My colleague and now roommate Michael told me about this festival, called AVA a few weeks ago already. As the lineup looked quite well and represented the kind of music that I’m into it, I decided to organize some tickets for myself. Lucky me that my fiancé used to print one of the few independent magazines in Germany (proud magazine) and is still publishing articles online, so that we were able to get two press tickets for the festival. The only thing I had to do is writing a little preview and as may be the case a review as well, according on my experiences there.
A word and a blow! Here we go (my first article as a „music journalist“ by the way):
https://proudmagazine.de/ava-festival-and-conference-2017/
The festival was from 5pm till 1am on Friday and from 12pm till 1am on Saturday. As you can guess already, the whole fun started straightly after work on Friday. Because I had still a ticket left over I asked Jordan, with whom Emin and me got friends at the office and pub night outs already, to go there with me. He runs his own startup „Orca“, a peer-to-peer investment research company. We got on our ways to go to the Titanic quarter, to be exact at T13, a urban sports park, where the festival took place, by foot around 5pm to meet Michael and his friend Shereen, who came over for a visit from Portland.
Fortunately it was quite empty as we’ve arrived there. On the main entrance we got redirected to the back of the very huge warehouse as the press and artists have got their own entrance. The welcoming was very warm and unproblematical. The staff was kind of expecting us and gave us our wrist bands. We got introduced to Dresdner Leitner (Head of Press), with whom I was in contact already before. We started a little walking tour with her and some other press people and met Michael and Shereen meanwhile, where the walking tour ended for us as we wanted to stay with them.
After a few drinks, dance moves, many fit of laughters and pizzas I decided to leave a bit earlier as the rest of the the group around 11pm because I’ve been very tired from the workday before already.
The next day I stayed only from 7pm until 10pm as I was still very tired from the whole week and night before. I was very impressed how much more the rest of the group were motivated. They stayed from 2pm till the end as well as the night before till the end. In general I got the feeling that the people over here are much more motivated relating to night outs (and drinking). Maybe it’s because of the fact that they don’t have many possibilities and long opening hours as back in Germany, so they take any opportunity when it comes about parties, festivals and night outs.
