Rock En Seine Paris France

In Paris, Aaron and I went to this giant rock festival called Rock en Seine, which was held in a suburb of Paris accessible by the subway, or by a taxi. It was miles outside of the downtown area and would be holding a large outdoor music festival with probably 40-50,000 ticket holders. It seems like both the planners and the city of Paris did a shit job preparing for this huge musical event. Here are some examples of why Paris needs to remove their head from their ass if they plan to have a successful outdoor music festival again:

1. They allowed camping in a certain area, I am estimating it held around 1250 or more tents, and 2 people per tent. For this amount of people they had roughly 4-5 outhouses! Needless to say things got nasty by halfway through the FIRST DAY.
2. The area where the campers had to set up their tents was really tight with no spacing between the lots. This did not really allow the campers to fasten guy lines on their tents, and caused others to have to move to other areas if their tents were too big.
3. They had a strict curfew of the camping area, but had loud music blasting until about 4 am. To make matters worse it was one of the worst DJs I have heard.
4. The park decided that it would be a wise idea to cut the grass along the fence of the camping area at around 6am the first morning of camping – 2 reasons this was funny; it woke everyone up, and shot rocks at the campers who were lucky enough to be along the fence
5. In Paris public transportation only runs until about midnight, the show would end around 11:30 pm and was about a 15 minute walk to the closest subway station. If the ticketholders were lucky they could have gotten one of two trains… I am guessing there were around 25,000 people who would need to ride these 2 trains, or the remaining few buses of the night.
6. The local taxi cabs were not alerted of this event and there were thousands of people waiting for the cabs, and that is if they were lucky enough to be able to call these taxis.
7. Luckily Paris’s finest were on the scene and of no help to the people waiting for the cabs

Musically the festival was pretty awesome, Morissey, Radiohead, beck, DJ Shadow, etc. It was a damn good show if you discount all the bullshit that was the fault of the city or the festival planners. Camping at the event was pretty interesting and we met some real crazy/amazing people from southern France.

In summary, Paris, you held one hell of an event and in my opinion you “screwed the pooch” when it came to ensuring that people could easily get to and from Rock En Seine.