Thirst

I spent a thoroughly miserable few hours at the Kama Love Music Festival in Beijing yesterday, and was forced to give up on the event and leave before my beloved Cowboy Junkies came on. 'Disappointment' doesn't really begin to cover it.

There were many reasons why the event sucked so mightily - reasons I should probably return to in a fuller post later this week - but the main reason I was obliged to quit was.... THERE WAS NO WATER ON SALE at the venue. Are you fucking kidding me?! That would be illegal in any sensible country.

No, NO WATER. Only overpriced paper cups of chemical-rich 'orange squash' and sickly sweet lu cha. (No beer, either. It appears they'd planned to have a large bar area, but the city authorities refused to allow alcohol sales.)

There was a hot, bright sun (temperatures nudging up above 30 C), and a scouring wind. Very little shade. And the venue had become a complete dustbowl long before the event even started, so our throats were being further rasped by all the grit in the air.

I'm prone to sweating rather profusely at the best of times. Ailing with a tummy bug, and coming off a hideous insomniac episode that had limited me to one or two hours' sleep the night before, my dehydration problems soon became quite acute.

I tried everything I could think of to get some water (tried to haggle for some with the MIDI Music School guys, who had two cases of bottled water under the trestle table in their stall, but were hogging it all for themselves): no joy. Eventually, one of the flea market stallholders took pity on me and gave me (gave me) one of his bottles of water. I also shelled out a couple of times for cups of (extremely watery) "lemonade" from the Taiwanese shaved ice desserts stall. That at least kept me conscious for a few hours, but it wasn't nearly enough to keep me healthy and I soon had a raging headache.

I noticed large numbers of people leaving only a couple of hours into the event. (There was supposedly no readmission - although the security guys didn't look like they really cared very much; and the turnout was so low, it really wouldn't have made a lot of sense to refuse re-entry to people with torn tickets. Maybe I should have taken a chance on that??)  Shortly before 5pm, I left as well.

I drank FOUR 500ml bottles of water on the hour-long walk down to my 'local', 12 Square Metres. By the time the Cowboy Junkies were supposed to have been coming on stage, another hour or so on from that, I had guzzled another two pints of water and 2 or 3 icy draught Kronenbourgs. I was just starting to feel modestly OK again. 

But it was a further two hours before I needed a piss.