I went through Sunday, August 4 following more or less the same blueprint as the day before. I started out with breakfast somewhere down the street from the hostel, and then spent the morning and early afternoon doing a makeshift pub crawl while dipping into the city's medieval Hungarian past.
Looks like just another old building in this town, doesn't it? I'd walked past it an untold (no pun intended) number of times the day before. It turns out this is quite a historic landmark, for in 1443 a child named Hunyadi Mátyás was born there, who would grow up to be Hungary's greatest king, Matthias Corvinus.
While I was in the area, I had to hit up O'Peter's Irish Pub again for some more beer, Kronenbourg this time, and an Irish Coffee. Maybe both of those things in rapid succession isn't such a good idea, because they left me feeling like I'd just taken a pill I should not have. I'MFINEI'MFINEI'MFINENOREALLYI'MFINE.
Eventually, after another bar stop somwehere else, I found my way to another bar full of Cold War nostalgia, called The Soviet.
The first rule of nostalgia: if it happened in the past, people will get nostalgic about it, even if it sucked. Don't forget, not only was Romania on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain, but for much of that time it was ruled by a dictator. Even that doesn't stop some Romanians of a certain age from getting misty-eyed about those days.
Even so, the place served as a rather fascinating museum. Ever wonder what you'd see if you entered an average home in a Communist Eastern European country circa 1975? You'd likely see items like these:
Finally as I leisurely mosied toward Central Park, I had to stop by one last place serving beer, called Euphoria Biergarten. This was a great cap-off for my little pre-game pub crawl. Euphoria doesn't have a huge beer selection, but the atmosphere more than makes up for it, as well as the fact that they serve up the beer in half-liter glass tankards.
I had a nice frothy mug of Pilsner Urquell. This is a Czech beer, but today this brand is owned by Ursus in Romania, making it easy to find here.
Soon after getting into the fest, I set off to get something big to eat that would serve as both lunch and dinner. I forget exactly what I had there, but I can tell you that the food situation at Untold is just as top-notch as in Tomorrowland, Electric Forest, or any other big multi-day festival I've been to. Just about every kind of food you can imagine you can find at the food court. I think my favorite dish that I ate there was Chicken Tikka Masala.
The only possible complaint that I could have about it concerns the posted menus at the food booths; they were all in only one language, Romanian. Now, if you've read enough of this blog you may have picked up that I'm not exactly monolingual. But Romanian, which I've never needed to know anything about, is a language I couldn't speak a word of. Well, I did learn one word, because staring at all those menus taught me that "pui" means chicken. The people working at these food stands spoke reasonably good English, but the menus on the walls behind them were nothing but Romanian. Hopefully this situation will improve next year.
One good thing about Untold that was better than at Tomorrowland: the coffee situation. At Tomorrowland, inexplicably, there was exactly one (1) coffee stand in the entire festival, and I had to rely on Pepsi Max to keep myself awake after the sun went down. At Untold, there is coffee everywhere! It's not much better than Starbucks, but at least they have it.
So for most of Sunday there weren't a whole lot of artists I specifically wanted to see, so between getting dinner and throwing back pints of Ursus and the occasional coffee, I mostly just caught more trance sets and such at the Fortune and Time stages.
But I should note, Untold isn't just about electronic music. Look who I found playing at the Forest stage Sunday night:
This is Inner Circle, a Jamaican reggae band that came here all the way from Kingston. Never heard of them? You may still recognize their song "Bad Boys," which was used as the theme song for a certain TV series called "Cops."
On this, the last night of Untold, the Main Stage had its usual slew of big-name, mainstream, commercial EDM artists, like Martin Garrix and David Guetta, who I don't dislike, but wouldn't go out of my way to go see. My original plan had been to stay at the fest all through the night, then check out of the hostel, go to the airport, and sleep on the plane. However, by this point on Sunday night I was feeling burnt-out (remember this was only two weeks after Tomorrowland) and decided that the Main Stage closers were worth missing for a few hours of sleep. After all, I thought to myself, if I really wanted to see David Guetta I'd have taken one of the many chances I had in Ibiza in 2011 and 2012, so cutting out now would be no great loss.
But I wasn't done completely! Nora En Pure was playing the Time stage and I really wanted to catch that set. She had also been at Tomorrowland and I had to miss her there (though the set is, of course, on YouTube) so this would be a great way to cap off the weekend. So much better than the crowded Main Stage; music I *really* wanted to hear, and plenty of room to move without five or six other people's bodies squeezed up against mine. No photos, unfortunately; I took several but they all looked awful.
After Nora En Pure finished, I took my final exit from Untold and did the now-routine walk to the hostel. Instead of staying up all night, I got a little sleep before meeting my scheduled car service to drive me to the airport to catch my super-early flight. Unlike the two flights in, I only had one flight out, from Cluj to Memmingen on Wizz Air, after which I finished the return trip on a train.
So...overall, how did I like Untold? It was definitely worth it. I may not have liked it quite as much as Tomorrowland, or even as much as Electric Forest or Lightning in a Bottle, but it's up there on their level. With such a big-name-heavy lineup combined with such a low ticket price, it certainly wins the "most bang for your buck" award. And with Tomorrowland still fresh in my memory, I greatly appreciated the fact that, unlike at Tomorrowland, everything for sale was priced in the local currency--lei in this case--and not in some unnecessarily-created scrip (at Tomorrowland all prices are quoted in "Pearls"). There's no camping available, but that's OK when you're staying in a hostel within walking distance of the festival. Would I do it again? Maybe; it depends on if there's something else going on or if I can get the time off work. I certainly am not ruling it out yet for next year.
Other articles in this series:
