Concerts galore and related epic disasters

This last weekend was actually rather tiring, seeing 3 concerts in 3 days (though obviously not something I can complain about, haha). After Friday’s World Cup Draw party, on Saturday, Julia, Wenli, and I spent the entire afternoon sitting outside listening to various bands play at an outdoor restaurant in Hout Bay. Even though we had seen Freshly Ground the night before, it’s always a pleasure to see them and this time there were just a handful of people between us and the band, as opposed to thousands, haha. (For anyone who doesn’t know Freshly Ground, you should check them out – they’re great fun!) It was a perfect way to spend a sunny summer afternoon – outside, on the beach, listening to music. Despite applying layers and layers of high SPF sunscreen, I still got a little burned, but that’s ok – maybe this means I won’t be the pastiest person in the room come Christmas time, for once :)

Hout Bay, where Saturday's festivities took place


Just before Freshly Ground went on, there were some really great dancers imitating the MTN robot

And finally, Freshly Ground!



To round out the weekend, on Sunday, Byron, Julia, Wenli, and I went to see The Killers play at a vineyard in Paarl (a wineland area about an hour outside of Cape Town). Huge international bands don’t come to Africa that often, as you can imagine, so everyone around here was rather excited. The show itself was pretty fun, and of course it was quite unique to see them play at a vineyard, as opposed to a concert hall or regular indoor venue…but I don’t think I would ever, ever do something like that again. Confused? Well, let me take a minute to explain...

Julia picked Byron, Wenli, and I up at 3pm and we jovially embarked on what we thought would be approximately an hour-long drive to Paarl. We anticipated some parking issues, so we figured if we arrived at 4pm we were allowing ourselves plenty of time to deal with crowd issues before the 6pm start time. If only we had foreseen what was coming.

Shortly after 3:30, traffic came to a grinding halt on the freeway, and we inched (quite literally) along for, oh, a mere 3.5 hours or so. Being stuck inside a hot car and really having to pee isn’t the most fun thing in the world, as I’m sure you all can imagine. However, once we exited the freeway and reached the road the vineyard was on, our good spirits returned with the excitement and anticipation of the concert inspiring us. Noticing tons of cars were just parking along the side of the road at this point, and having read online at the vineyard website that the venue was 3km from the freeway exit, we opted to park as well, looking forward to stretching our legs a bit, still seeing nothing but a slow-moving, endless line of cars ahead of us, and assuming we would then be able to beat the traffic on the way back if our car wasn’t jammed up in a vineyard parking lot.

Thus, at 7pm we abandoned the car and joined forces with the hundreds of other concert-goers walking to the concert. Hearing music far off in the distance, we were sure we were missing the concert and walked as fast as we possibly could to make it to the venue. We walked along the main road for quite sometime and finally saw a sign for the vineyard up ahead, turning onto a smaller paved road. Then we once again walked for quite sometime before seeing another sign for the vineyard, this time turning onto a small dirt road. Do you see a theme here? Once again, we walked for quite sometime before we finally saw signs of concert life. Oh, did I mention that Byron and I have lately been having knee problems? Yeah, Byron tore his meniscus about 2 weeks ago and I’ve encountered some knee pain that has forced me to stop running for the time-being. Yes, considering that half the people in the car were icing their knees during the drive to the show, it wasn’t exactly an ideal situation to be walking for hours on end. (Thankfully, my knee caused me no problems whatsoever yesterday and is doing fine today, but I have to say, I don’t know how Byron made it, limping along and visibly in pain for the whole time. You amaze me, Byron!) Suffice it to say the vineyard was most definitely NOT less than 3km from the car.

So, let’s see…at this point it was about 8:30pm, we were hot, sweaty, hungry, and tired, etc. and there was no band onstage. Though we missed the opening act, luckily The Killers had not yet come on and by the time we arrived, we only had to wait about 15 minutes for them to start playing. It was a huge venue, and I think I would have actually appreciated the surroundings had I not just spent over 5 hours trying to get there. Yeah, that kind of put a damper on things. In the end, I did enjoy the show, but I think that’s beside the point as far as this nightmare is concerned.

At 10pm when the band finished, dreading the walk ahead of us, we somehow managed to find the energy to trek for however-many odd kms back to the car, in the dark. It only took us 2 hours though! (That was sarcasm, in case you didn’t catch the tone.) Haha, it sort of felt like we were participating in some sort of “Night of the Living Dead” ordeal, walking in pitch black darkness across fields and along roads in the middle of nowhere surrounded by hundreds of half-dead (from exhaustion) concert-goers. Well, by the time we reached the car, most of the traffic had cleared and it only took us 45 minutes to get back to Cape Town. I guess that’s one thing to be appreciative of? (We talked to a woman from work this morning who said she was stuck in her car for 3 hours trying to exit the venue.)

So, to sum up, 4 hours waiting in traffic to get there (or sort of near there) + 3.25 hours walking back and forth + 0.75 hours driving home = 2 hours watching the band? Unfortunately, I think it’s quite obvious that one side of that equation far outweighs the other, especially when you consider that I actually forked over $50 to participate in the madness…

Can I just say, if you have a vineyard, perhaps the kind that only has one entrance, and if that entrance consists of a one-lane dirt road, it might not be the best place to hold a concert with thousands of people attending? Yeah, it definitely does not take much thought to see that one coming. I had gotten my hopes up with the relatively smooth operation of the World Cup Draw, but this is case in point why I’m a bit concerned about how South Africa is going to handle hosting a World Cup. I hate to be this scathingly critical of event planning in a developing country, but the thing is, this situation would not have been that hard to avoid if someone had just sat down and thought about it for approximately 2 seconds. Anyway, I sincerely hope the “park and ride” trend catches on in Africa before June.

Well, I think about the only thing we have to be thankful for was the band coming on hours late – given the trials and tribulations we went through to get there and back, I hate to think how we would have dealt with things had we missed the show. Haha, at one point the band even apologized for being late, explaining it was due to the fact that “yeah, we were on the same one-lane road you were.” In conclusion, as refreshing as the open air was, having now experienced what a never-ending walking tour of Paarl is like, I think we’re all in agreement that next time we’ll be doing all vineyard sight-seeing by car.

Ok, even though it was a hike to get to the vineyard, I admit the view was quite nice

It's hard to get good pictures in the dark, but it was fun to see the band. I guess.


And now for this upcoming week, I’m looking forward to resting (at least socially speaking)! Should be a very busy week at work, as Nzwaki is visiting Cape Town to work with Monica and me on writing up the report for the big study that recently wrapped up at the Innovation Center in East London. More to report on that later!