#cobboven

August 2016: Germany (August 23rd to 31st)

Cologne 

Fact: Cologne is one of the warmest cities in Germany. It has a temperate–oceanic climate with cool winters and warm summers. It is also one of the cloudiest cities in Germany, with just 1427 hours of sun a year.

The next decent skate park was located in Cologne, to which we later learnt was also called “Colognifornia” it was only around 22 minutes down the road so not of a  Getting there should of been pretty simple until you make the mistake of just relying on following in convoy with no actual spot mapped in the GPS... fools. 

Now i wont point any fingers at anyone (Nath!) but the job of driver is to keep up with the others, but he likes giving way to other road users when its our right of way, causing us to fall behind and losing the others. This leads to getting stopped by the German police.. “for fuck sake i thought!!” but casually i got all the documentation we needed, the officer explained this road is closed and not for use of vehicles, taking our passports he walked back to the police car and made us wait, which felt like an eternity. At last he returns with our stuff telling us it would of resulted in a 20 Euro fine, but he must of had empathy for us (secret defender fan), let us continue down the closed road to join our van crew scot free.

Colgnifornia, named due to experiencing weather like California lived up to its name, the heat was scorching meaning frequent visits to the lake to jump and summersault off the foot bridges and perv on good looking german women. It was so great here 7 days passed parked up in the car park,  which so far was the longest we’d stayed in any spot. Free public toilets (Heaven), a huge place to swim and wash it was paradise. With the occansial visit to the local Lidl our supermarket of choice to resupply. The days really consisted of pure chill, we were here to ride the skatepark down the road but got so comfortable waking up going for a swim and cooking Pizza’s in Luke's Cobb Oven on the top of Georges van, can't get better than this.

Cologne also holds a record for Europes biggest Brothel “Pascha” The Pascha is a 12-storey 9,000 square metre brothel, With about 120 prostitutes, over 80 employees and up to 1000 customers per day.

Now just to clarify before a judgement is made, all of us were curious to see the brothel from the outside, once we got there the guys wanted to go look inside, i was uneasy about, like stated before when we visited Amsterdam i’m not interested in prostitution and neither were the others, guess they wanted to check it out, Luke’s girlfriend Hannah was also uncomfortable with he scenario and was happy to wait outside with the bikes, i was also happy to wait outside. 

We ended up all going inside and within the space of 10 seconds we were back outside, 3 of us managed to hand cash over and the they refused Hannah entrance due to being a female... ok we all leave then, i was some what relieved as i want stoked being in this place. What to do now? well just down the road looked like scrap yard which in actual fact was a Rock opera “Odonien” sweet this is more like it, so we all enter the long alley way like entrance greeted by 2 young lads at a table taking entrance fee’s to go enjoy bands we’d never heard of surrounded by steel and alloy carcasses of what were vehicles, machinery of some kind. Trying to barter the price of entrance, we couldn't negotiate with the stubborn Germans, they were trying to get us to pay full price for the last 30 minutes of the show.. get fucked, Luke played Paper Rock Scissors to get a better deal, lost and we scarpered.