Festival-goers without shoes

It’s a dreary Saturday afternoon as Jet and I get in a taxi headed to Ruigoord, one of the most famous and notorious festival terrains in Holland. We’re on our way to Shoeless, a well-known festival where you – guess what – cannot wear shoes. You understand, that for a shoe girl like me, this is quite something. Armed with a maxi skirt (to hide my feet as much as possible), umbrella (that we had to hand in at the entrance dammit) and a camera-telephone from Samsung, we enter the festival grounds.

As soon as we got in, we knew, this was no ordinary festival. The management has asked everyone to come as dressed as possible, but since most of the Ruigoord population are artists or (old) hippies, there were no tight shirts or sexy mini skirts to be seen. The idea was to be as ‘you’ as possible, anything allowed, everything goes, nothing must, that type of thing. There were various stages but mostly lots of small stands, shops, corners, booths, activities and thank god, places to hide from the insistent rain.

Jet had her heart set on a flower hair band that she saw, not just one but two. I looked at her with a big question mark on my face but got told ” yes, of course I’m going to wear it, they’re fabulous!” The hippie-vibe had her totally in its clutches. Aside from hippie, Jet is also an avid foodie so we quickly headed to do some thorough research into the Shoeless offering and the results were extremely positive. All bio, all delicious.

As I mentioned, we were given a cool Samsung camera-telephone to take with us. The thing is, we really wanted to document the festival but iPhone photos are so-so and walking around with a full size reflex camera was also not on the cards, no thanks. The Samsung Galaxy K Zoom is a camera that you can use to call with. Actually. It is a telephone of course, but it has such an incredibly good camera and that is the foremost reason I wanted it. Whenever we asked the colourful public if we could photograph them, their immediate reaction was “yes of course” and then the second reaction was “wow, what a cool thing that is.” And it is.

Jet and I were like two oldies, oohing and aahing about how razor sharp and beautiful the images were. Of course we also took like 80.000 selfies, egged on by the cool functionality that makes your skin extra smooth and even, we like that. This camera is a huge forward step for technology and I truly hope I can take it with to New York, London and the rest of the world, because dragging around a full size SLR camera is no fun, especially not for my outfit.

May I now present, Shoeless. Look and be amazed and maybe we’ll see there next time?