Marc's Blog: festivals - Parookaville in Weeze, Germany

2024/07/22 Parookaville in Weeze, Germany

π 2024-07-22 01:01 in Clubbing, Festivals

I believe Parookaville is the biggest EDM festival in Geramny. From the website and FB group, it looked like the festival was mostly for Germans, but most things were also in english. The one thing that was not was the main FB group, which included non trivial questions to join, that were in german only.

Anyway, about the festival:

500E per person for 3 day VIP is not cheap but given the size of the festival, not outlandish either.

A good amount of stages with varied EDM, even if it was a bit light on trance overall (but had more than tomorrowland that had close to none)

It was great to see some DJs I had never seen before, including Scooter. I also enjoyed Drum and Bass and Bass played in cloud factory

The stage production level was good, not EDC level, but better than most festivals

It was somewhat big to walk from one side to the other (and the 2 biggest stages were opposite corners), that said, not a bad thing

Lots of food options, but useless to me since I do everything I can to avoid buying and using fake money. Their loss.

Some other attractions, including a few rides

It rained pretty hard for 1-2H one day. This can happen, that location is not immune to rain.

Things I didn't like as much:

The required personalization and ID check with full intrusive info all the way to birthday and all the stuff that can be used for ID theft, is borderline unacceptable. I bought 2 tickets separately from the official site, named them to me, and they refused to give me the 2nd wristband and made us stand in a very slow and stupid line to "fix" the 2nd ticket, and they even may us pay for the privilege. Honestly, I was pretty pissed, one hour lost for nothing, missed DJs I wanted to see and in exchange they forced us to give private information they have no business having. I realize tomorrowland is just as bad, but that does not mean it's ok.

Festival is very tricky to get in and out due to active airport, but not having shuttles and bikes enter the north of the airport feels like a big mistake. They make everyone, even bikes, enter the south side, and then wait in a line for shuttles to drive all the way around the airport (and that's slow). The offsite parking shuttles were stuck in long lines of cars. When I considered camping, people on the FB group told me they got stuck in 6H lines to get in. Honestly, they should reward people biking in and taking shuttles by having them enter from the north side (but that entrance is for staff only), while everyone else driving in enters from the south side and create a traffic jam that doesn't affect people using alternate way of getting in to relieve congestion.

Mainstage was a death trap when it was full, with cops preventing you from leaving because it was the wrong exit, despite scary overcrowding

VIP felt barely worth it. There was no VIP wristband help when they denied me entry due to their personalization requirement, and the mainstage VIP is all the way on the left, very far away from the entrance, and near impossible to reach or leave from when mainstage is full.

I missed fireworks out of fear of being stuck in a 1h+ line for the shuttle back to our bikes (see above how they should allow bikes to come in from the north). That sucked as they looked good, but the line after that would have been massive.

Security was nice and chill, that was appreciated. It was however questionable to have rules like "no camelbacks" or "no bottles of any kind, even plastic, unless it's the exact 0.5l plastic foldable kind that we sell". It was very nice and the right thing to do to offer free water stations, but filling those small and fragile containers took a while, and many ended up breaking and leaking. Unfortunately I found out too late and one leaked in my backpack later, and shorted a $3000 laptop :( Parookaville, please drop this silly rule, allow refillable soft plastic and camelbacks, they are not a treat (unless hard plastic and glass).

Stupid plastic money that even got devaluated so the prices didn't match what I tried to pay when I was donated plastic chips. By devaluated, I mean that someone gave me some of their pastic money to say thanks for my LED outfit, and when I went to buy a drink, I was told the price on the board was wrong, and it was now double. WTF?

They proudly announced that their fake useless money will be digital next year. Great news I guess? To me it's just another festival trying to be a bank and credit card company when there are already perfectly good, working, tested, and safe credit cards.

Grounds

This will give an idea of what's going on with regard to airport location and shuttles. Obviously not impacting actual traffic to the airport for the few daily flights from ryanair, is also making everything more complex. Note that the track shows entering by bike, cars would get in another way. I make no claims that this is an easy location to work with, but I'm hopeful it's possible to segregate shuttles and bikes from cars in line for parking. Germany is a green country afterall, they should encourage this :)

Since I did some research and read pretty terrible things about being stuck in traffic and parking lots trying to drive in and out daily. So, I figured let's drive to the nearest shuttle or bus station and get in that way, but I unfortunately found out after research on the FB group, that the shuttles were kind of a mess too, and the ones to offsite parking lots would and did get stuck in the same traffic jam than cars trying to get in. That was disappointing news (people talked being stuck 2H in a parking lot trying to get out and barely moving towards the exit road).
So I briefly considered camping to avoid the daily commute, but then I also read people literally saying they were stuck up to 6H in a pretty terrible line towards the camping grounds and saying how ridiculous that was too.
So in the end, I opted for finding accomodations not too far, and biking in, which worked as a hybrid of driving the bikes (big Dutch bikes that so barely fit in the SUV) to a place we could park and biking the rest in.

basic accodomations in Holland in a campground

very very tight fit

biking from Holland to Germany

then biking towards the airport and the bike parking lot

sadly the bike parking lot was nowhere close to the read entrance and needed yet another shuttle with a not super short line

Biking helped getting in and out, but because Parookaville did not allow bikes to park close to the real entrance and walk in, it still took quite a while since we were stuck having to take shuttles that took quite a long time. And by that I mean this, especially on the way back:

Because of the long line for shuttles back to the bike, we left a bit early on day 2 and sadly missed some nice fireworks. I wish I could have stayed the last 15mn, but the lines to the mandatory shuttle to get out, would have been way too long:

it did look sweet, bummer!

