Saturday, July 29, 2006

Roskilde Festival

Roskilde Festival...What a blast! We'd been looking forward to it even before we bought our tickets in March. The festival lasts 8 days, with only 4 days being actual festival days with full music programs and stuff. Since we hadn't shown Etienne and Berns Copenhagen yet we opted to only come for the last 4 days. However, rumour had it that finding camping spots would be difficult if we didn't show up on the first day with everyone else to set up our tents.

So...Etienne arrived at Copenhagen Airport from London on the night of the 25th. After a quick stopover at our place we headed to Roskilde right away to grab our wristbands and wait until the gates opened up. In the morning, after having waited until the crazies had stormed the festival grounds we walked through an already mushrooming fields of tents and set up our tents. Little did we know then we ended up getting an amazing spot - right a the edge of the swimming area!

On Thursday we came back, in time to see Guns N' Roses. Guns N' Roses pulled a no-show for the first hour of their set. After a while people just assumed that they weren't going to show at all and begun yelling "Asshole" at the stage. When they finally did arrive, the first few songs were classics followed by a bunch of terrible, long solos. Partway through a few of us took off and checked out Sigur Ròs (which was an amazing show!).

Friday and Saturday didn't have very many bands playing. We really liked Morrisey, Tool, The Streets, Tool, Thäström, George Clinton Parliament/Funkadelic. Bob Dylan, was a suprising disappointment as he was just too old and had lost all stage presence. Despite being at the festival, we didn't have to miss the World Cup, as they showed the games on a huge screen.

Sunday was definitely the best day at the festival. There were so many good bands that we couldn't even fit them all in. We saw: Arctic Monkeys, The Strokes, Placebo, Franz Ferdinand, and the final act, Roger Waters performing Dark Side of the Moon. Roger Waters put on an AMAZING performance! Definitely the highlight of the festival.

Check out the festival website


At the end of June, we ran Broløbet - a race spanning the Øresund Bridge between Denmark and Sweden. It was the last time the race was going to be held so we decided to take advantage of an opportunity to cross the bridge on foot (normally the Øresund is only open to vehicular traffic). Since the entire distance of the race is a half-marathon (21.2 km), we divided the race up so that we each did roughly half of the distance.

The coordination involved for this race is pretty impressive. About 10,000 people participated, about half coming from each side of the bridge (Copenhagen and Malmö). For this they had two seperate registration centres and buses shuttling all the runners to the starting point. In addition, about 500 people were running the race as a relay so buses had to be coordinated to shuttle second leg runners to the halfway point and pick up the first leg relay runners from the halfway point to bring them to the finish line. On top of all this they had to close down a lane of traffic on the bridge and section off the rest of the course.

To see pictures and how we did in the race, check out