Cigarette smoke, weird little sausages, wack Euro style and a million odd dialects. Ahhh…Europe.

Completely beat the jet lag this time around. I stayed up that last night in Veg-ass, all the way through. Tough shit. Caught my flight over to Los Angeles. So hard to stay up. But, as soon as that big plane took off, I was to sleep. Slept 7 of 11 hours. Long ass flight. Touched down in Paris, got a real cold vibe from all the Frenchies who were checking my passport and tickets. Wow, surprising. Fuck ‘em. Over to Munich, and right to the show. Met up with the Grenerds and well, shit was on.

Highlights from the last week:

01. Shared a room with Dave Schiff. Big hunk of shit. Buy some new socks, fuckbag.

02. Hearing Rose yell, “Blow Job” so loud over a nice dinner at some traditional German restaurant. “They don’t know what I’m saying, right? Ha. Watch this: BULLSHIT!”

03. Meeting a ton of exotic people, from wild-ass places like Poland and Finland and Russia and Belarus and France and all over hell, over here.

04. Getting a stern tongue lashing from a nasty old German lady. (Dave Schiff’s fault, of course. He had his feet on resting on the seat across from us on the subway, while passed out.) “Alben schlicken hoffen foffa scmitzen der plotz!!” (Excuse the sad recreation at her angular outburst of grisly ranting. What a goddamn brutal language. Goddamn bavarians, anyway.)

05. Carving my namesake into a table at the Hofbrau house.

The ISPO tradeshow ended without incident yesterday. All the brands report good showings. The Coal and Union booths were amazing. GP and Martino killed it. Grenade’s German distributors blew last year’s booth completely out of the water. Great, great job, you schnitzels. Saw lots of industry friends from the states, a big extension from Veg-ass last week. All good stuff. I’m no Bob Gundram or anything, but, find myself amazed at the cavalcade of buddies I know from this little snowboard industry. Pretty colorful bunch of dicks.

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Munich is cold. Not used to this bone-chillin’ weather. Been enjoying a daily pretzel and a nice ice-cold bottle of Volvic (odd name.) water. “Aqua Minerale, No Gas!” Fuck the selzter water. Absolutely required for your hotel room while in Europe: One giant bottle of water. (I don’t budge on this one.)

Still in Munich, rooming with Coal Brad, Union George and Union Marty. Had an amazing Indian food supper last night, and counting the minutes for an exotic meal tonight. Bring it on.