Preface:

    This report was written in a hurry by Pipe/Nature,
    that went to Mekka&Symposium 2000 to demonstrate 
    the SidStation.

    I suffered from a cold all the time, and currently when
    I'm typing this, so my english is probably very strange in
    many places as my head isn't clear enough.. :)

    This party was the best I've ever been too, and it beats
    both TP and TG. The organisation was superb, the compos
    was the best, and there was no PC-lamers with quake around!

    I hope you will enjoy this little report!


Friday:

    At 02:00 me and my friend Daniel from Elektron arrived at the
    the busstation in Gothenburg and found the gate where the bus
    to copenhagen should leave. We where greeted by Merko/Independent
    wich I had been discussing the journey with earlier. The sign
    over the gate flashed "02:25 Köpenhamn", so everything was fine.
    At 02:25 no bus had arrived so we where quite a bit suspicious.
    At about 02:29 or something a bus to Copenhagen drove past us
    on the road outside and went of to copenhagen without stopping.
    We looked at the gate, that still said 02:25 Köpenhamn.
    After a few minutes the text dissapeared, and we tried to call
    the bus company with no result. This was bad.
    We had to take this bus as the other bus from copenhagen where
    waiting explicitly for us. After a while a lady aproached us and
    told us that the bus had departured from another gate without notice!!!
    We were very mad and didn't know what to do, so we was planning
    on going to Elektron to look up another bus. When we passed an infosign
    we noticed a flashing row with the text "02:50 Köpenhamn". We looked
    at the time, and it showed 02:50! We ran around and tried to find the
    correct bus, and finally found it. The bus was full so after a while
    they agreed too get another bus just for the few of us (about 7 people).
    This meant we had a whole bus for ourselfs, and arrived in copenhagen
    abouut one hour later. At that time the bus to Fallingbostel had already
    left.
    We looked at the trainschedule in Copenhagen and found a train to
    Hamburg. Hamburg is pretty close to Fallingbostel we thought, and
    got on that train. So far soo good.
    In Hamburg we noticed it was much harder to get to Fallingbostel
    than we thought. We had to go by three different trains, and the
    complete journey of about maybe 50-100 km should take about 3 hours!
    Ok, we stopped in the first little village and had a decent meal on a
    croatian restaurant, and went on the next train. Stopped in a small
    village with about 200 people, and got on the train to Fallingbostel.

    We arrived at the Fallingbostel "trainstation" at about 16:00
    on friday afternoon, and the first impression was:
    "What the hell?! There can only live about 1000 people here!".
    We were going to try to find the partyplace without a phone,
    and thought that could be hard, but lucky enough someone from
    the organizers had the job of driving people from the
    trainstation to the party, and he found us quite soon..

    When we got to the party we where greeted by Anonym/Padua and KB.
    They were very nice, and they saw too that we could have our
    equipment back up in the organizers room. This was very good as we
    didn't bring any computers so we weren't going to sit at one table
    all the time.

    I was planning to have a little "demo" on the bigscreen while
    we had the SidStatino show, but I didn't have time to finish it
    at home so I did bring the sources to the party in the hope of
    finding a computer to finish it on. As I needed PhxAss, PhxLnk
    and a make-program I first had to download it from the net as
    nobody on the party had these programs. Problem: The whole party
    shared 4 ISDN lines, so the network managed a maximum of about
    0.02 kpbs. Conclusion: I couldn't download the programs, so I
    couldn't finish the demo. No big thing though.

    As we left sweden in a big hurry I forgot my sleepingbag, and my
    friend didn't have one either, so we tried to locate a youth hostel
    or a room to sleep in. We found a youth hostel, but they had no room
    left. Then we found out that Fallingbostel was a village that lived
    on tourists so there was many people that offered rooms for a cheap
    price. The only one we found was an old lady that couldn't speak
    english, and looked very afraid when three youths, one with long black
    hair, one with no hair at all and one more normal asked for a room in
    a very primitive german. No luck there.. =)

    When we got back we talked a bit with KB about the show, and later
    we watched his opening cermony, wich was really professional, but
    a big egotripped.. :) No, really, it was a great show!
    It was nice wathcing the three guys dancing around topless atleast.. :)
    (Editors note: One looked exactly like Jerker Klang).

    About one hour after the show we talked with an excited KB about
    the SidStation show and started with the installation on stage.
    I ran around and took too many pictures on the C64 sceners around
    the partyplace. When the SidStation show started around 23:00 alot
    of people was seated and the show was a big success!

