British people and body parts kill a fesitval

The Serbian Exit Festival is located in a medieval fortress on the bank of the Donau in the city of Novi Sad. It started out ten years ago as a three-month protest against then-president Milosovic and the war into which he plunged the country. Since its first run in 2000, the festival was eventually cut back to four days and bigger names. That’s a great idea in theory, but it doesn't quite work out that great when those bigger names are The Prodigy, Korn, and Moby. The good people of the festival thought it’d be a good idea if the good people of our office in the Netherlands were flown in at their expense to report on their goings-on. We could see the merit in their plan and complied with their request. And we had a great time, despite the presence of tens of thousand of Brits and, of course, The Prodigy, and losing our camera in the shittest of shitholes.

The location couldn't be beat: there are high walls and little bridged lanes that have you yelling, “This is the best location for a festival ever!” like an imbecile. We stuck to that opinion, even when we learned a 22-year-old from the UK fell off a wall and died. But look at it:

Nice.

Paying for drinks was kind of odd. The organization decided that you could buy several kinds of tokens: one for beer, one for wine and energy drinks, and one for six packs. The last option allowed us to buy more beers for less money, a real value "ITE," so that's what we went for.

Well, no. Six-pack tokens allowed you to only buy six pints at a time, which meant we had to chug three beers every time we got new ones to prevent them from turning lukewarm. In this way, drinking beer became hard work and the festival almost had me beat the first night. But for cheap!
(The festival doesn’t cost a lot of money anyway; entrance is about 100 euro, beer is cheaper than in the rest of Europe, and in Novi Sad you get a dish of the finest Serbian sausage and beans for the price of, um, mere beans.)

What sucks about the festival is the ubiquity of the British. They’re the biggest ethnic group after the Serbians, which means there were plenty of assholes attending.
Look:

This one disguised himself as a Dutchman but we weren't fooled. Look, there's more:

The thought of genocide was never far away. This guy was the worst though:

Fucking scumbag. But it was all balanced out by the presence of some real cuties:

This girl told us she’s studying medicine in Budapest and that she could help us buy organs. Alas, we were shitfaced when she relayed this information to us, and we never remembered her name or any other details besides her being able to buy severed human hands and bowels and stuff. Needless to say, we tried finding her for the entire duration of the festival. When we finally did, she was kind of freaked out by us asking her about buying hands, but she liked us despite our weirdity, so hopefully we’ll be enjoying our illegally flown-in livers pretty soon.

Because the festival takes place at night, the daytime left us free to wander around Novi Sad, searching for the soul of Serbian society. We didn’t find it. What we did find was the reason why almost every Serb we met dresses in clothes the Salvation Army wouldn’t even take a shit on: it’s because there are so many clothing stores like the one in the picture above. Stores that sell clothing that’s functional, yet made fashionable by printing Mickey Mouse on a T-shirt and printing palm leaves on Bermudas.

The night before we met this guy, we left the festival early in the morning, looking for the raw, unfiltered Serbia. So we instructed the cab driver to bring us to the filthiest shithole Novi Sad had to offer. He took us to a place where an untainted Serbian gentleman played atonal Balkan tunes on a synthesizer while ugly harlots danced like dying swans for men who were probably administered steroids during their time in the Serbian army. We were unspeakably drunk and lost our nice camera at that bar (hence the plethora of crap pictures in this report).

When we woke up after that night of debauchery, we were still drunk, though unsatisfied, so we decided to look around town, where we chanced upon a roulette hall. We went inside to gamble and then met the guy in the picture above. "I have just woken up on a bench!" was the first thing he blurted out to us. Fantastic!

Excited by the prospect of having found someone we thought was an adventurer of some sort, we were heavily disappointed when we found out that this guy wasn’t some Ivan from Moldavia or some other exciting land, but Dennis from Limburg, the Netherlands. What's happened to culture these days?

Oh yeah, this is where all the culture is. It's on a dance stage lit with more much wattage than all the houses in that country use combined for the rest of the year. And it was sweet.

Fucked Up!

And because it’s Serbia, and not Holland or some other boring country, the music goes on till 8 or 9 in the morning. If mindlessly banging away at inane repetitive music is what you like, this festival is one of the best to attend.

And hey, the organization wasn’t bad.

Look at this Oompa Loompa manning a camera. See? Organized.

This was our favorite moment: fireworks during Buraka Som Sistema.

This was the worst moment: wedged in between tens of thousands of bastards who were fanatical about the Prodigy.

And when it was all done, we were tired and we slept. Bye!

(Any photo that doesn't look like crap by Jasper van Vugt)