With the coming of spring, a series of outdoor music festivals are launching, or have launched, in Shanghai. During the past Labour Day holiday, one of the biggest music festivals in China, the Strawberry Music Festival, was held in the Expo Garden in Pudong and at least 260,000 attended. People from all walks of life joined this unbelievably enthusiastic atmosphere, varying from students to white-collar workers, young children to older couples. Ranking as the second busiest and most expensive city in Asia, Shanghai citizens are always shouldering a huge burden due to the community they live in. No wonder the slogan of Strawberry Music Festival —— “Social Network Software Life is rubbish, get a real life!” attracts so many people, who have long been tied to their offices and campuses. That is no doubt true, because during our journey in this festival, I accidentally came across many of my former schoolmates and friends —— although it was thought to be the time of final exams in most universities. Here are some pictures we took:

The theme of the music festival this year, “the best of spring”, did bring us the feeling of spring, with warm and energetic lyrics that could be heard everywhere. Carly Rae Jepsen, The Hives, SHN48… all those names familiar to Chinese music fans appeared on 5 different stages: Strawberry Stage, Love Stage, Influence·Planet Stage, Pogo Stage and Alienware·Release Electronic Stage. Different from concerts, a music festival provides you with more flexibility of choices, based off of the audience’s different tastes. You can either stand, lie or sit on the grass, enjoy the music alone or share your opinions with strangers beside —— whom you will soon be friends with. You can dance without the limitations of a room, you can shout without worrying about troubling others. If you like, you can even FaceTime your friends who are far away, inviting them to take part in this experience with you, as we found most people did. It was really the time to get away from all of the hectic urban civilisation. As you can see many people held their cellphones and cameras in the picture; however, as time went on, what you can only see are faces with joy rather than flashes from pictures. We were surprised that many older people also took part in this festival that we thought was for the young. We found around six 70-year-old men in a group in the afternoon of 2nd May, sitting beside the stage, humming with the balladeer as if enchanted, and all of them were dressed in costumes with a rock n roll feel. One of the men even told us that he was great fan of Guns n’ Roses, Linkin Park and Pink Floyd. That is the charm of music, the charm of a music festival! Let’s get a real life, without our countless responsibilities, with the coming of spring in Shanghai! This article was written by Emma Tao. Send an email to [email protected] to get in touch. Photo Credit: Emma Tao