    We unmounted the gear and started looking for sleepingbags.
    Anonym/Padua was very helpful with this, and we got hold of atleast
    one sleepingbag, provided by Hoogo.

Saturday:

    After a hard nights sleep on the floor with just a sleepingbag on
    the hard floor,    we found a shower, and some nice currywurst.
    Welle: Erdball was also eating sausages, for your information.. :)

    *    Overall, we got very much sleep on this party, and plenty of
    *    real food in the restaurants around the city. This was very
    *    nice, and something I'm going to do on every party from now.

    When everybody had relaxed from the sleep and had got some food,
    we started to mount the SidStation table. KB helped us borrow a
    Juno and some loudspeakers so that people could try the synthesizer
    out. Alot of people did, including Andre from Welle: Erdball,
    that unfortunatly couldn't hear the machine as good as he wanted
    because of the loud noise in the hall and the bad speakers we had.
    I suffered from a cold the whole party, so I couldn't speak very
    loud too, so I had to save our conversation until later when they
    come to sweden.

    After a few hours we got hungry and left for some food. We found
    a very classy chinese restaurant and had some fried pork with rice.
    The plates where HUGE and could have fed atleast three more people,
    and we got no knives, but only a fork and a spoon. Very well. The
    service was great and the price was decent, so I must recomend this
    to the next party! (It was not Wang's, but the other, near the station).

    When we came back the Amiga Intro competition was almost over. :(
    They said that I had only missed Gush2, and the other was quite bad.

    We started the SidStation demonstration again, and then something
    started on the stage. Commercial for the party Radwar. It seems that
    they had rent a stripper, so everyone just ran to the stage, while I
    found a table to climb on and took some nice pictures.. ;)

    At 00:00 Welle: Erdball would have their show, but it got delayed an
    hour or two. It was well worth the waiting because it was a GREAT show!!
    Everybody screamed when they sang "Commodore 64" and they showed some
    C64 "demos" on the bigscreen.
    Afterwards I went backstage and had a chat with them, and they where
    very nice! One of the cute girls even offered me champagne. :)
    The short guy (Mike Bätz?) told me he needed a SidStation, and we
    tried to sell one for only 900DM but they didn't have any cash.
    He told me they where playing in Arvika soon, and then he gave me
    a copy of their latest maxi. Very nice people indeed! =)

    We was quite tired so we began our search for sleepingbags. This time
    we got one from M.O.M that had a very pleasant english/german accent
    and the someone asked for a SidStation poster. We told him that he
    could get one if we got a sleeping bag. "Shure, I have one in my car
    that you can use whenever you want.."! Indeed very nice and friendly
    people at the party!

    *    I would like to thank Anonym/Pauda here again for being so friendly
    *    even though he didn't had time to listen to our problems! Thanx!

    This time we slept in the organizers room as it was much less people
    running around. The problem with this room was that it was a very
    cold floor and that one of the organizers snored so heavily that it
    was actually less noise in the main partyhall. :)

Sunday:

    We three all woke at the same time, 16:00, stunned by the late hour!
    We showered and found our SidStation table taken by someone with the
    homepage flug.de or something. Probably some PC-lamer so we told him
    to get lost before we got back from breakfust/lunch/dinner.
    This time we thought we should try the kebab-joint in town, as we
    didn't want to spend that much money on breakfust. We asked for a pizza
    but he told us to get lost because they didn't serve pizza until 18:00.
    We then started our breakfust with some icecream at the italian icecream
    café.

    The lunch at the kebabjoint was a very unpleasant meal:
    When we asked for pizza again we tried to get a hawaii with mushrooms
    on as an extra, but he didn't understand english so we had to compare
    the english and german menue to get him to understand what we wanted.
    Then we tried to get mozarella on too. After as much trouble with the
    translation (you could think a pizzamaker would now what mozarella is)
    he told us that's not possible. "Wir haben kein mozarella". Ok, you
    couldn't order any pizza with mozarella as he was out of stock on that.
    We ordered another hawaii, and tried to get a written reciept as we
    needed that for our company but he told us the machine was broken.
    We talked him into writing a reciept on paper, but he incisted on
    "You write, I stamp". Ok. We wrote a reciept and he put a stamp on.
    We seated ourself near the T.V. and watched VIVA with some adventure
    show sponsored by Aqua, and listened to another Aqua tune on the
    radio simultaneosly.
    We counted our money and got to the conclusion that we had only payed
    for ONE pizza. We orderd the plain hawaii again, and at the end
    everything cleared. We got the pizza's we wanted, and the beverage too.
    We asked for a knife and a fork, and got the answer: "No, the pizza
    is already sliced in four parts!". Indeed it was, and indeed we didn't
    get any knife nor any fork.
    Ok, the pizza tasted good, and we went back to the partyplace.
    No more "Flic-Flac" again as the place was called.

