MetalDays announced a winter edition: “Winter Days of Metal”. The second edition of this festival took place from the 31st of Januari-4th of Februari 2018 in the village Bohinjska Bistrica, and since this is the real definition of grim and frostbitten, of course the GRIMM crew was there again!
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Line Up
Location
The festival is located 54 km from Ljubljana airport and is easily accessible by car, bus and train, with a guaranteed amazing view on your ride there. The idyllic village of Bohinjska Bistrica is situated in between the beautiful Lake Bled and Lake Bohinj and next to Vogel Ski Resort. It offers the guests an amazing winter holiday experience on natural snow, with spectacular views. If you’re not really into skiing or snowboarding, you can also take a Wellness festival package, so you can enjoy the Bohinj Aqua Park, with its pools, jacuzzis and saunas.
Of course Bohinj has a lot more to offer, so you can also go on a hike and discover the surroundings and other activities. You can find more information about the possible activities on the official Bohinj website.
Festival Area & Ski Resort
The festival itself takes place at the Dvorana Danica venue, just at the edge of the Bohinjska Bistrica village. It’s a sports hall, located at the Danica Camp site. Upon arrival you could get your festival packages at the local tourist office of Bohinj or at the reception of Camp Danica itself. The festival bracelet itself was available from the first real festival day, at the entrance of the venue.
There were several places to sit down outside, a small bar for the pre- and afterparties and enough toilets inside of the venue. The bars were like stalls from Christmas markets, so they really added to the winter feeling of the festival. The stage, lighting and sound (though sometimes a little too loud) were great throughout the whole week. Sadly the Gostilna Danica restaurant was only open for the catering of the bands, because we saw on TripAdvisor it should be a great culinary experience as well!
The Dvorana Danica venue is about a 10 minute walk to the village center and Aqua Park so everything is really close. To get to the Vogel Ski Centre you can take a shuttle that gets you to the start of the ski slopes, at the edge of Lake Bohinj. At the tourist center you can get a bus card for a €3 deposit fee and go by bus all around the Bohinj area and even to Lake Bled for free. You can also buy a Bohinj Guest Card (€10) which will get you even more discounts on several activities around the area.
Food & Drinks
At the Dvorana Danica venue there were 2 food stalls: one local one with burgers, sausages and the sorts, and the vegan one known from the MetalDays beach. In Bohinjska Bistrica itself there are 2 supermarkets (Spar and Mercator, several small stores / bakeries and restaurants to make sure you won’t get hungry.
Outside the venue there is also a bar where you can get beers, soda’s, schnapps and great mulled wine (glühwein). Inside, to our great pleasure, you could also get the famous MetalDays cocktails. So we gladly drank our ‘Sex on The Beach’es and Piña Coladas once again!
!! At the festival you can only pay cash. You can get money at the ATMs in Bohinjska Bistrica itself.
Accommodation
You can choose to stay at the winter campsite Camp Danica, in an apartment or in a hostel/hotel. It’s possible to book your accommodation privately, but if you book a package it will already be arranged for you. The first edition we had a great AirBnB apartment just 1 street from the venue, and this time we were more people, so we even had a villa at the ridge of the Valley, just a 10 minute walk away!
Festival Packages
You can book your festival package that includes a festival ticket and a choice of activities for the week: a skipass or a pass for the wellness center.
For the 2017 visitors the Winter Days of Metal organisation also posted a nice surprise on their Facebook wall:
“Each of you, our visitors, that have purchased the ticket for the WDoM 2017 (either festival ticket or any of the daily tickets) will receive free ticket for the WDoM 2018 : festival ticket buyers will receive festival ticket, daily ticket buyers will receive a daily ticket for the WDoM 2018 for a day at your choice. All you need to do is send either a photo of a ticket or a wristband (or any proof of payment) to our e-mail : info@winterdaysofmetal.com, together with your personal details (name, surname, address, country, phone number and e-mail) and you will receive further instructions.”
This is just another example of how awesome the MetalDays / Winter Days of Metal organisation really is!
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Since the festival was only 3 days this year, we decided to have some warm up parties in Ljubljana! We drove to Ljubljana first and got there at our hostel C-Punkt, a simple but good hostel at a good location, and definitely a good price! The first day we went to Sir William’s Pub, one of the best places in the capital to try some Slovenian beers, and we gladly did so! After a stroll through the city we went for dinner in Das ist Valter, a very cheap and awesome Slovenian grill restaurant, and even got to take some food with us because it was too much.
Then we met up with “Team Holland” at the local metalbar Orto Bar, but since there wasn’t really something to do there, we went back, because very near Das ist Valter you can find Metelkova. Metalkova is an old military facility which was squatted and turned into a music venue, some alternative bars and art galleries. It’s the main social spot for jazz, rockabilly, punkrock, metal, noise and techno. There’s a lot of graffiti and cool artwork to check out all around the site, so be sure to go there when in Ljubljana! You can find the activities on their website, and there’s a great hostel next to it that’s made out of the old prison and the rooms are actually cell blocks. Sadly that was the hostel we tried to book at first, and it was cancelled because it would close down the week before we arrived! We really hope it will continue with new hosts, because we would love to stay there!
The next day we went to…
Waking up with quite some struggles, we left Ljubljana and went on to Bled.
Lake Bled
Bar
Off to Bohinj!
Villa Bohinj – huisje –
Activiteiten eerste dagen
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Eerste festivaldag!!
On the first festival day we went for a hike through the area of Bohinjska Bistrica. We ended up at the terrace of Strud’l, a little breakfast/brunch restaurant. We had a cheese platter with cheeses from the Bohinj region, and local beers from Lintvern Brewery. As Belgians, we were quite surprised with the beers, since they were actually quite great. We had all 3 of the beers: the Lintvern (black IPA), Bohinjski Čatež (sweet stout) and Jezernik (white beer). The artwork is amazing too (see picture).
Then it was time to check out the festival itself and see some bands!
WAT GEDAAN DAG 1
DAG 1 BANDS
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WAT GEDAAN DAG 2
DAG 2 BANDS
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DAG 3 ACTIVITEITEN
DAG 3 BANDS
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Reis naar huis
Verdict WDoM
In the end we had a lot of fun at Winter Days of Metal. It’s a great festival, and you have a lot of free time during the day to go sightseeing or check out all of the fun things you can do around there! There were not a lot of people, but that didn’t really matter since the atmosphere was brilliant and everybody had an amazing time. The bands played like they were playing for a full venue, and the sound was great as well. Reading the band statements at the WDoM Facebook page, they really liked it as well.
Sadly there was no snow though, only on the ski area itself, but maybe next year there will be snow everywhere, because it will be earlier on. The weather was good, and we could even walk around in our t-shirts by day! Maybe when it’s colder it would be good to have some some terrace warmers and open tents to eat outside. And more (especially gluten free) options for food at the venue would be nice.
We had a different activity every day and went to Ljubljana as well, which is really cool and the area is very beautiful. If you like to ski or snowboard, it’s an amazing combination of a winter holiday and festival, but we thought it was really nice to do something different every day. The Aquapark is definitely cool for one day (or maybe more), but to take the wellness package for the whole week would be kind of an overkill, in our opinion.
The combination of the activities, nature and surroundings, and then in the evening the festival itself, makes for a great holiday experience! We loved Winter Days of Metal and we’ll be back!
WDoM 2018 Highlights
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More Info
The next edition of Winter Days of Metal will also be in 2018! It will take place from 29/11 until 01/12 in Bohinj, Slovenia.
For more information check out their Facebook page and website.
Join the official Facebook event.
