Thursday, April 23, 2009

T-Mobile Extreme Playgrounds - Germany

Kelly hit the ground running when he got to Europe, first stop Amsterdam to check out the canals, dykes, smart shops and the infamous red light district.

Next mission was to Duisburg in Germany to catch up with our mate Phil Sundbaum at T-Mobile Extreme Playgrounds Dirt Session. The train ride was pretty fun, there's not much room for luggage so we had our legs jammed up on top of it all for a couple of hours till we got there. We've noticed that people over here aren't shy and like to stare at anything out of the norm, so we've had our share of stares. But whatever, you learn to stare back pretty quickly.











Then we got to navigate the streets of Duisburg and find our hostel and then head out on the mission to the venue for the comp. This was an interesting operation, took about half an hour to figure out which train to take, which price class it was, where to get off etc, but my shabby german got us through and some locals helped us out.

We spoke english to the security guard at the venue and said we were looking for the jumps so he let us in assuming Kelly was one of the bike riders. haha.
We found Uncle Phil and watched some of the practise.

The next day we felt like locals, catching the train to the venue and even helped out some germans who were looking for the way to get there. We waited in a line for a while to get our VIP passes which Phil had hooked up for us, YEAH! Cheers bro.

The venue was awesome, in an old industrial iron mill which had closed in the 80's, the jumps were in a massive indoor building with a huge stage at one end. There were 14 riders in BMX and MTB, with two heats and a final 4. It was a sick comp, live onto MTV and we were stoked to be there to watch the action. In between heats there were live bands on the main stage. The best part was that NOFX played after the finals and it was epic. We rocked up to the front and got a good spot to watch the punkrockers take the piss out of Ze Germans and be general munters. A wicked welcome to Europe!
NOFX on the main stage:
Check the highlight vids on Freecaster.tv:

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