Roskilde Festival '98     Visit the official site of the event.

In the first few days of July '98 I visited the festival with four German dentists and thousands of Scandinavians.  Incidentally, I had to quit my job at a fine Fortune 500 company a few days before to join up with the kids in Denmark.   It was a difficult choice between sitting in a cubicle eight hours a day, or rocking out in Europe for several days.  I guess that really shows where my priorities are. Sometimes you just have to take a stand in life.

This is the main stage where the Beasties, Garbage, Iggy and Ozzy performed.  I also checked out Kraftwerk, Rammstein and over a hundred other bands.  There was a jamming techno tent with some live, hardcore trance music.   As the music was on five stages simultaneously, there was rarely a boring moment.   Me and Kala even made it onto European MTV for a brief moment as we later discovered in Finland.  This annual event makes Lollapalooza or even Woodstock look pretty small.   Turns out that Roskilde also has a medieval downtown and some Viking ship museum.  It must be nice....

This area shows some of the tents where the festival's ninety five thousand attendees were staying.  Places are hard to come by even on the first day and it only gets worse when the rain turns things a bit muddy.  By the way, most showers are co-ed.  Some of the best of communal living...

Anthropological research...   One of my goals was to really dwelve into the scandinavian psyche and find out what Swedes think of the Danes, Norwegians and Finns and vice versa.  From the outside they may all seem fairly similar, but there are subtle differences.  A scandinavian music festival was the perfect place to do a little research.  I've found that most other scandinavians are jealous of Norway's oil fortune.  (There's a lot of oil in the North Sea.)   The Swedes are seen as the boring ones, but they do start rocking out on the Baltic ferries where alcohol is relatively cheap.  The Danes are arguably the friendliest and basically nobody understands the Finns as their language is completely foreign to other northerners.  The Finns are a solems bunch that veered up north over a thousand years ago from the dephts of Asia, just as they lost their distant cousins the Hungarians.  I was also trying to gather local jokes that would reveal which guys are perceived as the dumbest (sort of like the Polak jokes in America). 

A bust...     Among our adventures during the festival was a visit to Christiana which is a part of Coppenhagen.  This is a sort of alternative/hippy part of the capital.  We were lucky to experience a full fledged police raid on the local herb and pharmaceutical vendors. It was a major effort with about twenty policemen in riot gear.  If that wasn't enough excitement, soon I found myself about to be roughed up by two residents as I attempted to take a picture of the police raid.  The locals are very sensitive to any photographs, since they are often involved in several kinds of semi-illegal activities. They offered to smash my camera if I would not remove the film from it. Thank God for that advantix system.  As it turns out, I did not even take the picture so I almost got beat up for nothing. 

Later.   Everything went pretty smooth until we took that final turn into the Roskilde Festival parking area.  Here we met an unexpected danish police checkpoint, complete with dogs and a paddy wagon.  The german dentist group had a difficult time, since the local regulations are supposedly more strict on european dentists  and some of them were loaded with a variety of goods.  After the police confiscated over a hundred dollars worth of stuff and issuing four citations, we continued into the festival area.  It was a full day's worth of alternative experiences and the music was just starting...

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