I had known about Luminosity for a little while, but had failed to make it happen earlier. Sadly, this year was not nearly as much as the previous years: it used to be 4 days with 12H a day, but the city council responsible for that part of the beach actually decided that it was too loud and put a reverse curfew on the festival. This was apparently not to inconvenience a few people on the beach who could literally have walked 2mn away in either direction if they didn't like the sound. Sigh...
As a result of this BS, the event was only allowed to start at 15:00, but it gets worse, even then they were not allowed to use any sound until 17:00. Sadly, that meant the first 2 hours were literally sound you could barely hear and a mostly a waste for the DJs that were playing. It kind of broke my heart to see Thrillseekers do a 3H set from 14:00 to 17:00 one day where you couldn't hear the sound :(
This is obviously not Luminosity's fault, but it effectively removed around 5H per day, or 20H total. Hopefully they get to handle that for next year, or the event is going to be much lesser than it used to be
I talked to some DJs who got sets cancelled or were forced to play with virtually no sound, and they were not happy either
the sound booth guy was tired of everyone asking why you could barely hear any music
That said, there were plenty of DJs still. I couldn't help myself and take a few pictures. It actually took a while before I got a clue, I could have gotten many more pictures if I had tried harder, but I had been wanting to talk to PvD and get a picture with him for so long since I've been listening to his music for over 20 years and that this alone was awesome. Sadly I missed Ferry Corsten due to a time conflict. Oh well, maybe another time:
Cold Blue
Craig Connelly, I'm a big fan of his tracks
Paul Van Dyk, after so many years!
Matt Darey, that brings me way back. He also did a great classics set
Thrillseekers
Cosmic Gate
That being said, despite the 20H that were effectively missing, it would have still been a stellar event, but there were more issues:
As I just learned the day after getting home, the city council, on top of putting heavy schedule and sound restrictions on the event, also apparently put heavy security restrictions, to the point that they went overboard with security and denied me use of my led outfit during the last 3 days of the event "for security reasons"
the security was not correctly prioritizing their threats (to be fair, that's actually hard to do, and even with proper training, not everyone does a great job making the right calls), and convinced themselves that the wires in my outfit could be used to injure others, when shoe laces would honestly do the same.
the "you must buy our overpriced bottled water, which we'll sell you without bottle caps". Please just charge what you need to charge on the tickets and let people hydrate as they need to. If only one person ends up in the hospital or worse due to dehydration, that is not worth it. Insomniac got the clue, Lumi not yet.
The security company they used freaked out on day #2 when a different guy at the entrance saw my light outfit and the wires that it needs to run. In his head wires = bad = terrorist = fear. He actually said he worried about ISIS. OMG... It was downhill from there, people trying to justify the decision all the way where they agreed that I wasn't a risk, but someone could rip out the wires from my outfit and use them to strangle someone else, or something. This is the saddest I've ever heard, especially because the event security was so sad to start with. For their own sake, I'm not going to reveal the huge security holes I found when I got annoyed at this (I have security training) but generally the perimeter was a joke. You could literally smuggle anything you wanted in, including weapons. The thing is that people didn't do it because they were happy to pay for the event, like I was, and honestly trance events is not really where you find weapons or fights to start with.
there were so many fences you could smuggle anything through. Thankfully it was only water and ice cream
The only thing that kept us safe was that people came to have a good time, not to cause trouble (except maybe a handful of people who got a bit too drunk and became mean drunks), and honestly they should focus on that.
Thankfully, and that's their biggest failure, their biggest external "threat" was really people trying to smuggle water in, or would you believe it, bottle caps (holland believes bottles with bottlecaps can be used as weapons).
this did his best to beat the system and brought his own resealable bottle cap
While I expect any festival to screen for weapons, even if this one had such a porous perimeter, the empty bottle and bottle cap stuff was just sad (food was of course also forbidden, but that's a bit more typical). The food options inside were pretty poor, but on the plus side, they allowed you to leave the event to buy food outside if you wanted to:
people stood in line for 30 to 60mn on the first day to buy fake money
which actually got devalued and of course becomes worthless at the end of the event
and then you can spend it on limited food options
Can't say I was a fan of this. They should allow contactless payment (phone or credit card) which is almost as fast and bypasses this silly token system, at least in addition to tokens. Inside they had 30-60mn lines at the token counters and no lines at the food/drink booths (2022 update: this was fixed, tokens are gone, thank you).
