Burning Man, day 2 (Shade construction, exploration, pirate ships and BRC French Quarter)

Waking up was a fun moment, because there's nothing like unzipping your English-festival tent and you're used to seeing mud, grass and 10,000 other tents and the far off sound of the slamming door of the toilets and getting a load of blue sky and desert.

Me and Lucas were the lucky ones - we put our tent up by our car so that we'd not get the full brunt of the morning sun and it worked well enough. Espen and Dave on the other hand were not so lucky! After a short period of feeling a bit like , argh, how are we going to rearrange this shit. We'd also been asked to move Dave's car and some tent as well so we were feeling a bit confused.
Things started to feel awesome as soon as we went on a little mission to get ice for our cooler. I finally had a cause to wear my huge floppy sunhat. I was also eminently glad that I brought my silky dressing gown as it was really helpful to keep the sun off me generally. It was pretty awesome taking Dave and Espen down to the Esplanade as they hadn't seen it at all yet, when I'd seen it the previous night by bike. It looks insanely different in the daytime, and the first time it was virtually unrecognizable to me.

On the way to the ice tent (there's two things you can buy at Burning Man - Coffee, at centre camp, which I never bothered with, and ice!) some good things happened - we saw some great art (huge teacup with WORLD'S BEST GRANDMA on it) including the Pier which was a massive art project I donated to and was interested in following which was a group of people from Reno who spent ages working on. The Pier was super cool - it looked like the photo below, and had ocean noises, and a 'bait shop' which people enjoyed mucking around with, with a book where you could write stuff. At night, you could go up and sit and dangle your legs off the end. When we were there, at about 1pm the crowd on the pier was amused by a bloke pretending to swim below.
"How's the water?"
"Fuckin HOT!!!"

So we're making our way to 3:00 to find Arctica where the ice is, and finding the BRC Lemonade stand by mistake playing ridiculous dubstep. It's a beautiful thing, if you can imagine being so parched and hot and adapting to this temperature, then suddenly getting a pint (I had my pint glass from Latitude as my cup for the week) of gorgeously ice-cold perfectly tart lemonade. It was divine. I was practically jumping up and down on the spot. From there we asked for some directions and eventually found Arctica.

We queued up and talked with this awesome guy from Eastern Europe for a while with an amazing half-finished tattoo, and I remember it being really good fun, as I find queuing at Burning Man isn't really like queuing at all, it's just like hanging out I swear, way more than Glastonbury. At Glastonbury if you're queuing for the loo or the atm or the bar or whatever, chances are you will have a nice chat, but at Burning Man it's just even nicer, if you can believe. Lucas fetched the ice, and we all rejoiced at carrying it back. Espen in particular held it on his shoulder, and it was melting down his back and soaking his shirt and he was just going 'Ahhhh'. Ice is pretty amazing in the desert.

Here we are with some ice. You cannot see my face at all because I have a dust mask all the way up to under my eyeballs because the sand played havoc with my nose and was too dry so by keeping the mask up it made it a bit more bearable and moist.

We also got misted by some lovely guys who had lavender-scented mist - protip at burning man is if someone says "Misting?" you go "yes" and "please do my back as well". It's awesome. Honestly, you could probably jump into a pool of water and get drenched head to toe out there, and quite reasonably you'd be dry within 10 - 15 minutes I'd estimate. It never lasts.
Getting back to camp I think we basically decided that we knew how we were going to do the shade, so invigorated by the promise of eventually-cold beer when we were done (ice in the cooler, beer in the cooler), we set to work setting up a shelter so that we wouldn't bake in the nighttime. Eventually, after running around a little bit, and checking with some people, and the other people, and everything, we decided to use a huge white schoolbus as one strut of our support, and me and Lucas's rental as the other. The schoolbus was so high, we decided to just pull the tarp down in a diagnonal slant and tie it down using bungee cords and ... winchy... orange.. rope things that I don't know the name of.

Espen managed to climb up onto this fucking schoolbus in the middle of the hottest part of the day and was up there for a good 40 minutes securing shit, while we all ran around like idiots trying to stop the tarp from blowing away, grabbing onto flapping corners, and when when it was done we were all so fucking pleased with ourselves, even though we only used about half of the epic Home Depot shopping trip, and NO POLES after all that. It still worked. We had our little space. Set up Dave's awesome camping chairs, cooler in the middle, some LED fairy lights and Solar light sticks, finger lights velcroed onto guy ropes and off bungee chords, and we were good and cozy. (By the end of the week, by our drunken shenanigans or costume-encorportation, we had NO lights left. WHERE IS MY TORCH WHERE IS MY EL WIRE fuck it i'll just take this)

And then it was time for some beer and some food and some fun! Eventually me and Lucas decided to head out on our bikes and see what the Playa looks like in the daytime, which entailed us having a bit of a stop by Centre Camp, and also going on a huge ass swing where some random stranger started pushing us while I had a beer in one hand and my arm around Lucas with the other so I was screaming a lot. There was a tight-rope walking game and we watched someone fall quite hideously on his crotch wearing a sarong and nothing else (not even underwear) which looked painful but as we'd been goading on the punters for 30 minutes drinking beer we decided to have a chat with this bloke.

