Vama Veche - The Sequel

On our return visit to Vama Veche we are on a mission - a mission of music. Mira and I travel down with co-pilot Yann Le Blay to share our music with the masses at Stufstock Festival, a rock and alternative festival, now in its fourth year. 8-10,000 people are expected this year and i'm Djing on the friday night and Yann is playing sax with his band Endless Zone on a specially built stage on the beach (see above), for a gig to be played as the sun rises on sunday morning.

We arrive around midnight on the friday night, book into the same 'wendy houses' (see previous Vama post) and have just enough time to grab a quick pancake before I have to go off and DJ. It was only friday night and the weekend had only just begun but already it was evident that I was going to be playing records to the most pissed audience in the world ever!


I probably could have put The Magic Roundabout soundtrack on and everyone would have danced but the tunes of the night were Justice Vs Simian "We are your friends" remix and Daisy Daisy "Michelle Plays Ping Pong - remix". We didn't have the big camera with us, but Mira took some snapshots and danced with the locals. We befriended some young graffiti artists who were very proud to show us their empty spray cans!? At 4am our job was done and we escaped the carnage for the peace and tranquility of our wendy house.

On the saturday we left Vama and did a bit of exploring. About 20km up the coast are some old communist beach resorts called Neptune, Saturn and Venus. We couldn't find Uranus, which was strange as they were all shit holes. I guess back in the day families who lived in joyless blocks in the city would spend a week stuck in souless blocks by the sea. Night time activities were shared in the two discoteques in the resort, Kremlin Disco (where everybody was rushin' presumably), or the brilliantly named "Why Not - Disco".

I'm guessing the resorts didn't see any foreign holiday goers in communist times, so english translations of things like menus wouldn't have been necessay. Today however one or two restaurants are giving it a go. The example below is the strangest one we've come across. We were shown it when we stopped in Saturn for an ice cream, and the only explanation could be that it was translated by a free translation website or indeed someone from another planet.

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Mixed Salad
Here you will find hiding in the corner of the garden, dancing vegetables protected by an indian virgin dressed in a orange sari. The only way to stop them dancing is to throw them in a pan and smother them.

Pork Schnitzel
This is for a very lonely person.

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And so onto the Endless Zone gig. The band was playing at 5:30am for an hour, starting as the day breaks and finishing (hopefully) in glorious sunshine. What could possibly top that? Well, read on. The band had their soundcheck at 11pm, saturday night and even that drew a crowd, which was promising! The crowd i should point out were now mostly resembling stumbling, incoherent rocker zombies. Fast forward 6 hours and the beach was still swaying with blissed out festival goers as Endless Zone took to the stage. The performance was impressive. The silhouettes pumping out some solid funk-rock slowly took on character as the sun rose up from the sea behind them. The crowd were appreciating the spectacle, until a stranger took their gaze.

At the front of the audience, a trashed girlfriend of a guy in a pirate outfit was starting to get a bit over enthusiastic with the bogle dancing technique. I'll let the pictures tell the rest of the story, but let's just say this behavior carried on for a good twenty minutes by which time most of the audience had had their photo taken with her, and her pirate boyfriend had been clapping and smoking fags as if was the most natural thing in the world.



Polite Note: Look away now if you're easily offended.
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