Usually I don't rant like this, but between forcing people to pay almost $5 per 0.5L of water (make money on the ticket, not on water that creates so much plastic waste and kills our oceans), and banning my outfit on day 2 after all the trouble I went through to bring it in across the world, I was not a happy camper. That said, I had a few pictures from day #1 before I was considered such a risk, along with some of my friends from the San Francisco area (who were then all very disappointed to learn that luminosity banned my outfit on the next days):
Ok, now that it's off my chest, back to the event. Despite the serious neutering that happened due to the city sound curfew, Lumi is still an event that's one of a kind. The sheer amount of DJs and producers that attended, was beyond impressive. To their credit, they also allow you to stand almost next to the DJ playing or behind him/her while he's playing and take great shots of the crowd. This is not something you can expect just about anywhere else. And on top of that, many DJs were more than happy to talk with their fans and pose for pictures (some were understandably harder to approach than others).
also I saw people just climbing speakers and dancing on top when at the average festival, they'd be taken out within less than 1mn. I can actually found that refreshing :)
no backstage pass required, I was just able to walk here
Let's get back to the event, which was otherwise quite good despite the effective 20H+ missing compared to previous years.
For starters, we were lucky with the weather, it was unseasonably warm, even borderline too warm on saturday (some other years, they had rain and most of the event is uncovered).
you may notice the big dune that you'll find all the way around the Netherlands as a shield for the country that is partially under sea level, the Dutch are the world specialists on dunes and levees
the event was by the beach, and there was a fair amount of wind most days
They had 4 stages, 2 big one outdoors and 2 smaller ones indoors. Some days only had 3 stages running, other days, 4. Interestingly while the schedule changed quite a bit during the event, saturday and sunday had an extra unannounced stage, and when Solarstone was playing allegedly until midnight on friday, he didn't stop and no one kicked him out either :)
Anyway, here are pictures from Day 1:
my first time seeing Will Atkinson. Some DJs don't travel to the US
4 Strings
haha, climb on top of speakers, no one cares :)
sun took forever to set, it was only dark for 15mn before the 'day' was over
sucks to be the laser guy when you can only use the lasers for such a short portion of the event
Video of Day #1:
This brings us to Day #2. That day John Askew played a 9H OTC set. I was joking that he was wearing a "weekend at bernie's" shirt just in case they had to prop him up, but he didn't need that, he just kept on going, awesome stamina:
Markus Schultz
Gareth Emery
finally some darkness
Solarstone finished the evening
He finished past the event closing time, and no one complained :)
well said
Video of Day #2:
Saturday was Day #3, the warmest day of the festival:
they added some big fans, as indoors was unbearably hot
they had water cannons to make the temperature easier to bear
next was PvD
Video of Day #3:
Sunday was Day #4 and the last day:
I ran into Matt Darey, awesome. I thanked him for his stellar Gamemaster mix
Got to chat with goldenscan before their classics set, which was quite enjoyable
thrillseekers did another set, he sure worked a lot and I sure didn't mind :)
Matt Darey took the classics deck and did a very enjoyable set too
Judge Jules
Cosmic Gate
Ferry Corsten was next
Video of Day #4:
And that was it for Luminosity, it ended at 23:00 on the 4th day (probably another city curfew).
A few extra pictures. One plus of the festival is that you get sunsets. Day #2:
As for outfits, well, they weren't many. Outside of how I was treated, and the fact that most of the festival is during daylight hours (sunset was at 22:30), looks like Europeans aren't into fancy outfits as much in the US. Never mind totem poles, not seen a single one (although to be fair I have mixed feelings about totem poles as they totally block the view of the stage). That said there were at least some fun T-shirts:
Should you go? Would I go Back?
LBF, otherwise known as Lumi may not be the most flashy festival, but it's simply the best festival in the world for trance lovers, no discussion there. Even that challenging year with cuts in the schedule and heavy sound restrictions, where else do you get 4 stages of trance for 4 days? And where else do you get to see so many trance artists who often don't make the cut for mainstage at bigger events? The answer is simply: nowhere. LBF is where it's at!
Is it worth flying across the world for? If you are a true trance lover, this is the place!
Conclusions
So that was that, with the security stuff that happened, sadly it was a bittersweet experience, but outside of these unnecessary actions, it was enjoyable and definitely interesting to experience. Now, if they can just stop the bottled water thing, reconsider their real security threats (if any), and fix the very damaging curfew from the city, hopefully next year will be better again.
