MNSTR Blade
Other than hanging at the house my time was spent working and getting high in the evenings, the connection I had in Münster was just amazing and never failed to deliver the most amazing stuff. We had a couple meetups with old friends as well, basically a big Schlemmertag for everyone.
Felix would invite the old teenage friend gang we both share over for homemade burgers and a barbeque. Burgerfest was one of those occasions, all the sauces and dips were created at home, caramelized onions, guacamole dip, the famous burger sauce, lots of bacon, fine buns, a couple of salads, handcut fries, it was all there. All the boys came, we got drunk and high and reminicensed the good old times we had when we were teens. Everybody enjoyed building their own burgers with the pool of ingredients, happily reached food koma, finished it off with a few more beers and spliffs and then went to bed in the living room. Now that we are all older people most of us can’t make time inbetween kids, work and saving money anymore. There aren’t many chances for get-togethers so this was a great opportunity to catch up, get a glimpse of what everybody was doing with their lifes and of course share a couple of beers and spliffs. Everybody Felix invited came, enjoyed the food and each others company.
Jo Zenk – Backside Channel 3, Bochum, Germany
I was excited to go out and skate with the boys after a long Covid break. Restrictions were still being invented, at the time it was the number of people that were together in confined spaces, cars for example. We mananged to drive the 100km to an old trusted spot, Bochum university. A campus university set on the side of a hill with quite a few options to skate. This was the second spot and Jo kept busting out Topsouls, bs Backslides and ended the session with this bs channel 3. Our homie Deniz was filming on the stairs, but photoshop made him disappear.
Bikeride, Münster, Germany
Even though it is not, this could well be me on my way to the meeting spot, in the early morning. Münster is a small big city and whilst I lived in the south all the bladehomies lived on the northern side of town. This meant that I had to smash through 10-15 kilometres on the bike before I even was able to meet anyone or attend the session (if it was local). Münsters 3rd and arguably best park, Gievenbeck, was also located in that area.
The Mnstr Blade scene was quite strong with Jo Zenk and Patrick Smith as it’s core and a couple of other local guys that would join the session sometimes but were not as serious about it as those two. Due to the restrictions all the skateparks were closed when I first moved to Münster but towards summer they started to open up again, we were all counting the days.
I knew Jo and Patrick from past sessions and blade-meetups so we immedietly were able to reconnected where we had left off. We went to skate mostly in the parks around Münster, sometimes we’d go on further excursions but I don’t like being in the car for hours and hours to get to a spot that I might not even want to skate just to drive back a couple of hours. It felt like a lot of effort. We did go to Uni Bochum, had a session in Dortmund and went to visit a couple of parks outside of Münster but I kept it local for most of the times I went to skate. Eugen and Danny would come to visit from Borken a couple of times and destroy all the Münster spots we took them to. The crew was pretty tight knit which ment that they wouldn’t only skate but also hang out afterwards. I got invited a couple of times but kindly rejected their offer, which pissed them off a bit. They basically played videogames, had beers and smoked a lot of weed during their meetups, which I wasn’t all that interested in (at least the videogames and the beers). I mean I was almost 40 years old. While I would’ve met them occasionally the main problem was the 30-40min, 15km bike ride to get there. I had to ride to the northern part of town while I lived in the south. It also involved an intoxicated ride back, right through the centre, passing way to many police stations and possible checkpoints on the way. Münster is known to be a town where young policeman are trained to be old policemen, so to practice they stop a lot of bikes and scooters etc. It may be one of the few places in the world where crossing a red light is something unusual, can cost you your driver’s license and is frowned upon, so people just don’t do it. They wait and love to obey the rules, may they be as pointless as can be. It is so extreme that I was worried to ride my bike on the “wrong” side of the road as the police or the Ordnungsamt could always be close and fine me. A friend had lost his driver’s license for a DUI, so he had no choice but to ride his bike afterwards, now after a few more bike related DUIs the government sent him a letter prohibiting him from riding a bike at all. That’s how crazy it is in Germany. Can’t even ride a bike.
Jo Zenk – Rocket Fish, Bochum, Germany
I’ve come full circle, in my prime I would’ve tried something here, but in my later days I’d just watch and take a photo. It was time to shine for Jo (again) and he laced the rocket fish perfectly multiple times. Being on these sessions was hit or miss, sometimes the spots the homies wanted to skate just sucked or were too difficult to deal with, it was possible to spent the whole day waiting around for the others to deal with their tricks. That’s why I preferred the skatepark sessions towards the end, fun for everyone.
I enjoyed to just stay at the farm and watch the walking dead and have a few biffs in the workshop in the evenings which was another reason to not go on that long bike ride. This did last through the summer into autumn and was a perfect setup for those days with light till 10pm and late sessions at the skatepark.
