RSS Feed (xml)The story starts just under a week ago when Avid, Manhead, Lynskey, Sidewalk’s Ryan Gray and myself all met at Route One’s Leeds store to pick up a few last minute essentials (read – decks!) before embarking on a 5 hour train journey via London’s Kings Cross to Gatwick Airport.
Shortly after arriving we were met by Livingston legend Ben Leyden who immediately joined us in a stretch of the legs with a wander around, trying to find if anywhere was open at one in the morning to stave off our boredom.
Over the next seven hours we were joined by Brighton’s answer to Andrew Reynolds – Amir Williams, Bristol’s Andy Makepeace and the now London based Samantha Bruce, who has bigger balls than I do and a fair old trick selection to boot…
Our flight was scheduled for 10.30am and, after a thoroughly dull nine and a half hours meandering around Gatwick looking for ways to kill time, we were up in the air for a 3 hour flight to Bulgaria’s capital Sofia. As a regular user of budget airlines I was pleasantly surprised to be handed a free in-flight meal. This joy soon turned to disappointment as I opened the box to find cheese products galore. A traditional Bulgarian breakfast? Yes. Sadly your author is allergic to dairy products. Gutted…
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We arrived in Sofia at around 3.30pm local time after a thankfully incident free flight and were met by Virus Skateboard’s owner and Bulgarian skate legend Alex Kyourkiev and one of his team riders, known to us only as Yavor. This kid had some amazing skills as we would later find out and has had a number of Euro magazine covers to his name.
A short drive later, and after stumbling along, weighed down with far too many changes of clothes, we had found our accommodation. For anyone that has seen the film ‘Hostel’ think of that but sketchier! Well, not really but the stairwell leading up to the main entrance gave a foreboding impression to say the least. But we need not have worried as the welcome was one of the friendliest I have encountered throughout my travels, they even had a kitten by the name of Lucky to hang out with when the stress if dealing with 10 skaters got too much to bear!
Luggage was dumped; boards were grabbed and within one hour of landing we were making our way through the equally beautiful and ghetto streets to the main hook up point – NDK (pronounced N-D-Ka). NDK is the Bulgarian National Palace of Culture and the architects that built this huge imposing building also accidentally created a skateboarding heaven. You may well have seen footage of the place in recent Death and Blueprint videos - banks down stairs, knee high hubbas and some a lot bigger and all manner of ledges, kickers and acres of perfect flat ground. Combine this with the low cost of living and we were in heaven!
Most of us just had a gentle roll around but Lynskey was straight on to it – skating just as though he were at his local park. Within the first thirty minutes he had knocked out a number of film worthy tricks, finishing with a beautifully caught backside flip out of a mellow kicker and over a bin that had been raised well above it’s normal height.
As darkness descended the decision was made to go and get some food. So, going on the recommendation of our guides we headed over to “Bar Happy Grill”. Wonderfully cheap good food and stunningly attractive waitresses. This was sure to be an omen of the good times that were ahead…
After eating we split up. Some of us going to bed (me included – spending the last 36 hours awake had started to get to me) whilst others soldiered on through and went to witness a live set from old skool Hip Hop legends “Funk Doobiest”, in town playing their first ever Bulgarian show. The hip hop fans amongst us sure dropped lucky on that one and regailed tales of an apparent fantastic night the next morning. Well, apart from two of our guys accidentally ending up in a gangster’s house but that’s another story!
Alex Winstanley (R1 team manager – of sorts)
Continued very soon...
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