn’t buy a beer from the Heineken tent and drink it in front of the stages. Either side of the main field they had areas where you could buy food and drink. It wasn’t really too much of an issue though, these designated drinking areas were the most vibrant parts of the festival with music, stalls, shops etc. But if you, like us, are partial to a few tipples whilst watching an act then you were forced to go full ninja and manoeuvre your way past the bouncers with 4 pints of Heineken. Towards the end of the day, when headlining acts came on, the festivals enforcement kinda gave up on the whole thing and just let us through with alcohol. Yeah it was a pain, but I suppose it’s a great way for them to keep the festival grounds clean and avoid people throwing piss cups which, let’s face it, is the bane of a British festival. The constant fear of being twatted on the head with a cup of warm piss, is haunting. If you’re one for the hard stuff, I’m talking Vodka, Rum etc. then this isn’t really the festival for you. Apart from the huge Bacardi bar there was absolutely no spirit on sale. It was just Beer, Wine or Bacardi. Not the end of the world but a pain if you get sick of Heineken and Desperados.

Usually there’s an element of ‘make-do’ when it comes to festival food, it’s always limited in variety and tends to be extortionately priced. Do I have a burger, chips, pizza or pie? Slightly exaggerative but you get the point. Eating is a fundamental human pleasure, there’s not much better in this world than tucking into some beautiful grub. This ideal seems to fly out the window at festivals though; the lavish enjoyment of eating becomes nothing but a humdrum necessity as you try to fill your stomach with any form of substance to legitimise your daily binge antics. We must say though, festivals do seem to be moving away from this primitive catering outlook, it’s now a war to see which festival can get the most quirky/ original food stalls. Maybe it’s this hippy re-run era we seem to have fallen into where every 5th person you know is either a part-time vegan or gluten intolerant. Whatever the reason it’s good to finally see some variety. A message to all festivals out there, take a huge whopping leaf out of Open’er’s book, actually no, take the whole fucking tree. They absolute smashed this element of the festival, you could literally have anything from a huge box of nachos filled with all your hearts desires to a full blown meaty hog roast. They had a wide range of different street foods, even one of the fancy ice cream stands that we’ve seen go viral in recent months. Mind you the queue for that was pretty hefty. Savoury pancakes filled with Salami, Pepperoni, Mozerella, Tomato, Basil and Tortilla Chips which taste like heaven, all so much better than your grubby burger van with bean stains and dodgy hair nets.

As for the campsite it was absolutely spotless, a thing of beauty. Like a picturesque sanctuary of slumber and happiness. They had litter pickers on duty regularly to keep the rubbish at bay and stewards to guide campers to the perfect spot upon arrival. One thing we did notice is they hadn’t tried to cramp as many people in as possible. We keep going back to comparing with British festivals and please forgive us for doing so we just feel the comparative needs to be made. At a UK festival you find yourself back to back with other tents, so much so that you can hear your weekend neighbour snoring or worse…... There’s no room to put down you guy ropes and sense of extreme claustrophobia in every direction. Surely this is for them to maximise sales and enhance revenues, of course they have health and safety regulations and couldn’t exceed/ abuse these anyway however the contrast between the two is astounding. Opener’s campsite was vast with more than enough room for each group to have a proper campsite not just a spot in a field. The big coupe though was the shower sitch. Usually I don’t fuck about with showers at festivals, a few baby wipes are enough to get me through the weekend. Opener was a different ball game altogether though; I actually had a WARM, yes WARM, shower everyday. Of course it’s not as easy as it sounds; during peak times the shower block had a queue the size of the Great Wall of China but if you carefully planned your shower time around this then, my friend, you were winning. We executed this scenario perfectly, at around 4:00/5:00AM when we were staggering back from the main arena to our campsite the showers were empty. This was our window of opportunity to milk a long hot shower whilst everyone else was either flat out asleep or still raving on. Also the general vibe of people at Open’er was very friendly, brits are renowned for being rude ignorant pigs, but the Europeans were very chatty and inquisitive. Mainly desperate to bang on about the recent Brexit vote which had been banned as a topic of conversation amongst our group. Too many opposing opinions aren’t healthy for friendship.