Winter on the other hand was the season of long car rides to the few indoor skateparks that were close by, it could ve taken inbetween 1-3 hours one way. This never appealled to me and I think I didn’t join for any of the tours. Seats in the car were also quite scarce, so it was ok not to join. Once the weather turned bad skating with the crew fizzled out more and more and even my lonely sessions in one of the two neighboring skateparks stopped as it was wet almost every day and later too cold to be fun. Skating is a feel good and be in the sun activity to me, I struggle in the winter. From October to January the activity of choice was a 10km run, almost daily, to be able to keep up with the high(er) calorie intake. I could’ve just skipped all the red band and chocolates but that wasn’t and sadly still isn’t an option that works very well for me. Sugar addiction is a habit I haven’t been able to break. The running was alright and served well as to break a sweat, get those juices flowing and feel somewhat tired afterwards. I felt like I had done something that day, enough to eat a lot of food and then chill on the couch. Other than that I wasn’t moving a lot, apart from going to Lidl or occasionally to the post office I didn’t do much, if anything at all. For the dark wintermonths I’d hang out in the workshop on the side of the house for the duration of the laptop battery and edited the photos I took during my trip to Canada and the USA. I could smoke weed in there, but it was pretty cold and once the spliff was finished it was time to quickly get back into the warm house.
Eugen Enin – Sweatstance, Münster, Germany
Eugen is arguably one of the best skaters in the world, if a couple of common bladers were asked to create a top 10 riders list Eugen would come up in most of them for sure. Technically this is a pretty heavy spot, a huge kinked rail with all sorts of dangerous stuff towards the drop side. Eugen and Johannes skated it like a practice-rail for warm-up.
Going for all those daily runs ended in a dumb story involving a vehicle, its owner and me ending up having to sadly pay a 2500 euro fine. Once it got to late January life was pretty shitty, the pandemic was still going strong, it had been cold and wet for almost three months now.
Frustration levels were at all time highs. Even almost a year later they hadn’t stopped any of the bullshit (rather the opposite, they kept it going for another whole year and raised the intensity for certain groups of people). I was on my run and had already finished about three quarters when a guy in a biger SUV type of vehicle came in my direction. He was definitly speeding on the tiny road I was running on. The road was a short cut known to the locals, conveniently connecting to bigger streets. From the perspective of the law it was “in the countryside” where any vehicle passing a person on foot needed to keep a minimum distance of two meters. With me on the road this was impossible as it wasn’t wider than four meters. He also didn’t care about keeping any distance or slowing down. There was a cyclist going my direction on the other side of the road, the driver had to squeeze his car in-between us. And after going on way too many runs I’ve had it with those respectless dickheads speeding on that little road. The city had made it a 50km/h zone just because of that. I rasised my arm just to reach out with the intention to touch the mirror a little, spread some awareness about keeping at least some distance. If I could touch the mirror like that he was too close. Due to the speed I wasnt able to foresee how the mirror smacked back towards the car window and it broke. I didn’t care and kept running. Obviously the guy went completly nuts, he turned around, sped by me and started to block the road a bit further ahead. He threw himself at me like he might have seen in the movies and tried to bring me to a fall but couldnt, he just bounced off and fell to the ground. I managed to get rid of him but he had allready called the police who was able to catch me. With just about another 30 seconds missing to me being well hidden at home they came cruising down my road. This was pretty unlucky. The whole thing went the correct german way with lawyers, letters, the police station and court orders etc. By the time the matter was ready to be put in front of a judge I had left to Mexico and it was only those people that sat in the courtroom waiting for justice to be served. My lawyer somehow slept on the matter and the result was that I had to pay a 2500€ fine. Quite annoying at the time, but the thought of all these people sitting in that stinky court room and me on a beach in Mexico was worth the money. At least a little bit. This event ended my stay in Münster, I went to my parents place afterwards as I ended up in a crisis, working crazy hours all through the holiday season, it was extremely cold in the house as well as the room and it was a dark and sad yet pretty normal German winter. The only positive thing on the horizon was a plane ticket to Mexico that I had booked a while ago. Felix came up with the destination mainly because the covid rules were supposed to be pretty relaxed over there. I don’t think I would ve considered traveling to Mexico if it wasn’t for him, too many cliches and prejudges. We had been talking about it all of autumn going into winter and finally booked our little escape around Christmas.
Jo Zenk – 540, Münster, Germany
This bank-spot is located in front of one of Münsters university buildings, I would describe it as an inverted pyramid. It was extremely hard for Jo to get enough speed to gap over the side walk to the street. After a couple of tries one of our friends got his motorbike (a real motorbike not a 125cc or anything toyish) into the triangle and made sure Jo would fly out the bank without any problems.
