Yes, we’re back from the Hip Hop Kemp we went to last weekend. I’m writing about it kind of late because I had to get some rest after 4 exhausting days!

We drove 12 hours to get to Hradec Kralove, in Czech Republic. The scenery is incredible! Believe it or not, but I’ve seen some amazing landscapes in the Czech Republic. I imagined it would be a gray country (because of the former communist era) but I found out that there’s more that meets the eye over there.

The story:

As I understood from somebody from the Kemp, the hip hop festival was organized onto a former military airport, thus the huge space. There were lots of tents. Everywhere you looked around there were tents. Lots of people, mostly from Slovakia and the Czech Republic. But there were also lots of Germans, France was represented by some hip hop lovers and of course, Romania represented by a bunch of people, including me!

The festival was pretty well organized although I’ve seen better programming! We had a hard time in finding the place, there were not so many street pointers to guide us to the camp site. I found it pretty strange that the security people had no skills in a foreign language. No English, no Spanish, no German! Most of them know only their native language which is not cool at all. I tried to talk to them as little as possible.

We camped in the VIP section which was very well guarded. We liked that because many people were drunk and I feared about my own security. I guess it’s normal, I’m not used to hang around drunk people all day long! The showers were so cool! You had to buy a coin (it cost 20 Czech corona, about one euro) and you had to put that coin in the shower machine. There was a timer which gave you 5 minutes to wash up pretty well. I loved it! I guess everyone loves it because after a party night, a nice warm shower was fantastic.

The freakish weather gave us a hard time. Fortunately, we had good tents and very warm sleeping bags so we felt no cold during the sleeping time.

Unfortunately, some bands some bands had a hard time in arriving at the festival. We were browned off to see that Army of the Pharaohs and Pharoahe Monch were not going to perform at the Hip Hop Kemp! At least we got to see Zion I, Looptroop Rockers, the Navigators, Emdee and The Roots.

The funny thing was that the foreign bands who performed on stage were speaking English and many of the people from the audience were from Czech Rep. and Slovakia, most of them no knowing English. It was pretty funny to see how the artists tried to make some noise when most of the audience had no clue about what the guy on stage was saying! I mean, you listen to Hip Hop music (including international artists who rap only in English) but you have no clue about what are they saying?! Come on!

Anyway, we also enjoyed the feminine Hip Hop, DJ’s were amazing and the beat box was very cool! We also saw some break dance, football on slippery surface, bungee jumping, basketball contests and other contests organized by Gambrinus, a beer label, very popular over there and also a very good beer!

One of the most interesting thins about the camping place were the graffiti walls! See some examples in the photos below.

The Photo gallery: <—click to see more photos