My positive Graspop experience
I read a lot of posts here that point out the things that are going wrong or otherwise are contributing to a bad experience. And of course these posts have a legit place here. It’s absolutely allowed to share your experiences especially the ones we should learn from.
Having said that, I do want to point out that Graspop attracts 200.000* people. Of which only a handful are active here. Reading reddits like this makes it easy to believe a festival like this is horrible, while in the general sense it is still also an amazing experience and an amazing community of people.
Sure, i was nervous when the message came out that the parking areas where going to be closed, we had paid 15 euros per day in advance to be able to park and were now unsure how the hell they were going to solve this.
But the communication did inform us to go to Witgoor and the (volunteer) traffic managers did an amazing job pointing us to fair parking spots every single day. The parking tickets will be refunded, so we had free parking the entire festival. The people around the town of Witgoor can’t be thanked enough for their hospitality and patience, all for our pleasure)
The shuttle bus service was amazing, no long delays, no horrendously overpacked busses (full yes, but safe still). The bus drivers all did an amazing job steering their enormous vehicles through the crowd (cyclists on the road everywhere), some drivers added in a bunch of humor too, already contributing to a good mood.
The mud situation was a challenge. But in my opinion the organization kept an eye on things and did arrange things in order to keep things safe. It would be easy to say they could’ve done more and i am fully aware of the dire situation on the campsite that was apparently not properly handled, but I myself did not experience that, so not my place to complain about that. So, yes: the mud was a challenge and if you’re expecting to sit in the sun all day to drink beers and listen to music, you might be disappointed. But for me, it kinda even added to the festival atmosphere and the companionship of the metal community. We face setbacks with healthy stoicism, raise our glasses and laugh about the situation and turn things into something fun. That’s what we do best and a festival edition like this brings this even more to the surface.
If the universe gives us mud, we will stomp our boots in it with pride.
The garbage collection worked amazing! I am pretty sure after the festival was over hardly any piece of garbage was left behind. The toilet lines were visually long, but in honesty they moved generally relatively fast. I found the crew generally very friendly, maybe because I gave them a thanking wave or a verbal “thank you” and/or a smile to acknowledge them. But even without that they seemed to be happily (mostly voluntary) doing their not very fun to do jobs.
I had a good time, seen good music (Igorrr was amazing!) and got emotionally touched by the community multiple times.
🤘
P.S.: this post is not meant in any way to downplay any of the others experiences or to blame the victim. Also, I am not naive and not blind for anything negative. I did see things that were not ok. This post is only meant to share my (mostly positive) thoughts and they are my own.
*apparently the number of visitors is debatable, i have used the number that is on Wikipedia. Even if it is not 200.000, my point still stands: a handful of people will be (probably rightfully so) vocal about complaints, but there will also be thousands of people that have a generally good time.