Holly and I busted a mission today. We needed to catch a train to take us 3 hours East (almost to the Polish border) get on a tram and land ourselves at this music festival called Colours of Ostrava. See, Holly’s life dream-ish is to see Damien Rice perform live. He hasn’t performed in the states since 2007. Since we are in the same country, I agreed to go to this festival to see him.

We were in Prague and switched to a hotel that is close to a train station that could take us to the city of Ostrava. We woke up this morning, went to the train station to buy our tickets and the lady tells us we can only go to Ostrava from the main station–even though online said we could from that station. Alright, no big deal we hop on the Metro, take it 4 stops to Muzeum, get off, get our train tickets and take the 11:29 to Ostrava. It’s about a four hour trip with all the stops. The ride wasn’t so bad, we just listened to iPods and played games on our phones. Finally we get to Ostrava.

This was the tricky part, we know we need to take a tram to the festival but we don’t know which one. We bought 24 hour tickets (cause we would need them for the return too) and figured we would just pick a tram and see where it goes. We figured we would just figure it out. The first one comes and it’s just the number 1 so we hop on. We are riding along looking at the city and as we get more inland we notice people starting to get on with purple bracelets. For anyone who has been to Coachella or Stagecoach, they look like those. They’re a fancy fabric material and designed to stay on your wrist until you (in theory) cut it off. We eventually can see they say Colours on them so we know we are going the right way. As we continue on more and more people with these bracelets begin to board the tram. We decided then just to follow the crowd. When they get off, we will too. Which is exactly what we did and followed the group straight into the festival.

Oh my gosh. This festival is HUGE. You see, in researching Ostrava, Ostrava is a huge industrial city. It use to be a steel and mining town back in 1939.  The Nazi’s took over, deported the mayor, shut down the mines, and that was that. Since then it has built itself back up but the site for this festival is an old steel factory site (I think) and it’s huge and abandonded. It has signs eveywhere more as a historical site it seems that they give tours of. There’s towers, huge tall buildings everywhre and everything is old grungy ruined and looks like you are walking through a history book. It’s really cool. To give an idea of how big this festival and site was, there was 12 stages. Yes, 12. That’s insane!

Anyways, Damien Rice wasn’t playing until 9:00 and it was now 3:30. We had time to kill. We really didn’t know any of the artists and could only pick out certain parts of Czech to understand what kind of music each group was. So we walked around, got our return train tickets stamped (makes our 4 hour return ride free) and decided to go get food. By this time it was 4:30 and the first artist on the main stage was starting. We were sitting near the main stage and as we walked by we could hear him. His name was Dub FX. He’s an Australian guy who makes up beats on the fly (so he says) and then rolls with a song. He actually sounded pretty dang cool. We listened for a bit then grabbed food.

There were 2 artists playing on the main stage before Damien Rice, each about an hour with an hour break in between. We finished eating and decided to go explore more around the grounds and all these different stages. So we follow this path up some hill towards a large crowd. As we walk by the bathrooms, Holly noticies that they. Have a circular station just out in the open of about 5 urinals for guys to use. It’s as private as you can get, small walls on the aides and your back to block people but it seemed efficient enough. Just super awkward, haha!

At this point Holly is thirsty and we go on this drink quest. We keep seeing signs for Kofola, but we can’t decide if it’s beer, coffee or soda. Eventually Holly just goes for it. Turns out to be Czech soda. It didn’t taste bad.. But it had a kick to it. We decide to go watch the band performing because the music was a type I had never really heard before.

This groups name was Russkaja. They are from Russia, go figure. They looked and sounded Russian and it was great. The music style listed in our program, from the Czech we could decipher says they are a polka punk group but they sounded more like ska and heavy metal, haha! I loved the energy they gave, it was great, too funny.

After them we went back to the main stage because our plan was that once everyone left after this next guy, we would go post it in front of the stage and wait for Damien Rice. Concerts here are different than at home. You don’t have to have any special pass or pay extra to be in the front. It’s first come first serve and I really like that. Anyways so we are watching this guy Asaf Avidan. He is from Israel and seriously had the weirdest sounding voice I have ever heard singing. I did not like him at all and kept mocking him. He kinda sounded like Amy Winehouse meets Duffy. It was so weird. The background music itself was fine but his voice wasn’t doing it for me. Eventually he made a comment about how he’s a man that sounds like a woman, so at least he KNOWS he sounds like a girl. It was just weird. No one in the crowd was having it, except for his last song which seemed to be the ONLY song people knew.