    We mounted the SidStation table again, and then a friend called
    Pepto arrived and greeted me! We only had conversations on email
    before so it was relly nice meeting him! He looked like Jesus, btw! =)
    I had a chat with Pepto and he showed me the music to the intro I
    missed in the Amiga intro competition. He showed me his friends Amiga
    in 1600x1200x24bit and we talked a bit about ParSID.

    I went back to our SidStation table and watched the Amiga demo compo
    from there. Not one was any good IMHO. Only booring 3D-engines all the
    time. We tried to sell our party SidStation for 900DEM and talked to
    KB that announced the info on the speakers in a very cool way!! Thanx! =)
    That didn't give any result, so we talked to another organizer about
    putting it up on the bigscreen, but he refused as he was interested
    himself. Later, he bought our machine and saved our day.. :)

    Then the happening everyone waited for began: C64 demo!
    The SidStation table closed down just in time.
    Almost every entry was stunning. Some of them was the usual
    dutch drug-commercials, but they held a very good quality overall!
    It was VERY hard voting in this competition, as there was about 5-6
    demos that qualified to the first three, and these had to be sorted
    for the 1st, 2nd and 3rd price.
    Me myself voted #5, #8 and #2 for 1st, 2nd and 3rd price, and it
    seemed that everyone else did that too, so this was the final order.
    A note for the demo from Smash Design: It was very good, but we had
    seen it before, so Crest won with their new design and a stunning image
    of a lady rising from the sea!

    The PC-demo compo had a few demos of a good quality, but I can't
    understand how one can make a demo that don't run fullframe on a
    fast pentium!?!
    Well, atleast haujobb managed to make it fullframe, and with a very
    good design and a clean 3D-engine.
    I don't know who won though as I didn't vote or was anything interested
    in the PC-compos. PC suxx, as you all know.

    We tried to get a few sleepingbags again, but it was harder this
    time as it was the last day and people would like to sleep as they
    had to get up tomorrow and go back home. After some hour in despair
    someone aproached Daniel of our team and asked if he could help him
    cheat in the PC-demo compo, and we said that if we got a sleepingbag
    we could. Verywell, ofcourse he had a sleepingbag and we cheated in
    the compo for him. I agreed on sleeping on some cardboard and I had
    probably the worst night on the party, but I managed to get atleast
    one or a few hours of sleep.

Monday:

    We watched the pricegiving, and tried to get some food before we
    would jump on the bus to copenhagen. We had a nice meal in an old
    german nazi-restaurant called Alter Hof with a very nice old lady
    serving us plenty of food. Could be the perfect mother/grandmother.. :)

    When we got on the bus to denmark they laughed at us and said they
    where going to eat on McDonalds soon. Damn.. verywell, atleast we
    got some real food.
    In some way I managed to order 2 cola's instead of one at McDonalds,
    but ok.. my friend should have one too. Hmm.. I wouldn't think ordering
    a cola should be that hard, but.. =)

    On the journey home I met a strange guy from norway:
    "- I'm from apathy"
    "- Nice, I'm from Nature!"
    "- Hmm.. There where some nature guys at The Gathering 98 year."
    "- Hmm.. that's right, we where there!"
    "- Someone used my computer for writing some scroll I believe"
    "- Oh, that was me.. :)"
    Ok, I was sitting right next to the one that lend us a computer
    at TG98 for completing the endscroll to our demo Kicker.. :)

    He was very nice and I could understand his norwegian very clear
    and you can't say that about the organizers at TG98.

    The rest of the trip was a huge party with drunken danes all over
    the place that screamed and tried to hug everyone. I tried to get
    away but didn't manage completly. I did manage not to drink anything
    though, but it was close that someone spotted me once. I tried with
    the excuse that I had a cold, and bearly got away.. :)

    The journey was a race against time, as the last bus from denmark to
    sweden went 23:15 and the driver told us it was possible that we
    wouldn't make it. Ok, we arrived at 23:00 with only german mark on
    us, so one of us ran to withdraw some money and got back 5 minutes
    before final deadline.. =)

    We payed 87 SEK for 2 sandwiches on the ferry between helsingør -
    helsingborg and arrived safely in Gothenburg at about 3 AM tuesday
    night and took a taxi home.


    THE END!
                         /
                        / Pipe^Nature, aka
                          Anders Andersson, Elektron ESI AB
                          pipe@sidstation.com, pipe@c64.org