AAiddennium » BLOG «

On the weekend I visited the biggest Lithuanian festival of music and arts. It’s called “Be2gether”. Here are some of my impressions..

About ten kilometers of the road to the festival was graveled, so the traveling was a little bit disturbing and dusty. Everyone had to have his passport or ID card to show to police at a security checkpoint, because the location of the festival was almost on the border with Belarus. It was the Norviliskes village with a castle.

The weather was really extreme. There was never-ending storm on Friday and burning heat on Saturday. The tents had to be constructed on the wet ground, but there was impossible to sleep at the daytime because it was hot like in a greenhouse.

It’s good that I had a raincoat purchased already for a festival I had attended before. It saved me and the tickets of the whole crew from the rain, while I was standing in the long row at the exchange of tickets to hand bands. Unfortunately I had no boots, so my feet were swimming in wet shoes all the Friday.

They say that there were about 70 bands from all the World in the festival (personally I have heard about 20 of them during all those days). The main performer who I wanted to listen to was Tricky. His show wasn’t impressive or something, but the cool thing was that Tricky was having fun among the spectators listening to famous Lithuanian punk-rock band BIX before his own concert. The best music-and-arts-related thing on Friday for me was the performance of Etienne de Crecy Live where techno beat was accompanied visually on a lightning cube in which the DJ was sitting. The best audio-visual show on Saturday was the concert of Groove Armada (even lunar eclipse happened in the sky during that concert). And the best musical discoveries at all were the Latvian hard-rock band Coming Soon and Lithuanian rock’n'pop band Živilė Ba having their concerts on Sunday.

Be2gether wasn’t just about music. There were plenty of different kitchens to eat and drink; floors for learning Indian dances, breakdance, or quickstep; ramps for bmx bikers and skateboarders; a screen for watching basketball at olimpics; dirty dancing in the mud; and plenty of other things. People were peaceful, creative, and humorous. While dancing by the music of LTJ Bukem feat. MC Conrad in the tent of Sobieski Uogos Club, I noticed a group of people repeating my moves. “WTF?” – I thought. After a while the leader of them pointed to another person and everybody started repeating the moves of that person. That was really funny. Another funny thing I found was a mask made from a Chinese paper lamp and some packages for a drunken sleeping guy who became a photo-shooting star later that evening.

“Zivile, I love you too!” – shouted a funny guy to the singer during her concert.
“I love you all!” – she answered to the audience.
“It’s OK if you call me in singular” – the guy continued…

On Saturday I was taken about 20 km from Norviliskes to the Poskoniai lake where there were already many celebrators from Be2gether. We spent there half a day and I burned my skin, but it was fun anyway. The only thing I didn’t like was that fat local village people dipped single girls from the festival into the water with their cloths by force against their will. It was really hot that day, but people should respect each other.

Anyway the festival was cool and thanks to Ina & Giedrius, Aivaras, another Giedrius, Viktoras, Monika & Dima, Rasa, Igne, Viktorija & Dominyka, Agne & Inga, Deimante & Justas, Vaida, and all the others for a great company and good time!

Tags: lifestyle, travelling

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 20th, 2008 at 23:53 and is filed under Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.