We flew into Warsaw airport on Wednesday morning, with nothing booked or planned just knowing that we needed to get up to Gdynia, approximately 3-4 hours away, as soon as possible. The Last Shadow Puppets were on at 7PM so we had a time frame. There was no way on god’s green earth I was travelling all the way over to Poland and missing Alex Turner. We got to Warsaw Centrum at about 11:30AM, with plenty of time to spare. Let me just say the station is a nightmare to work out, you can’t just go to a ticket machine and type in your destination like back home in the UK. Most machines only work for certain train companies. We couldn’t work out our arse from our elbow so after half hour we went over to the ticket office and after waiting, for what felt like a lifetime, we were told that all trains to Gdynia and Gdansk had sold out. The next train available was at 7PM and it was a 3 hour journey. Our dream date with TLSP was in jeopardy. Rental cars was a topic of debate at one point or another but in the end we managed to flag down a ropey 8 seater taxi with a man who couldn’t speak a word of English who drove us 430KM north. It was a nightmare journey with many close calls, overtaking on single lane roads, swerving, braking. We were all pretty happy to live to tell the tale. For those of you following our nail biting experience, did they make it to TLSP? The answer is no, no we fucking didn’t. We left Warsaw at around 2PM and got to Gdynia at around 8PM, around 6 hours stuffed in a shitty old taxi getting lost and clinging on for dear life. It’s all an experience though I suppose and we got to see lots of Poland’s beautiful countryside along the way, every cloud and all that jazz right? If you’re reading this and thinking of going to Opener then please take our advice, pay a little extra and fly into Gdansk. No amount of money is worth the savage journeys we endured that weekend. If you thought that ordeal was tormenting enough then you haven’t heard anything yet, the way back to Warsaw was far more punishing. Whilst in Warsaw we were told that there also weren’t any trains back from Gdynia on Sunday which left us in a bit of a rut. We pondered getting a coach but thought it would just be easier to get the same guy to come and pick us back up again. He arrived on Sunday and found us outside the festival waiting for him. The communication barrier was a real task this guy literally couldn’t speak a word of the Queen’s English and of course, we’re ignorant brits, why would we learn another language? In order to communicate with our polish chauffer pal we had to get the polish festival stewards who could speak English to play translator for us. We eventually got in his car using very forceful and prominent hand gestures to ask how he was, everything was going swimmingly. Then 30 minutes into our journey, on a motorway just outside of Gdynia, the worst thing imaginable happened. The car started losing power, chugging backwards and forwards until we eventually came to a complete standstill on the hard shoulder. Smoke poured from the bonnet and he struggled to get it fired back up. This bloke relentlessly slammed down on the accelerator pedal and twisted the key but nothing was happening, if anything he was just flooding the engine with petrol. He lifted the bonnet, tinkered around a bit and got back in the car. I genuinely thought he had fixed it, more fool me. He done his checks turned the key slammed the accelerator and started pulling off onto the motorway. The taxi definitely wasn’t fucking fixed, cars were screaming past beeping as he continued to veer out onto the motorway. It was at this point we all jumped ship, I’m not getting flattened by a lorry because some polish moron pulls out onto a motorway with a broken down car. We all threw our bags on the grassy bank at the side of the road and got out. He continued to run around the car with his hands waving in the air shouting and screaming in polish, we couldn’t help but feel awful for the chap. He had just driven 400KM probably set off at 6AM to get there to pick us up on time and boom he was dished a fresh serving of some unwarranted karma. Petrol was leaking underneath the car; we gave him 200 Zloty for his trouble and went our separate ways. Not knowing where the fuck we were we walked down the motorway and found a place to sit. It was surely better for him having us out of his hair. After quite a while we managed to rope down another taxi with a guy who spoke a little English he took us to the nearest city, Gdansk. Finally it felt like we were getting somewhere after hours of despair and panic. Luckily for us the taxi fares were ridiculously cheap, 1200 Zloty for a 6 hour trip, for those of you with little experience in FX rates that’s roughly £230. Split between 8 people is pennies; it worked out cheaper than the bloody train.

I know what you’re thinking right now, jesus will this story ever end. Well, yeah sure but sit tight we’re almost there. It had been a long day, the final destination was but a vivid image in the most supressed depths of our subconscious, glowing like a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. The end of the road still seemed a million miles away but the thought of our lush city centre skyrise apartments kept us going. Two members of our group were due to fly back to London at 6PM which was looking increasingly more unlikely as the day went on. There we were sat outside Gdansk train station, still no rail service to take us south all absolutely drained of all for of life. Bare in mind readers we had just been at a 4 day music festival grubby, sweaty, hungover life was not being kind to us. We eventually had to rope down two 4 seater taxi’s that cost 1200 Zloty each double the price of our last lift, but at this point everyone was more than willing to take the hit. We got to Warsaw at around 8PM in the end having left Opener Festival at 10AM that morning, a monstrous ten hours of travelling. Nevertheless, life goes on we supressed the heartache and went exploring around old town. If you haven’t been to Poland before Warsaw should be high on your bucket list it’s a great city. Long shower’s, a rooftop sauna session and a three course meal in Warsaw Old Town was on the agenda. Oh and of course the longest, most comfortable sleep known to man.

The whole experience is, for sure, one I’ll never forget, despite being absolutely relentless at times, testing my character, patience and determination, I would do it all over again in a blink of the eye. It goes to show that broadening your horizons and embarking on new, exciting expeditions can help you view the world and its challenging manner in a whole new way. The trip helped me realise that being fixated on the same festivals year in, year out and re-living the same thing time and time again doesn’t help you move forward. You are merely standing still, repeating the same experiences/ memories. You need to get out there and try new things at any given opportunity. So next year will hopefully bring a similar comical series of events as we hope to go check out another festival somewhere in Europe.

Here's a dodgy video of Red Hot Chilli Peppers set at Open'er, ENJOY!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWa6yWOfvAU