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Vice Blog

NETHERLANDS - ASSHOLES AND CUTE DEALERS IN HUMAN BODY PARTS IN SERBIA

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.

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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.

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:

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.

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!

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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.

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

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

JAN VAN TIENEN

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