Lumi is definitely a event on its own: for the trance fans by the trance fans. The access you get to DJs, I have found nowhere else and I can only say thank you for that alone. Thanks to all the DJs/artists who came, and everyone who supported them and made the event happen.
After a bit of time in Amsterdam, we went to Zandvoort, which is definitely not a place you'd fly across the world to go visit, but it's close to where Luminosity was, so that's why we slept a few days there. Because Luminosity started later than planned, we had time in the mornings and early afternoon to go around the nearby towns:
The 2nd day we biked to Harleem which is not too close but we had electric bikes, so that made things easier:
We went to the Corrie ten Boom house/museum, but unfortunately someone screwed up and our tour guide was never able to get in with us, so he gave his tour from the outside. It's a house that hosted a few jews during the war in a secret hiding place, until they were eventually turned in:
We went to the Corrie ten Boom
The Haarlem big church is magestic, even if the protestants gutted most fo the catholic stuff that used to be inside:
Mozart played on this organ
The catholics ended up rebuilding a new church slightly out of town:
interesting that they put a walkeay on top, nice for tourists
we took the stairs to the top
Nice views of town:
Haarlem had multiple museums. We didn't have time for all, but the Frans Hals Museum was the main one, so we checked that one out:
We then went to see the Adriaan Windmill which had nice guided tours:
the bridge closed as we were arriving, but it was pretty fast
the blades have sails you can retract when you have too much wind
The next day, we stayed locally in Zaandvoort and looked at its 2 small museums:
The last day, we went to a local park that houses a wild deer population:
From there, we went to a nearby town with a science museum that houses the biggest steam engine ever built and that was used to dry out a huge lake:
normally they used windmills for the job, but this area was too big
a big portion of holland was reclaimed from the sea
this was the lake which was emptied in 3 years of pumping
We took a morning train to Amsterdam, which was supposed to be 3h30
when the train could, it went at good pace
During the train ride, I played the Anne Frank ticket game, you have to connect before 09:00 and get out of the virtual line as soon after 09:00 as you can. I took 6 browsers and was able to time it ok on one of them and got tickets for that afternoon after other museums were closed. To be honest, I don't think the visit is worth it but Jennifer read what she wrote and was happy to see it:
The train arrived late, but we still had a few hours to spend in Amsterdam that afternoon.
After that, we went to the New Church, which was gutted because it was catholic and looked too nice. Now, it's used as a museum to show pictures:
We then had to leave to get to Anne Frank House for our timed tour which sure was hard to get. That was one no pictures place, likely mostly to keep things moving. Again, Jennifer was happy to see it, but I'd say it's fine to skip if you can't get tickets, honestly you're mostly just looking at an empty house with a few plaques you can read on the internet:
locations of jews
secret door to the other building that hid Anne Frank and her peers
The days being long, we had more time to go around:
We then went to the Hemp an Hash museum, which was quite informative:
Hemp can be used to create materials in more sustainable ways than plastic
it's actually illegal to grow pot in Holland but the museum has a special allowance
well said
OMG, pretty sad misinformation, well done federal government
By then, the day was finally ending past 22:00:
Day 2: Museums, canal cruise
We went to the museum district, and started with the Van Gogh Museum for our timed tour at 09:00
nice way for a teacher to share knowledge with her class
Van Gogh wrote many letters to his bother Teo
Next, was the excellent Rijks Museum that we should have spent more than 3H at:
Napoleon was the King of Holland for a while
We then left the Rijks Museum, we did the modern art Stedelijk Museum, which honestly wasn't worth as much time in comparison. We should have allocated more time at the Rijks Museum, sadly Rick Steve's book which missed a lot of newer attractions, also failed to recommend time for each of those museums:
We still had some time for the nearby Banksy Museum, which was actually better than Stedelijk for us:
Again, long days, so after dinner, we had time for a canal cruise 20:30 with plenty of daylight left:
Day 3: Naval/Science Museums and more
a few bikes around the train station :)
We biked to the naval museum:
royal parade boat
pretty
The Dutch were the top map makers at that time in history:
Next was the science museum next door, great views from its patio:
We spent quite a bit of time at the science museum, and then biked to the rembrandt house:
