Hohaiyan 海洋音樂祭

So the Hohaiyan Rock Festival last weekend was more about the carnivalesque atmosphere than the music. Not that I didn't see this coming, but wow was it a crowd. The one-and-a-half hour train ride to Fulong Beach was so sweaty and sardine-packed that my fingers began to wrinkle from the moist air. Sauna, anyone?

Just as Pots Weekly and Freddy Lin (organizer of the more independent Formoz Rock Festival) predicted, Hohaiyan has become jarringly over-commercialized since 7-11 picked up sponsorship (and 7-11 here is not the suburban podunk shambles as it is in the States; it's obiquitous to the degree of elevating Taiwan's convenience store concentration to the world's highest). I love 7-11 and all, but I really don't need them blaring S.H.E. music videos and commercial jingles at my supposedly-grassroot music festivals.

So my high school buddies and I were so happy to be liberated from the sardine train that we ran straight for the beaches and jumped into the ocean (clothes and all) right after we got there. We would've died otherwise. Though walking around in wet, sandy boxers for the remainder of the day was not such a pleasant experience.

As the sun began to set, we started heading towards the stage and choosing camp-out spots on the beach. We dug little trenches in the sand and made makeshift couches and fell asleep in them reading, chatting and drinking beer until the night began to set. Honestly made the whole ordeal entirely worthwhile.

Conclusion: Hohaiyan is good as a once-in-a-lifetime thing, even just as a study in Taiwan's burgeoning youth counter-culture (they call the current generation 七年級生s -- born into the 80s, averse to soul-killing office work, lovers of graphic design and ridiculously torn jeans, and most of all disgusted by their parents' living-is-for-working philosophy). In the end, though, I still much prefer the hangout atmosphere of live-house bar performances.

I'm close to finishing my first travel story for the internship. It looks like the final magazine version will be kinda depersonalized and truncated, but I'll upload it anyway when it's ready.