The buildings in the
background are not that
far away Claus, hip-hop
at Carlsbad.
40
them. This youth hostage differs very much
from any other of its kind. The owners don't
mind noise at all, and everyone may stay
up as long as they want. There are approx-
imately 150 to 200 skaters in this house,
so you can probably imagine how loud and
rowdy it was. We were told that we could
sleep until midday the next morning, but
this turned out to be untrue. We were kicked
out of the hotel at seven.
The second and last day of this contest
the weather was terrific. As soon as we hit
the site I got into my safety equipment and
scammed the ramp. These people have
never even seen a rock n' roll before so
they were very stoked.
The ramp now had a platform on one
side and was thus skateable. Only a couple
of local daredevils and myself skated it and
because of this I was very exhausted after
every session. The same happened to
Shane, who gave what seemed to be the
longest freestyle demos of all time. We
were soon sweating like hell.
Between pipe, freestyle and streetstyle
demos we were both busy signing auto-
graphs on simply everything. I guess you
could say we were some kinda sensation
over there.
I got better and better with every session
and was soon declared to be from outer
space, as, "these tricks you are doing are
inhuman!".
Everything that happened that day was
filmed by T.V. and video companies, later.
to be shown in, believe it or not, cinemas
and on television. We also gave a couple
of interviews for magazines.
At 8 o'clock everyone headed home...
again not us. The car key... remember? It
was still broken and thus hindered us from
getting the car going regularly. Two hours
later we eventually leave the place and,
after a couple of minutes, get stopped by
the police. The "POLIS", as cops are called
over there, soon inform us that driving with-
out a car key is somewhat illegal and keep
Ludek's car papers. This meant that he had
to get his car repaired within the next 6
days and then show it to the local police
again to get his papers back. During the
entire time Ludek had to pretend that he
was the real friend of Shane's mysterious
High-jumping is one of their
favorite disciplines.
A home-made board with
home-made (self-molded)
trucks.
lady, because she'd get in trouble if she
was together with a foreigner. Quite aston-
ishing, ey?! Well, we arrived in Prague,
again and slept at Ludek's place. The next
day we got up at around nine for our next
tour stop in Pilzen, a big town further south.
On the way we found a dry swimming pool
with somewhat skateable walls. We ses-
sioned it for a couple of minutes but then
leave again because we were already late.
After a somewhat hopeless search we
finally find the ramp in Pilzen Already a
healthy amount of locals are waiting for us.
The ramp is small and features two rather
different looking walls. One has a 7 foot
transition and the other a 5 foot transition.
Soon we're in our gear and rip the ramp.
Even Shane skates the ramp and a couple
of local super-8 filmers shoot quite a lot of
film on us.
The local skaters session the ramp too.
"Well, and how do they skate?", I can hear
you ask...they don't really do any tricks
yet, but they can grind. You see, vertical
terrain is relatively new to them and they
have never seen anyone do it before. All
they basically do is backside and frontside
grinds and frontside airs.
It had become common that Peter and
Ludek would pay for everything that we
wanted. Peter always said, "Keep your
money for the last day in Prague, so you
can buy your parents a present."
After this session we all went to eat in
this big restaurant where they had a big
card with all these nice dishes, of which
they had only a very few...I would ask,
"Can I have the omlette, please?" and the
chef would answer, "I'm sorry sir, we don't
have eggs today.", and so on.
We headed on towards Carlsbad, a town
approximately 3 hours up north of Pilzen.
There, Shane and I were told, was a giant
ditch-type pool waiting to be sessioned. It
was dark when we arrived, but not too dark
to see the pool and gaze at its enormous
size. The pool was heart-shaped, seven
feet deep, approximately 120 feet long and
110 feet wide, with mellow walls leading to
about 70 degrees. However good this pool
was, it was too dark to skate it. All we found
out by riding through the flat parts was that
it was stoney.