He ended and Holly and I made our way to the stage to camp for about an hour and fifteen minutes. We were in the front and so close to the stage!! There were a few other people around but we didn’t talk to anyone, we just waited. Then Holly realized people close to us were speaking English. And I mean American English not the proper British kind. After some awkward feelings Holly finally walked over and asked where they were from. Turns out it is a couple from St. Louis Missouri. They were in their early 20’s and had traveled all the way to Ostrava from the states just for Damien Rice. Turns out we weren’t the only crazy Americans there, we had two whole other people who did what Holly and I were doing! I’m pretty sure the 4 of us were the only Americans, but that’s okay! This festival had people from all over the world at it. You could hear accents and dialects, it was really cool. We also met some girls from Poland who were really nice. The time comes and Damien Rice comes out.

He doesn’t say a word but plays about a half hour straight before talking to the crowd. He was amazing!!! Holly was so happy, her dream was coming true so close to her eyes! He looked a hot mess. Shirt was shredded and torn and his guitar looked like it was about to break with lots of wood chipped and missing from all of his strumming. It was perfect. He had a great performance and even pulled a girl on stage to drink wine with him while he told a story and sang Cheers Darling. She was so happy, it was great. Damien Rice was so nice and a great performer.

When he ended, Holly and I knew we would be on crunch time. We knew once he was done, we had to go. He was to only play until10:15 and the last train out of Ostrava back to Prague left at 11:28.

Damien Rice bowed and Holly and I turned around and booked it! We ran straight for tram, waited, got on, got to the train station with about 20 minutes to spare. So we waited. I know, really anti climatic. Eventually we get on the train, find an empty compartment and take the two window seats hoping no one will join us. There are 4 seats on each side of the train cart and we had two to ourselves each side. Its 11:30 at night, how many people are really taking a night train? We get through like one stop and we are joine by a grungy looking man and his beer. Holly instantly thinks he’s drunk. Which he very well might have been. Holly and I exchange looks and then another younger man in a suit joins us. I was fine so I closed my eyes for like 10 minutes. I open them to find Holly staring a me wide eyed. She tells me she’s uncomfortable. I ask her why and she says because of that guy. She didn’t like how he looked. I looked over at him and he was leaning on his wall, quiet and eyes closed. He looked harmless to me. But nonetheless Holly was uncomfortable and wanted to look around to sit somewhere else. “If we both go look, won’t someone take our seats?” says I, “I think there are plenty of seats” says she. Alright so we both get up and go. We walk down looking in and almost every cart is completed filled. We head back to our original cart to find our seats taken. We walk as far as we can go before we get our tickets checked and then yelled at in Czech to go the other way. I’m looking at Holly like “oh yeah, plenty of seats” and she says “Wanna sit in here?” I look in and it’s two older men again. I say “Are you sure?” she responds with “yeah, it’s fine.” We enter this cart, sit down directly next to each other. The man across from us looks even worse than the first guy on the grungy scale. His teeth are all messed up and he begins to talk to us in Czech. I say I don’t understand so he asks if I speak Dutch, I say no, he asks English and I say yes. He said England or USA? I answer USA. He responds with state and I say California. His english is super minimal and after about 10 minutes of gesture and broken English, all I got (I think) was he was in Utah 20 years ago with his uncle. At this point I’m sketched out and annoyed we left our first cart. So next this guy says “Facebook” I say “yes, it’s popular” he points and says “Facebook” at us and Holly says we don’t have Facebook and I tell him our friends do. You can hear him and the other man talking in Czech and about us cause we hear America. At this point I am now uncomfortable and creeped out. I look at Holly and say “where is the bathroom?” Holly points close to the end corridor close and says “right there” I LOOK at Holly and say “right there?” Holly catches on and goes “I’ll show you.” And we walk out. The door shuts behind Holly turns to give me a look and all I can say is “fuck you Holly, fuck you so much right now.” and were kinda smiling and laughing and Holly keeps saying shes sorry because she knows that was awkward and way more uncomfortable than our first quiet cart and it’s her fault we werent there now. Walking up the train to find yet ANOTHER seat we see two seats and there’s two seprate couples in this one. We join them and everything is fine.

Now you see the other problem is we aren’t exactly sure how long the train ride is. When researching we knew it could be as short as 3 or as long as 6. But there was no way to know. I was uncomfortable with both of us sleeping because we wouldn’t know when we were arriving to our stop (there were several stops along the way). So Holly slept and I stay posted awake. We finally get to the main train station in Prague at 4:00 in the morning. We need to take the metro three stops to get to our hotel, easy enough it seems. The only problem being the metro doesn’t start running until 5:00. One hour. There are peopled laid out on the floor all over sleeping. So we find a spot on the ground, Holly sits and I lay down to get my one token hour of sleep on the train station floor. Not one of my finer moments but hey, I’m 22  backpacking through Europe.

We finally get to our hotel by 5:15 and I showered and was in bed by 5:30. Taxi was coming at 12 to take us to the airport.

We busted such a huge mission and got a good story. Now I’m in the airport, about to board my flight.

Next stop, Dublin, Ireland!