Amphi Festival!

Ho, what!? Has it really been four months since I posted here? That's not really alright, is it now? Anyway, since I was unable to do much filming at the Amphi Festival this weekend, I thought I would recall the experience for you the old fashioned way; by writing it down.

After spending a few days exploring Bremen and Osnabrück, I went to Cologne for the Amphi Festival. The first night was the opening party, for which my companion wanted to style my hair for me. I haven't let anyone do my hair for like, 15 years or something. I like surprises, and trusting this friend to do a good job, I left it to him and said, 'do whatever you want.' I ended up looking like this:

Hair: highly flammable. Two hours and a whole can of hairspray later.

I always wondered what my hair would look like standing on end, now I know. For the unfamiliar, this is a style typical of the early Goth scene, not just... random daftness.

The opening party was fairly meh, mainly because the walk there was long and wet, and my preloaded booze had worn off by the time I arrived. However, I met with friends from Wellington there, whom I hadn't seen for months, so that was awesome. Unfortunately, we got spectacularly lost on the way back to our accommodation, and ended up walking for two hours. As a result, we slept in too long the next day, and were quite late for the start of the festival.

However, when we arrived at the Laxness Arena, we learnt that the bad weather had caused most of the bands to be cancelled or postponed. This was great, I thought, given that I had wanted to see The Crüxshadows play earlier that day. But it turned out that they were one of the bands that hadn't been postponed. Boo never mind! I spent the evening and afternoon mostly drinking, talking to friends, and making new ones. I also did a spot of my favourite activity, Drunk Shopping™, where I came away with a beautiful cat skull necklace, a Lip Service jacket, Batcave T-shirt, a big silver skull ring, and (because I felt slightly cold and it made sense at the time) a decadent velvet cloak from Sinister.

The festival atmosphere was fantastic, despite the ghastly weather. Around 16,000 Goths and suchlike came together dressed in their finest; there was a lot of human eye-candy, and a lot of black.

With friends on the first day of Amphi.

Here is me with some lovely friends on the first day, still with my tall hair. That evening we had hoped to go to an 80s party, but instead, everyone either got lost, too drunk, or too tired for more funtimes. 

The second day I awoke and missioned to the supermarket first thing. I fucking love the food in Germany, especially since it's summer at the moment. I had a huge breakfast of redcurrants, salami with cream cheese, chocolate pudding, and Monster energy. Closely followed by vodka *thumbs up*

Having woken up looking like Sideshow Bob, I spent much of the morning trying to restore my hair to its usual ball-shape. This was no mean feat as I had run out of hairspray and had to be a bit creative. Eventually I achieved some semblance of my usual, and dressed in an outfit entirely of PVC. I like being shiny. 

We cruised back to the festival just in time to see Combichrist. I met up with some of the beautiful friends I had made in Leipzig at WGT, and went with them to their car where we drank this dangerously delicious liquid raspberry magic. They also supplied us with hairspray, and the day was saved. Here is our little car boot party: 

My lovely friends and I drinking raspberry liquor in a parkhaus

We dashed off to see The Mission UK, who were awesome. Really enjoyable. I had rather wanted to see VNV Nation after this, but instead I filled up on some delicious cheese-bread thing, a smuggled bottle of vodka, and decided to carry on with my Drunk Shopping™. I came away with a craptonne more stuff I likely won't be able to fit into my already very full and heavy luggage, but drunk me doesn't think nor care about these trifles. You can see all the neat and super cute stuff I got in my Drunk Shopping at Amphi video.

The weekend seemed to go by very quickly, but it was great fun. I think it's the people that make any event or party, so for me it was wonderful to be reunited with friends, and make many new ones. The festival drew to a close too soon, and people started milling around seeking an after party. Astonishingly, no one had organised one. So it was agreed upon within the group whom I was with that, in the absence of a party, one should be started. So myself and perhaps 30 other beautiful people,  including my fellow QoD Ambassador Adora BatBrat, played some music on a portable speaker, and partied all the way to the train station. Then we partied on the train. Then we got accosted by security guards. Then we partied all the way to a karaoke bar, which turned out to be closed. So we took over a small cocktail bar, and launched the one barman into action. It was a truly splendid time, with our group coming from Germany, Sweden, and New Zealand. Really brought the weekend to a perfect close.

The next day, after sleeping in once again, we furiously cleared out our accommodation, and dropped our luggage off at the main station so we could go explore Cologne. We went into the enormous and ancient Cologne Cathedral, which is fucking impressive as fuck. We also climbed 500 steps to the top of a spire, and visited the belfry, wherein were some giant bells that chimed while we were in there.

Eating redcurrants again outside the Cologne Cathedral. I fucking love redcurrants.

After that, we caught up with a chap we had met the day before, and headed to the vast and beautiful Melaten Cemetery. This was the third cemetery I had visited within a week. Très cliché. We wandered the place for a long time and, naturally, posed for a lot of gloomy photos in front of graves.

Getting my gruft on in the Melaten Cemetery.

 

It was such a lovely time, and I really liked Cologne. Now I've got a few days to recover before the M'era Luna festival! Thanks very much for reading, until next time! x