The British Museum and Arriving at Westfest - Day 4

I'm having trouble formulating thoughts. I've been awake now for thirty two hours. It's funny how, once the sun rises, your body gets an unexpected burst of energy. I was worried about making it through the night, but one Red Bull at one o'clock and one at three o'clock (that's AM England time) did just the trick, and I was able to jam out righteously until the lights came up at six AM.

I took so much video that I had to delete a large part of it during the night to prepare for the later acts. The sheer size of the event was unlike anything I had ever seen. The largest raves I had been to earlier were Baltimore's Ultraworld parties, now defunct. Indoors, there was one held every Saturday after Thanksgiving in the DC Armory from noon to midnight (perfect timing, if you ask me), and outdoors there were two that bookended the summer (one in June, the other in September, Starscape and the Sunrise Festival respectively)

I was up so early to check out of my hotel at ten AM. A few minutes after ten doesn't matter to a student hostel clerk, and after locking my luggage in storage (a closet with various pieces of unsupervised luggage strewn about), I was off. I decided to take in the British Museum, which was immediately next door to the hostel. That way, I could keep the timing flexible. I had no idea what I was in store for.

Let's image there's this fiercely imperialist country, one with powerful dynasties and a solid class structure that encourages taking over other cultures and claiming their artifacts as spoils of war. Then let's imagine this country "decides" to open up the collection to their citizens. Such was born the British Museum.

I strolled slowly, then accelerated due to time constraint, through the largest collection of Egyptian and Greek artifacts I have ever seen. No, the word "artifact" doesn't quite do justice to the entire outer wall of the Parthenon, just one of many dozens of examples of critical segments of other cultures that Britain has claimed as their own. They have literally stripped the walls from the structures of Greece and the tombs of Egypt, and put them in the museum. I could describe many many examples, but I'll save it for the pictures, which explain it better than I could hope. One final interesting note is the result of British antiquity fanatics, the precursor to archaologists. The difference being, the antiquity societies pretty much just collected a bunch of interesting stuff, occasionally altered (ehm, "restored") significant pieces, created fakes, and catalogued things in random arrangements. The collection is nonetheless remarkable, spanning dozens of millenia of history and dozens of cultures, many extinct. It's just too bad there's not more to learn from it because, well... let's just say a detective would be hard pressed to work with such a collection.

I left the museum, grabbed my bag from next door, and rode the tube to Paddington Station, which has a kiosk that sells Paddington Bear kitsch (Paddington at Paddington, they call it... cute). The station itself it quite nice, with a huge glass roof and a simple arrangement. The trains are also very nice... smooth ride, comfortable clean seats, lots of room, great views.

At the first stop after London a strange thing happened. Ravers boarded the train. There were five stops in my two hour ride, including the departure and arrival points, and at each stop, the train got louder. And another thing... drugs.

Drug dealers walked the aisles offering pills and "whatever you need", and the four late teenagers took them up on it. I watched one of them snort from a little bag of coke, and what was most disturbing wasn't the drug use itself, but how little they cared about their surroundings. As we arrived at Castle Cary, our destination stop, there were cases of beer being carried from the train (it's legal to consume alcohol anywhere in the UK... outdoors, on the train, on the tube, anywhere). The cops were there for "crowd control", which in the UK means... nothing. I was only nervous because I was carrying my life on my back, and I didn't want to be bothered or pillaged.

The shuttle bus arrived to take us to the venue late, and we waited in the rain for half an hour for it. When it finally arrived, an epic bum rush ensued, and since (warning: gross generalization ahead) I'm not British and I anticipate what a crowd will do rather than simply reacting, I didn't have a problem sliding onto a seat on the bus. While I'm generalizing, it's interesting how, in a situation as chaotic as this (picture mosh-pit-prior-to-show squashed together here), nobody makes a bit of fuss when people take time to ask the driver questions rather than shutting up and getting on the damn bus. I'm not complaining, just observing... this type of situation happens over and over, it's strangely conforting knowing that in chaotic situations here. In similar situations I've been in here in the states (think HFStival, Sarah), some jackass will eventually get frustrated and start a shoving war, toppling over and endangering people. Comparing police is the same way. I'm not saying this is better or worse, but here people were cursing at the cops, and the cops stayed calm, and the people stopped cursing. If there is a yellow line at a train station and cops are watching closely, in the states you'll get hollered at almost instantly if you step on that line. Here in the UK, just don't fall on the tracks, OK?

Here's another example... the shuttle bus ride over. As soon as the bus took off, excited (drugged?) ravers started banging on the interior, cracking beers, even lighting cigarettes on the charter bus. At the train station on the way home, people smoked openly, under the watchful eye of the police and directly beneath signs reading "smoking at this station is illegal". Very friendly folks, and I was nervous to even open my mouth and reveal my American accent. I'm not sure what I was so nervous about... perhaps the potential of ANARCHY?! In highsight, such concerns were completely unfounded. I've never known a people so friendly to the drugged up around them. Example... inevitably, some of these, um, drug consumers, consumed too much too early and stumbled into other people... over and over and over. I completely expected a series of asskicking, but they were met with nothing but concern. The same guys who defaced a shuttle bus, were... not friendly... but accepting of the complete inebriation of others, even when cigarettes held by said inebriated fellows ashed inappropriately. Now I'm being delicate because I fear I've completely scared my parents. Allow me to finish with the final negative note of the evening, all of which faded away the moment I stepped through the doors of the epic, enormous venue... nay, serious of venues that made up this event, the description of which I'll save for the next entry:

The queue. The queue was terrifying. We stood and waited behind three security guards while they let us out in sections of fifty or so to the security queue. Mashed together, I felt a bit claustophobic, until an ambulance drove through the center of the crowd, at which point I feared for my life. Picture two long fences, hundreds of feet long, twelve feet apart, peopled queued up and crowded within. Then picture an ambulance driving through the center. Well, we got fed up with those security guards and followed the ambulance, rushing through their grasp, opening up the floodgates... where we were now smashed even tighter together in what was the security queue but was now a mob.

I stood there for two hours... two hours while some around me pushed people aside to urinate or vomit (only once did I see either of these activities, and the guy never did actually vomit), although I suppose it's nice they didn't just pee or puke directly on them. Stories were traded about how reasonable the queue had been the previous year, and how they made people completely empty their backpacks to search for drugs... something I was definitely, definitely not looking forward to with my large pack full of safety razors and other such potentially hazardous and yet essential items. We inched forward at a pathetic rate, pushing each other like cattle. I couldn't bring my arms up in front of me to brace myself... it was that bad.

All of a sudden, something changed. The crowd broke. I think they must have decided to completely cancel the security check, because the next thing I knew I was flooding forward, a drop of water in a sea of people, and was stopped only briefly to have my ticket collected. Never checked, never searched, I almost ran forward, half pushed, into the open air of the event space, which was really a collection of barns, warehouses, and an open air carnival fair. I had expected to wait another full hour, and had an instant smile. I heard the driving beats, and trotted with intent past the carnival rides towards the first of six large arenas.

But more on that later....