Solo festival goer advice. Breaking ice and volunteering...

[20190624]

Hi. One of my kids (18 years old) is volunteering at Glastonbury this year and hasn’t been to a festival before. I will call them John to protect the innocent ?

John had a lift share to the site today but his first volunteer shift is not until Wednesday.

John isn’t hugely extrovert and isn’t sure about the best route to try and meet people while there. Hopefully once his shift starts on Weds it’ll start looking up. 

However there is still tomorrow with time to kill. I wondered if anyone knows if there are any opportunities for people to volunteer on an ad hoc basis while on site? He might ask around tomorrow but I thought I would check here too. 

Also. Is there any good place to go on site for people in John’s situation who might be on site on their own but might want to try and meet up with others in the same position. I don’t really mean for meeting significant others. Just friendly faces etc. 

Plus one more thing. Any good tips for breaking the ice or good ways to get chatting with random strangers at festivals?

Sorry. Lots of questions I know but I’m just being an annoying micro managing parent sticking my nose into my child’s affairs from long distance ?

Any advice much appreciated. 

Thanks

[Superscally]

I think a lot of the people who volunteer are the welcoming type. The whole atmosphere is welcoming in the festival. It'll be a wonderful experience for him I'm sure. Try not to worry too much! 

[balti-pie]

Is he with Oxfam? If so, I’ll bother him with endless chat about craft beer, favourite Slayer albums and likely Spurs right back acquisitions ?

[Mark E. Spliff]

I'd say his first and best chance to get to meet people will be putting his tent up in the staff campsite.  At that moment, people are at their most excited about arriving and will be messing around getting everything set up, cracking open the beers and talking to anyone in the vicinity - you get little groups of newly-arrived people talking and you just get drawn into conversations.  There'll usually be a fair few people who're new and have come on their own, and just asking one of them something along the lines of 'do you know where we need to go to get our shift briefing' will have a very high hit-rate in terms of breaking the ice.  I'm pretty sure that will do the trick, but if not, once he's done a hike round the site to get his bearings (which could take a whole day...) he could just go and tell the people in the staffing cabin that he's on his own and wondered if they had anything for him to do. 

It's bound to be a daunting prospect, but the absolute worst-case, and extremely unlikely, scenario is that he doesn't make any new friends until his Wednesday shift.  There is such a vast site to explore that spending the first day on his own might not be such a bad thing.