FCUM A.D.

Yes we do…. <3

Spotted in town (opening a can of worms in Hamburg):

Ha!  Wandering around St Pauli on Saturday and there are Angry Worms everywhere!  Reminds me of the computer game…

Random Streetart & Graffitis in Dresden:

Mostly SGD related…

Random Streetart in Dresden:

Non-football related but still kind of cool…

<3

Spotted in town (Hamburg)

a few nice stickers and paste-ups spotted in and around St Pauli.  Should buy a little time, whilst I try to make a match report from Sunday’s “spectacular”…

For those of you into bicycles, Suicycle (featured on one of the stickers and from St Pauli) do really nice frames.  Including this lovely flame-grilled badboy.

Back to football soon I promise!

Spotted in town (Hamburg) part 2:

A few more snaps…

Spotted in town (Hamburg):

Or buying time in between all the traveling to finish my match report for Frankfurt ;-)

A beautiful winters day, coupled with some time off, meant I got to have a stroll along the harbour front on Monday.  A few sights…

Ah this blog, back in its early formative…erm…months, used to spend a lot more time concerned with such matters.  Still just because the pics arent so frequent, doesnt mean they’re not appreciated.  Spotted in town…

Awaydays Part 2:

So the general plan was to see a bit of the Ostsee (the East coast of Germany) in between the Duisburg game and the Braunschweig away match.  Over five days, I trained it to Lübeck and then road the coast’s cycle routes through to Rostock, stopping off at interesting towns (or places with vaguely amusing names like Klütz) on the way.  Id be tempted to adapt the tagline from Easyrider “A man went in search of Germany, but he couldn’t find it anywhere…” to describe the trip.  A great ride, was sullied at times by endless election posters for the German Nazi Party.  I felt like I was going to be pulled over by the police like in the film for my unruly hair or beard…or perhaps for being foreign! 

As the route progressed, the stickers on lampposts indicated the locals preferred football team, St Pauli in Hamburg, a mix of St Pauli and HSV in Lübeck, only HSV once you got beyond the ferry at Travemünde and suddenly Hansa Rostock all the way once Wismar was reached.  The Nazi party posters started to appear, ironically, in the little countryside towns, where few foreigners were to be seen apart from the tourists boosting the economy there.  One particular village on the outskirts of Rostock was so monopolised by the posters, I had a good mind to come back at night and dig up their nicely paved cycle path (which naturally had been funded from outside their national borders by the E.U.).

However that puts too much of a negative slant on the place in general.  Wonderful countryside, was accompanied by beautiful beaches, and cycle routes meant you barely had to glance at a map.  I was particularly surprised by Rostock too.  Despite having visited the place once briefly when I was younger, due to the rivalry and trouble that has been standard between St Pauli and Hansa for so long, I expected it somehow to be a den of knuckledraggers.  Whilst the neighbouring villages seemed to match the cliché, as soon as I was riding through the Rostock estates with their streets named after famous Russians, I was amazed by the amount of Antifa stickers and punks everywhere.  Obviously when St Pauli come to town, its been known for Nazis to pop up frequently in the Hansa crowd, but the whole rivalry took on a bit of a Springfield v Shelbyville feel once I got as far as Rostock’s centre.  A few of their ultras were milling about later on, and amusingly looked like any other teams equivalent.  Carharrt trousers, Airmaxes or NB, Raybans, tru-fit caps, silk scarf etc.  Even funnier was that they also have their own szeneviertel (sort of the cool part of town) like in Hamburg.  Similar graffiti, similar cool cafes, similar bohemian looking houses, similar Late Machiatos sippers!  By the time Id noticed all of the freshly stuck leftwing stickers, right next to Hansa Ultra group Suptra’s ones (bizarre as the group’s reputation always suggested such stickers would never be found in such close proximity), I was wondering to myself how this rivalry keeps on going.  Its fucking miles from Hamburg, politically its hardly Chemnitz anymore…I guess the reason for my lack of understanding, is because Im not from here in Germany.  You perhaps need to have grown up with it, with its recent political history, to understand it.  For the same reason, send a German to Chester and they’d probably marvel at the pretty market town, rather than muttering something about “Munich gesturing, richkid, fully seated stadium bastards”! ;-)