We then had to run out just in case to get to the Google Amsterdam Office south of the city before they closed at 18:00:
we took the fast subway there
nice views from the top
We then came back to town to have dinner with two of our cousins:
But the super long days still weren't over, so more museums:
Day 4: Half Day in Amsterdam
We started with the museum of the canals, a very good museum that shows how Amsterdam grew:
the entire city is on top of piloti to reach the stable layer below
Next door was Cromhout House which I went to by mistake as the 2 buildings were too close:
We came back 4 days later from Zandvoort for 2 more half days before flying home. We took our same rental bikes and went to north amsterdam via the free ferry:
we went to the film institute, an interesting building, but probably a so-so attraction
The 'this is holland' show next door was pretty good
And then we went to the observation tower
nice view from the top
a few more bikes
After those 3 attractions, Jennifer went to rest, and I went to bike across town to the Heineken Museum, which was a fun visit, even for me who don't like beer:
cannabis condom? Why not? :)
After the museum, another bike trip across town:
I then went to check out 2 more churches, the old church (church of our lady) and the catholic church hidden in a house when they were forbidden:
Red light district museum was an interesting stop:
Our 2nd hotel was very nice and close to the main station, very nice decors:
Day 6: Hermitage Museum
Day 6 was our 4th half day (we really had 4 days total in Amsterdam), and we went to check out the Hermitage Museum for our last hours before going to the airport:
the winning shot of the trip
Hermitage museum is quite big and worth a good 3H if you have time
It was then time to go to the Amsterdam airport for a flight home:
By sheer luck, I was in Paris a few days at the same time that the Bourget Air Show. This also happened in 2005, and I went there for a day then.
This time, I went during professional days, which meant fewer crowds (good), but a much lesser airshow (not as great, but oh well):
the line to get in was thankfully fast as everyone was pre-paid
I then went to see expo halls:
chinese jet
cool aircraft using helium for lift and hydrogen for propulsion
NGF concept
VTOL aircraft:
quadplane (multirotor for takeoff and conversion to plane in flight)
another concept
Drones:
tethered drone with unlimited runtime
It was air and space:
A fair amount of planes outside too:
next generation fighter
I went back to see the old planes that are there all year:
747 2nd floor
So, there was a small airshow, I only watched part of it given limited time and that it was a bit weak. I heard it was better during the weekend when the general public was allowed. I somehow made a few wrong turns and ended up at the Airbus private viewing lounge:
And that was it for the Bourget expo. I didn't quite have the time to see everything in one day, but saw most of it, worth the visit given that I was already there :)
Thankfully, we were able to attend this birthday. It wasn't the exact date, but it was a bit later, matching other travels and offering better weather in June:
π
2019-06-18 01:01
in France, Ntrips, Paris, Trips
Since we were going for my Dad's birthday during a nicer season than the usual Xmas, we got to enjoy Paris with nicer weather.
We got to enjoy the SFO Polaris Lounge and its sit down restaurant, which turns out to be fancier looking than it actually was, and had a good 45mn wait to get in. Still, we went to check it out for fun :)
I got the Polaris Burger
Here's a quick overview of where we went:
Once in Paris, we went to check out Atelier des Lumières, which used an old warehouse to project nice stories. One was about Japan:
The longest display was Van Gogh:
Not too far was cimetary Père Lachaise, the most famous cimetary in France:
Jim Morison
Racine
La fontaine
Oscar Wilde
crematorium
Then, we went to the Buttes Chaumont Park, where I went a few times as a small kid:
While most people go to Santa Cruz (hwy 17) or Half Moon Bay (hwy 92), I figured it would be fun to spend a day at the beach for Jennifer who loves looking at tidepool, and me who doesn't a fun curvy road to get there :)
We got to skyline towards Alice's Restaurant, and then 84/pescadero to Hwy 1, a fun road. We ended up by the best BBQ restaurant on Hwy1, which is to say that it was ok and had no competition :)
Then we went to the beach for a few trails and looked for tide pools:
oister catcher
We then drove up the coast in look for other beaches:
interesting rocks
After around 5H at the beach, it was time to drive home. pescadero, skyline, pagemill. Nice roads. Jennifer was a good sport given that she doesn't much enjoy twisty road driving :)
Johannes nicely invited me for a hike around the hills. We didn't quite have the time to make it up to the top of Black Mountain before running out of daylight, but we still went pretty high and had a good view before having to turn back
