Full On Ferry Fiasco

Last night me and my girlfriend (as well as a couple of thousand other souls) went to the Full On Ferry Masquerade in Rotterdam. I had had some bad feelings about the whole thing for a couple of days, but I chalked it up to my s.a.d.
Anyway, we got on the train from Enschede at 21.57 to go to Rotterdam. A 2½ hour train trip and a subway ride later, we were showing the people at the gate our tickets.
Once we got inside, we started moving to the dance floor. The place featured only once large-ish dance floor, and a staging area where one could buy hotdogs (the only food available), and some trinkets and other knick-knacks.
We went to the dance floor to get a feel for the music. 30 minutes later, I was convinced that the DJ had not changed the record. Not because of mad DJing skills making for seamless transitions, but rather because it sounded exactly the same. Similar is ok, it's in the same genre, but the same?
Not only was the music incredibly repetitive, but it was also horrible. Labeled as a trance event, this was the housiest trance I have ever heard. And it wasn't the good kind of housy trance (there are a few tunes), but rather trance laid on top of a lazily crafted house loop. Absolutely nothing going on but the rhythm. The music was incredibly boring.
We left around 3 am.
The problem was that last night was the switch day for daylight savings time, which gave us a wonderful extra hour. Now, had this been at a great party, I would have liked it, but the fact that we were stuck in the cold Rotterdam night with no way of getting back to any kind of civilization made this extra hour seem like hell.
Our first train was scheduled to leave at 7.32, a lovely 4½ hours later. As this was clearly unacceptable, we embarked on a long winded train trek over what seemed like all of Holland, just to be indoors on a train instead of waiting out in the cold.
The train trip that normally takes just over 2½ hours took us somewhere around 4.
For those of you who don't know, Holland seems completely devoid of indoor waiting areas. This is fine in July, but it is unacceptable in October.

I've been let down by Ferry Corsten and his ilk before, but this was the last time.
From now on I will refuse to spend 39 EURO parties that I know will never ever be worth the money. If I also have to travel to another part of the country just to attend, I'll be even less likely to go.
I've known for a long time that spending anything over 10 euro on a party is too much, compared to the value I get for it, but silly little me, I keep on going anyway.
Well I say no more. The stupidity ends now!
No more crappy mainstream trance events. From now on I choose my parties with care. Even though it means going to fewer parties, I am totally fine with that.
Seeing as how I am a poor student, I can't afford to blow 100 EUROS for a party night anyway.

I hate seeing stupidity in other people, it's painful, but seeing stupidity in my self is the worst.
Hopefully I can remember this vow next time a big party comes up...

Fuck you Ferry, Fuck you very much!

On A Roll

I've been feeling a bit under the weather this last week. The phrase "my old bones ache" (from Warcraft III, actually. Spoken by Cairn Bloodhoof) really fit me yesterday and the day before. Today the aching is gone, but now my throat hurts instead.
My roommate gave me throat pills with Lidocain in them, which do a pretty good job of easing the pain. I'm going to the store for some more of the same in the morning. Might be good to have. They contained a shitload of Lidocain too, I can barely feel my tongue, hehe.

Anyway, what I was getting at was the fact that I haven't had the energy to blog properly this week, and I first thought that I'd submit a series of small blog posts, but then I thought what the hell, and put them all in one big one. Thus:

This week was spent in London, as some of you might know. Not actually IN London I guess, but more just west of London in a little shit hole called Reading. (All British towns are shit holes, no offense.) I went to visit a dear old friend of mine. We partied hard, like we always do, and I had a blast! I guess I did come home with some sort of fever, but I suppose that's the price you pay for going all out. I met a lot of cool new people there. Some of which were from South Africa, which is pretty neat. What they were doing in the UK though, I will never know.
I also met this really cute girl. At first I thought "But, she's cute... There are no cute girls in England.", but then my friend explained that she wasn't from England, and that's when all the pieces fell in to place. It's too bad that we live in different parts of the world though. Travel is fairly cheap I guess, but not that cheap. It's not like jumping on your bike and riding for 10 minutes.

Speaking of travel, my friend told me that I might have to watch what I bring with me on the plane, what with the recent ban of liquids on board and all that nonsense. They actually did force us to put stuff in transparent bags at Schipol, to carry through the security check, but at least we were allowed to put those things back in our bags after security.
I wonder what the point of that exercise is. Do they think that the security people could have spotted "dangerous" liquids just by looking at them? I'll bet you a small country to a bent hair pin that no one that works security at an airport can tell if one water like substance or another can be used to make explosives. "But they put it through machines" you say, "maybe the machines know?". Well, if the machines know, then why can't we just keep the containers loose in our bags? Why do they need to be packed in sealed transparent bags?
A false sense of security, and a shitload of inconvenience is all it is. I don't even feel safer, not one bit.
Ohh, and when I'm going through security in Gatwick, I start noticing that our queue is much slower than the others. I look ahead, and find that we have to take out fucking shoes off and put them through the x-ray machine too!
Can you believe this bullshit? What's next? walking naked through the metal detector? Putting humans through the x-ray? When does it stop? When will the people of the world rise up as one and say "No more of this bullshit!"?
Don't you see that the terrorists have already won? Being a terrorist, by definition, means that you are someone bent on creating terror. Creating terror doesn't necessarily mean crashing airplanes into skyscrapers. Creating terror means to instill a feeling of terror in other people (or animals, for that matter). To make others afraid.
I think they've done a pretty good job at it so far. We're so scared that we'll allow virtually any freedom reducing "security" measure to feel a little bit safer, yet we're not safer off now than we were before 9/11!
All these so called security measures didn't stop people from bringing liquid explosives on airplanes, and it's sure as hell not going to stop nefarious people doing whatever their doing next, because they know our every move! They know our full strategy! They have our game plan laid out for them to poke holes in!
As you might have gathered from this (and previous posts), I'm a privacy/freedom nut. I also happen to be a security nut, but one thing I'm not is a sheep. They are slowly but surely eroding our freedoms until there is nothing left.
I guess we're lucky that they still let people ride the subway, after what happened in London.
Nuts I tell you, NUTS!

I could rave about this all day, but I'm getting hungry. Time for some microwavable food, because I've spent all my energy writing this piece here, plus I'm sick, so I've earned an easy street dinner.

Watch this space!