Dance together
Laugh together
Drink beers together
Eat fatty nomz together

6 days; 200 concerts; 160,000 music lovers; 35,000 campers and a whole lotta rain boots & ponchos.
This was Dour 2011!

In the beginning of the festival, the sun was shining and the music was good.
But then, it started to rain and the music (luckily) remained great.

Saturday, everyone was surprised by a big amount of rain. That it would be a flood of those proportions, could not be read from the rain radars. The outdoor pools swelled rapidly into little lakes and wherever I stood, wet people (sweat? the rain? urine???) were shoving their way around me. Little by little, the flood changed the solid ground into a giant mud flat. Because of that, the exodus to the campsite at night was more like a zombie procession of people dressed in ponchos and trash bags that were pushing and shoving their way through a seemingly endless mud flow.

But still. It struck me how much the audience could handle during those five days. The filthy toilets with no paper, bottlenecks, walking on slippery slopes, the distance between the festival meadow and camping site.
Everybody kept smiling & dancing like we just didn’t care.

Eventually the lovely sun pushed the rainy clouds away and all I could see were tired faces, dirty feet and an unmistakable grin on everyone’s face under a beautiful rainbow.

Rain also has its charms, isn’t it?

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