UNKNOWN  

Rovinj , Croatia  (8^th-12^th September)

Featuring: People Get Real, The Sonic Emporium, Mike Jones

We arrived at Zagreb airport bright and early (and very weary) with a mere 4.5(!) hour wait until our transfer 😦 Perhaps the transfer will arrive early we thought, perhaps we can camp out on the coach we thought…but no, that would be far too logical, instead our coach had been told to arrive 15 mins after the scheduled departure time, in case people were late (strange, given the coach was basically scheduled to cater for people coming in on the same flight, all of which had arrived nearly an hour earlier).

Anyway, after what seemed like the longest of journeys, we finally arrived in Rovinj, or, more importantly, at Entrance A! We jumped through the various check-in hoops and found ourselves in our home for the week – the onsite 3* Amarin apartments! We should have taken a picture as this was definitely the cleanest and most pleasant the apartment was going to look for the rest of our time there…

With the third member of our crew having arrived not far behind us (hello Catriona!), we proceeded to have a relatively low key first night: a bit of unpacking, a bit of food, a trip to Randy’s… Who, you might ask, is Randy?! I’m pretty sure most of Unknown will have come across Randy at some point – with the onsite supermarket closing stupidly early (and subsequently running out of alcohol on the second day), if you weren’t prepared to go offsite there were few options for a little tipple – recognising this, Randy had very cleverly set up a little ‘fruit’ stall near the supermarket that coincidentally also sold various wines and ‘grappas’. With our banana and pear ‘grappa’ in the bag, we headed back to the apartment. To this day we are convinced it was probably just cordial but it did the job and the banana and pear, strawberry, and cherry versions were a hit across the site! Good job Randy!!

Although a low key night, it was clear early on that the festival had attracted a friendly crowd (we’d already started to make friends!) and we were optimistic for what the week held in store.

Cue Monday, our first full day, and a day of good weather 🙂 We made our way into the town to sample the local food – sea food, sea food, sea food, sea food, sea food!!!! 🙂 It is unlikely we could ever grow tired of eating the grilled calamari – yum!

Having eaten, we were ready to face our first proper night…and what a first night it was! We would like to share all of our secrets (and photos) with you, but that would be giving the game away…instead we can tell you tales of the retro, disco-fuelled fun times we had in the Medina, our first discovery of The Forest (what was to become our home for much of the rest of the week), and the numerous friendly locals we encountered (oh, and the time Wendy fell out of the hammock – who knew hammocks could be so dangerous?!)

When we say the locals, we certainly do not mean the Croatians (who, by the way, for the most part, are up there with some of the grumpiest people you will ever meet); instead we mean the English, Scottish, Irish locals…you could be mistaken for thinking we had gone to a festival at home! Not that we’re complaining, but it was a bit surreal at times.

Given this is a music blog, we should probably also mention some of the musical highlights from the first night. Without doubt, the standout set for us had to be the Northern lads People Get Real, The Sonic Emporium and Mike Jones going B2B. Kicking off with a nice bit of Falling Up, track after track after track…you could not keep us still! Alas, all good things must come to an end and we fell into bed sometime in the early hours, ready for the next day’s excitement.

Stay tuned for our review of days 3 and 4…

 Visit our Flickr page to see photo highlights from the festival and our YouTube channel where you can watch video extracts.
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You can also check out our Past Events page to see our music archives.

 

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