Sziget Festival Summary – Day 2 – Endless party at Sziget

Day 2 was supposed to bring shows of Ellie Goulding, Ella Eyre, Foals, Interpol and many others. The day started for us with a nice sleep in our own bed and a long shower after that. Jealous? Be! We got to the festival area just in time for the concert of Akkezdet phiai on the stage with the longest name ever – Petöfi rádió Telekom Volt festival stage.

 

Akkezdet phiai

 

Is a Hungarian hip hop band that consists of 2 guys singing and one mixing the music. It seemed like their music will call a storm, but it did not (sigh). As almost every band playing on this stage, they were starting late. I am wondering whether it is a trait of Hungarian bands or whether it is the stage to be blamed. Let me do some more observations about that.

I am not the biggest fan of hip hop, so it came a bit odd to end up being in the first row with our alpaca partying to the songs of Akkezdet phiai. But since we were surrounded by Hungarians, it was necessary to go with the crowd and sing with them too. The concert itself I think was a good start of the day. If only…

If only it would not be that hot in the half tent stage. There was some wind blowing, but it seems it could not get inside of the Volt stage, so although we had a shower not a long time before the concert, we were totally sweaty and stinky and this feeling did not leave us for the entire evening.

Akkezdet phiai and alpaca
Akkezdet phiai and alpaca
akkezdet phiai
Akkezdet phiai and alpaca with the singer

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ella Eyre

 

At around 21:15, we finally managed to reach the A38 tent, to our big surprise, Ella Eyre has already finished her gig. Even the LED display by the entrance to the tent was indicating that she will play until 21:30, but she did not. So I guess I would have to check her out at some other ocasion. Funnily enough, 2 days ago, same time, same place, was the concert of Selah Sue, but she played until 21:40 almost, making people skip the beginning of Florence and the machine. Maybe she did not want to miss the concert of Ellie Goulding, who knows…

 

Ellie Goulding

 

We decided to grab a spot on the left of the main stage, where it is usually less crowded and enjoy a concert of Ellie Goulding. The concert had a really nice decorations on stage. Ellie started off with a hit that pretty much everybody knew, so people started dancing. Unfortunately, she did not have more hits (and the ones that people know, had to be kept until the end of the show), so the second, third and fourth songs were not so impressive and when I looked around, the people were not having much fun. I saw even some yawning girls.

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Ellie seemed to have a bit strange voice, maybe the effect of the dust? She was however looking very tired and maybe it took her some time to get heated up, but we are merciless spectators and we went away after 5 songs. We probably had higher expectations and this concert ended up for us in a disappointment. However, if you stayed until the end and she got better, drop a comment below, so we know how it went later.

Ellie Goulding concert at Sziget festival
Ellie Goulding one and only pic that is not that bad…it is actually quite bad, but compared to the rest…

 

Wellhello

 

As true Hungarian immigrants, we are trying to get the hang of Hungarian culture so that we can respect it (yes, lame joke in response to the billboard campaign against immigrants done by the ruling party Fidesz – details in my article here). So going to the gigs of Hungarian bands, is sort of a must for us.

Wellhello is a band similar to Halott pénz that was playing yesterday on the same stage one  slot earlier. They are also to my best knowledge sharing some members of the band too. The Petofi radio Telekom Volt Festival Stage got very crowded with Attilas and Csillas and the concert could start at 22:00, but as I already wrote earlier, it is a Hungarian or stage tradition to start later. This made the crowd angry and people started to yell: Mi a fasz van, which means WTF. The let them shout for a long time and then only they kicked off the show.

If Wellhello is similar to Halott pénz, it would not come to a big surprise that they are a sláger band, which has in total 4 hits. However, they are not scared to supplement them by songs of Halott pénz, so we heard again the song Hallo lányok (which sounded better in the Halott pénz version) and Emlékszem, Sopronban (which sounded the same, maybe because they did the song together). The crowd did not get angry for this, instead people were really having a good time.

All in all, the performance was quite nice, we danced on the table and I would think that the band has maybe opted in to be placed on a bigger stage next time as clearly, the Volt stage area was a bit too crowded. One last note, I am really trying to remember the Hungarian bands and their songs, but if they would be all the time singing each other’s songs, it creates a goulash in my head.

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Table dance Wellhallo
Table dance Wellhallo proof
Table dance Wellhallo Sziget festival
Table dance Wellhallo

 

Interpol

 

We had some rest after the Wellhello and continued our Sziget Day 2 adventure with a concert of Interpol in the A38 stage. I was reasonably crowded with a lot of people just chilling on the outside of the big tent. I liked the music, it is just probably the A38 problem that the sound is really not good. This was the case of Interpol too, so although the band performance was not bad, I had to leave the tent quite early as it was not so enjoyable.

And btw I think they should rename the A38 to be the Monkey tent. Hot, stuffy and smelly. Maybe they would even get a sponsorship from Chiquita.

 

Colosseum

 

We grabbed some food – marvelous quesadillas from the food truck by the Telekom arena (highly recommended to eat in food trucks rather than in the stalls) and decided to explore the island a bit more as we did not have the opportunity so far and we did not feel like going to bed either. When you decide to go to the Sziget beach and stop by on the way in Colosseum and check out the Campfire stage as these were pretty much the last places there was something happening, reserve enough time for it. Because it is far, very far.

quesadilla food truck alpaca sziget
Alpaca supervising the preparation of quesadilla in the food truck

I always was quite fascinated by the Colosseum, but as it is a DJ zone, I never really was tempted to spend there time as electronic music is not really my piece of cake. But I am able to survive it for 15 minutes maximum and so we did. It was Poli (H) playing and the Colosseum was as always full of Dutch people. If A38 should be renamed to Monkey tent, this place should be called Klomp (the wooden shoe) as it is exclusively an Oranje friendly zone. Guess the electronic music is doing the trick.

I was quite surprised that many of the people were climbing the structure of Colosseum and there was no security to stop them from doing so. Luckily, nothing happened and they were not falling down, but one would think that with such an amount of security guys at Sziget, it would not be that hard to prevent accidents of this kind.

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Colosseum climbers
Colosseum climbers on the entrance part
Colosseum climbers Sziget
Colosseum climbers

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Campfire stage

 

We checked out that one too, but there was a very small fire and a lot of people sitting in multiple rows and probably the performance was already over, as we could not hear or see anybody performing music. So we decided to continue further on to the Sziget beach.

 

Sziget beach

 

It is the northernmost place of the festival, we had a chance to walk through the entire island and on the way we realized that the festival although it is nice and shiny, it is also very dusty, stuffy and it is no longer green anymore. It also feels that there were a lot of trees chopped down. So the overall visual impression after 4 days of the Sziget festival is that it is brown and dusty everywhere. But the weather should be blamed too.

Sziget beach is a place with a bit of the Danube to swim in (for the brave ones) and with a stage of its own. There were surprisingly quite some people around. We even witnessed the security guys trying to run after a guy. They caught him, but we are not sure what is the offense that he committed.

Sziget beach
Sziget beach with nice colors and tired people

One thing that was out of ordinary at the Sziget beach was the toilets, half of them had broken handles so you could not close yourself, other half was very stinky and uncleaned. Quite a big comparison with the rest of the festival, which has a better quality sanitary equipment. It did not happen to me to use a very dirty ToiToi so far, but Sziget beach set the record.

We drank one beer on the level of the Danube and started to realize that the sky is becoming lighter. When I checked the clock, it was already after 4 am, so we set on a trip to the southern part of the island to our tent. On the way, we met many people in different states of mind, many sleeping people and we made a lot of pictures on that day. Check for yourself:

 

 

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