JOSSELIN GUICHARD, guest SonicBoom photo gallery contributor to our GFB 2022 Report
Thursday May 26: An Alarming Start
How do you like to start your day after your first night’s sleep in a nicely appointed Berlin hotel room?
It was evident that the nhow had made some changes to its pre-pandemic ways of providing room services — including guests now having to stock their own minibars and room service requests being directed towards an app that didn’t seem to work properly on laptops.
But I don’t think anyone would have chosen to start their day with the deafening fire alarm that drove nhow guests out of their rooms on Thursday.
I’ve stayed in many, many hotels but have never been in one when a fire alarm has gone off for real (allegedly). What do you do? I grabbed my wallet and passport and stepped out of my room to check that this piercing klaxon wasn’t just blaring away in my room. It wasn’t.
People were appearing from other rooms and heading for the stairs in a kind of herd cognisance that you’re supposed to get down to the ground floor and assemble outside the building.
I saw no smoke or flames, but there did seem to be an acrid smell in the corridors. It certainly felt like this was one of those times when having a room on the first floor was a definite advantage.
Emergency fails to interest hotel staff
But here’s the thing. Arriving in the lobby, we who were fleeing to safety could still hear the alarms (albeit not as loudly).
But no one already in the lobby — be they reception staff or other guests — seemed to be taking any notice at all!
Guests who had rushed down assembled on the steps outside the hotel entrance. But if we expected to find staff acting as fire marshals checking everyone had got out safely, we were disappointed.
No one recognisable as a staff member joined us to take command of the situation.
Did the staff already know it was a false alarm, and if so, should they have notified the Berlin fire service? Its firefighters soon arrived in a rescue van and a full-on bells, whistles ’n’ ladders fire truck, and dashed (well, walked) into the hotel.
After a few minutes, they walked out again, got back into their vehicles and drove off, leaving us to assume it was OK to go back into the building.
However, after what was now evidently a false alarm, the assumption that working lifts would be available to take us back to our rooms proved optimistic.
“They’ve said the elevators won’t be working again for 30 minutes,” I was informed by a young lady with a charming French accent.
So, it was the stairs again then — and yet another win for those with a first-floor room.
“How far up do you have to go?” I asked her as we headed for the entrance to the stairs. “I’m on the tenth floor,” she told me, bounding off with impressive agility.
Later that evening, I met up at the nhow with LFTV’s Cole Black and Psycatt with the aim of going together to SonicBoom at Matrix.
It was only a short walk, but I have to admit that, considering the amount of cobblestones we were obliged to traverse en route, Psycatt coped remarkably well in her heels!
SonicBoom and meeting Josselin & co
Entering the SonicBoom party, who should I bump into soon after we arrived but the very same young woman I’d been chatting to earlier about the lift situation in the nhow lobby.
What’s more, she arrived with designer/ photographer Josselin Guichard, my old pal from the Paris scene who has been a constant supporter both of these German Fetish Ball Weekends and my various fetish publishing endeavours over the years.
Turns out her name was Kenza, she and Josselin used to be a couple not so long ago, and this would not be the last time we would bump into each other in Berlin!
At first Cole and I wondered around looking out for shooting opportunities in the crowded bar area in the half of Matrix that is opened up for annual SonicBoom occupancy.
But it soon became clear that the smaller dungeon area to the left after the entrance corridor was a more suitable place for filming and photographing.
The two of us shooting side-by-side in this space attracted a steady stream of people wanting to be recorded for posterity.
People do often notice when a camera flash is firing of course, but I am going to credit the video light Cole had on top of his camera as the greater lure on this occasion. It attracted potential photography subjects like moths to a flame — and we weren’t complaining.
However, despite the enthusiasm for our dungeon-area shooting, I found when I reviewed the contents of my memory card later that I hadn’t actually shot as much stuff at SonicBoom as I’d imagined.
So how fortuitous that Josselin Guichard offered me a selection from what he had shot there! It was enough to provide our GFB 2022 Report with a second SonicBoom gallery, which you will find below along with my own pictures from the event.
As for the party itself, this year’s SonicBoom seemed to be as busy as the earlier editions that established it, pre-pandemic, as both a popular precursor to the Friday and Saturday parties and a showcase for much latex finery.
It left me confident that the rest of the 2022 German Fetish Ball Weekend was destined to repeat its earlier success as a latex fashion fest of the first order!
Principle photography/video links for GFB 2022 Report Part 1
BELOW: SONICBOOM galleries by Tony Mitchell and Josselin Guichard, each with 21 party pictures.
Click/tap either preview to open gallery, then click/tap any thumbnail to start slideshow
PART 2 of our 3-part GFB 2022 Report, covering the German Fetish Fair, nhow
pre-party fashion shoot and FetishGuerilla, is NOW LIVE HERE!
PART 3, our September cover, is now live HERE – dedicated to the performances and people at Saturday’s headlining German Fetish Ball and its aftermath
Tags: Fetish Weekends, Parties, Transport & Hotel Issues
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