Anyway, once inside, let's look at the city:

Bill, the city Mayor

nice of them to have water, unfortunate they mandated small and fragile containers

Post Office, cute!

So yeah, the bank you had to stay in line for, and a currency that made no sense so you didn't know how much you were spending:

They had a few performers, that was nice and added to party (few attendees had costumes and did the same, though):

Multiple places to have fun, like EDC:

I'm not sure how the swimming pool worked, you had to bring spare clothes, towel, and everything?

at least one big ride

and some shows

Reminder that we were on airport grounds:

a few ryanair flights every day

Good food options, but given that they refused legal tender, I was unable to try any of them:

Let's look at stages, they were nice:

People

I'll be honest that Parookaville did not have a lot of people with outfits, it's just not the thing people do there, fair enough. I found just a few:

there were picture opportunities

The 3 Festival Days

Day 1

Mainstage looked a bit tomorrowland-like, a bit smaller, and more worryingly all the getting in and out was only from the right side, which was a huge issue if you were on the left in the VIP area and everything was full:

Maddix!

Ray Volpe was fun:

Day1 Summary:

Day 2

It did rain a good amount around sunset:

nice resulting sky, though

Armin was up:

Day2 Summary:

Day 3

Aname!

I was very excited to see Scooter:

the second biggest stage was also very nice

Back indoors to see above and beyond:

and Giuseppe next

And left a bit early at the end of night 3 again for the same reason, to avoid a huge line for the shuttle back to bikes:

missing a few more fireworks in the process

Day3 Summary:

Would I go back? Should You Go?

Ok, so I'm clearly not a local so a EU festival has to be really special for me to want to fly back multiple years in a row. In this case, I didn't feel like this festival was special enough for flying across the world, but if you are in Europe, it is definitely a first rate festival worth visiting. If you area German, or just across the border, then it makes a lot more sense to go.

Thoughts for the festival organizers if they ever read this:

Please fix the shuttles so that people who park offsite, or come from the train station, get a dedicated shuttle route that does not get stuck with cars going to parking lots. Is it even possible for those shuttles to enter directly from the north entrance that is right by the festival, and saves the very long drive all the way around the runway?

Can bikers please be allowed to bike in the north entrance, and bypass the required long shuttle around the runway, that same shuttle that was ultimately the reason why I missed nice fireworks on both nights, to avoid a very very long shuttle line (missed with the kiss and ride folks), to get back to my bike?

More generally, please separate people driving and parking from pepole using shuttles and biking in, to reward people using other modes of transportation.

The fake money, fake bank, staying in line to buy fake money, later return it (making you miss a shorter shuttle line), and all that BS, seriously, must go. I'm not going to keep repeating the same thing forever. They actually proudly announced that the joke looking plastic money was being replaced by [digital pointless fake moneyg/perso/clubbing/post_2024-06-05_The-Issues-with-Festivals-That-Require-Use-of-Fake-Festival-Money.html]. Oh boy, how exciting. So sad that we don't all actually have digital money on all our phones and credit cards. Is it too late to switch?

Mainstage, when full, is kind of a death trap, especially when you are on the VIP side, most opposite from entrance and exit. After paying so much for VIP, being afraid to go there for fear of being stuck and/or having to cut through huge crows to reach it, is not ok.

That episode when I tried to leave mainstage VIP, had 10 minutes of hell cutting through crowds to get to the nearest exit, just to be greated by a row of cops blocking everyone from leaving, not allowing anyone else in, and basically pointlessly keeping us hostage, was beyond words. They kept pointing us to some far exit that was mostly unreachable due to over crowding, and not understanding that keeping us hostage was both unsafe and very uncool. It ended up being so bad with the crowds about to rush the cops to get out, that they eventually started getting worried and let us out. They were never aggressive, but this was totally pointless and kind of unsafe. I really hope they work out this mainstage access thing, it's not a good situation for a festival that big.

Forcing each ticket to be personalized to each person, taking personal information that they cannot be trusted to keep safe and is probably causing GDPR issues, as a required condition of entry, is not ok. Then forcing people to stay in a low slow line to fix a name (in my case I had my name on both tickets, and they refused to give me the 2nd one), and then to add insult to injury, charging a fee, any fee, to fix the name on the 2nd wristband??? Why, oh why? This really had an unpleasant "papieren bitte" feel to it :-/ (and cost me 1h of delayed entry on the first day as well as missing the first DJ I wanted to see)

The restrictions on preventing empty camelbacks, which are so useful at festivals, and allowed absolutely at every other festival I've been to, really should go. Those required 0.5l soft water pouches are crap, mine broke, and one I stupidly used later and it leaked on my laptop, killing the motherboard (yes, my fault, but just to say they leak and they are crap)

But things that went right:

All the staff was pleasant and helpful. They all spoke enough english to help.

Security was nice and reasonable, that was appreciated.

Food options looked good even if I was unable to try them since they used fake money I was not going to buy.

There was a good amount of other entertainment in the city, which was nice. That whole city feel was indeed very nice.

The stage variety and production level were very good

Random thoughts that may help you choose:

If you're German and like EDM, it's a no brainer :)

If you're within Europe during that 3 day weekend, it is a premium festival worth considering

There was some trance, not every day, but enough for me to be happy :)

If you plan carefully, it's easier to get in and out than tomorrowland (but beware of parking lots inside that could take 1h or more to get out as per what I read online)

If you wanted to go to Tomorrowland but can't, Parookaville is honestly not a far second. While it has a few things to work out with crowd flows for mainstage and shuttles mixing with cars, and it is a little bit smaller in footprint and number of stages, it's a comparable festival otherwise and worth considering.