He said we should go to the Mardi Gra night at the French Quarter over on 7:30, so we returned to camp with this news and as a result, for our group that night out was kind of epic because we all decided to head out and explore but had a clear destination in mind. Which we reached about an hour before dawn as it turned out because wow you do get distracted on your way somewhere!

Here we are all ready to ROCK - Lucas, Me, Espen

We walked down and popped into this bike-bar themed place where Lucas got his shots on with some Belgium guy and I had a really nice heart to heart with a leather-wearing gentleman in his 50s I'd reckon and his wife. Also, shots of rum are disgusting. We headed on, and saw the Wheel of Fortune (Burning Man style). Not sure I'd want to play that, and then saw something that was basically LOOK FIRE OVER THERE QUICKLY FIRE IS AWESOME LET'S GO!

Biker bar of the many shots and that Belgian guy

This thing was awesome

It was insane, this kind of helix-shaped mini-rollarcoaster style art piece that had flames running around it, surrounded by people. Then we spot the Pirate Ship - one of the many boat/nautical themed art cars which drive around the Playa - and decide well, hell let's get on. We clamber up - I'm in my gold bridesmaid dress with opera gloves and 6 or 7 fibre optic glowies braided into my up-do so this was a little challenging - and got a very good seat swinging our legs looking out on the Playa.

Our sweet ride around the Playa on Tuesday night

Took ages to get going, a lot of riding on art cars is just sitting and waiting, to be honest, but it was fun being up there, meeting a girl who lives in London - in PADDINGTON (10 minute drive from my house) - and then finally the car driving around. We jumped off in the middle of the Playa and by now our booze supplies were getting quite dangerously low. I.e, nothing. We needed booze, damnit. I think it was 2:30am by this point.

We ended up spotting ANOTHER art car and rushing over to that, because it was a fucking church on wheels and even though it wasn't planning on driving, inside I sat down and had a really awesome chat with a guy who had, I think, quite weird body mods, if I recall correctly. He started chatting to me first.
"Hi there, how are you?"
"I'm brilliant!"
"Hi brilliant, I'm Dave"

Me walking in

It was quite a nice moment anyway. And inside it was all furry and cozy as the walls were lined with felt and it was pretty chilly out there on the Playa without a beer jacket on. Places that giveaway booze are less easy to find at night so it's better to overestimate the amount to bring, and then you can always give it away, but this wasn't something we learned.

So we finally made our way to the deep edges of around 2 O Clock, going past all this crazy art. I really have to mention the Charon styx art piece. It was utterly insane. Look at this video. Like a giant zoetrope that creates the illusion of movement by strobe light with these skeletons.




We also got into giggles going past the 'Period Bar' which was menstrually-themed (lol), a lit-up death star that was driving around the place, a crazy art piece with loads of tripping people lying underneath it, and the Duck Bar where YES BEER HELLO THANK GOD. Although they were serving some kind of malty stouty aley thing I believe so I was glad they only gave me half a cup as I cannot drink that shit in pints and it's not like I can tip it in a bin or on the ground.

We had a good time at the next bar, mostly because my mental image is of Dave, one knee on the ground, seranading the bar keep to get a free drink (some places do this.). He had to do three songs, lol, whereas I got away with just babbling in Irish, and Espen had to tell an embarassing story (Lucas wasn't there as he'd just gone to find a loo). I actually loved this bar - it was huge, with comfy seating, and had a second attached tent and music and everything.

FINALLY we got to the place we intended to get to five hours prior - The French Quarter. It's hard to describe how cool it was just bumping into this place. Given it was 4:30 in the morning, there were still quite a few people here, music, a bar with booze still going and a huge table of crayfish (crawdaddies?) which I was like OKAY YES EATING DIS. Some guy with 1.5 of his eyebrows shaved off - it was for a bet - came over and helped my rather addled self break into the shell and get the meat out. Dude turned out to be a really lovely person actually, called Bowman, and he ran off with Lucas for a bit to show him some thing while me, Dave and Espen sat there rreeling that we were at burning man, taking it in, drinking this AWFUL drink the French Quarter bar gave us which was largely blueberry syrup and vodka I think :barf:

At one point I went off to the loos as at C on every major time intersection there's always loos, so I wandered off by myself up the street. On the way I almost got lassoed by a neon cowboy dancing on top of a huge camp, seriously just managed to jump out the way, what was that about! And went past sooo many cool dancey sound camps which were all a bit empty given the time of night and also that it was only Tuesday.

We finally straggled back to camp, unwillingly but our bodies had had enough. It was dawn when we got there. I slept quite well indeed.
(Photo from Dave, and also Scott London and this Flickr page.)

Day 3