This summer I was at colours of Ostrava as foreigner and complete tourist.

I found a festival that has a lot of potential to express but lacks of something in the organization.

Do not misunderstand me, I had a really good time there and I met loads of awesome people that were really embracing my perspective of what a festival should be : basically a place in which the music can be listened to in a very chilled and laid back mood. Nothing of a hardcore party is in the festival, no exagerrated dancing sessions in crowd, no douchebags in the crowd and mainly a very widespread good mood across all of the stages.

The thing that I was not really expecting was how long it took for me to get to the festival site from my camping site (Silesian Castle). It was kinda well connected though but we had to ask around and just the last day we really figured out what was the best way to get there. Some quick tips: 1)to get to the festival the best option would be to rent bikes (if you do it the very first day you just pay them 15 euros for the whole 4 days and believe me it is better than spending 30 mins walking), 2) in case you do not want to rent bikes then take the trams that pass really frequently (from the silesian camping take first tram 4 then tram 2), 3) to get back to the silesian camping site you can get the tram night line that connects straightforward the festival with the camping site, get off at the stop “U Hradu”).

This year the program and the booklet that they were handling at the main entrance of the festival was utterly in czech. The thing is that in this festival internationals are very rare and czech people on average do not have a good knowledge of english; anyhow they are very keen to help you in every way possible they can.

If you go there with the intention of a “summer hook up” with some slavic beauty then Colours is not really your place, especially if you are in between 18–25 years old. As far as I have seen, I do not really know way, the very vast majority of people there is in a couple and the average age is quite high (due to the fact that, as I mentioned before, this is essentially a chilled festival).

The food and beverages are really cheap if you consider that you are in a festival, beer especially cheap with food not overpriced.

In the end: go there knowing that if you are not czech your odds of socializing are limited for a very evident language barrier and if you are in a hardcore party mood you will be disappointed.