17th October 2008

My flight to Cologne, or Koln as the Germans would prefer you use, was uninteresting and thankfully safe, despite being booked on Easyjet, possibly the cheapest no frills airline in existence. Thankfully they don’t save money by only flying on one engine and I arrived in Koln about an hour after I set off from London Gatwick.

My hatred for travel, or rather airports was not dimmed in any way by my experience of Gatwick, an airport I haven’t flown out of in some time (my usual destinations mean I have to use Heathrow). Despite not frequenting the place in a long while, it hadn’t changed. Its still stupidly busy, poorly organised and badly designed. Don’t even get me started on their systems either. I arrived at 3.10pm and yet it took until precisely 5.09pm to get checked in and through security. That’s worse than Charles de Gaule or Heathrow and trust me, it takes a lot to beat either of those terrible airports in the badly run stakes.

It doesn’t help that security seemed to be half asleep, even forgetting to put out a sign that warns you in advance to take our your laptop. Heathrow on the other hand, doesn’t require you to do so, so I left mine in after guessing which way it would go. I got it wrong and the whole queue then had to be held up so they could put my bag, minus the laptop through the scanners and then laptop, minus bag through straight after.

That wasted 2 minutes alone, imagine if 200 people did the same thing that day. That’s 400 minutes or almost 7 hours! The people who turned up at 4pm to catch their holiday flight to Tenerife at 8pm, missed it by 3 hours and are still at Gatwick now, flummoxed by the delays. And all because someone was too lazy to put out the sign before security asking you to take out your laptop. When I pointed out the lack of a sign, the security guard merely stared at me blankly with a resigned sigh and said “I know”.

The flight was slightly delayed on take off too, but nothing in comparison to the delays I have had on Virgin flights in the past. Don’t get me wrong, I actually love flying with Virgin, but they never take off on time. Its always something. A dog died once and a lady got take off due to a heart attack on another occasion. We then had the doctor on board the last time I flew to LA and we were grounded by fog a few years back, all on Virgin flights.

So, Cologne. Well, its not that different to any other European medium to large sized city. Except the part of town I am in is very, hmm, how do I put it, Persian. I understand from my brief study of Germany that almost 3% or 3 million people that live here are Turkish, which may explain why it feels like ive flown in to Ankara (minus the sun) rather than Koln. And no, sorry, I don’t have the little dots on my keyboard that go above the “o” in Koln. See.

I arrived here yesterday evening at around 9pm and after a fairly expensive cab ride to my hotel, I quickly made my way to my place of work for the weekend, the GIGA studios ground floor, also known as ESL TV. Despite covering ESL matches and working with many of their good people down the years, I had never had the pleasure of working on ESL TV, although a few years ago, GIGA did use my live commentary on a few matches in UT2004 which went out on GIGA 2, which is effectively now ESL TV.

The studio is compact, but useful and pretty good for an online production. My guardian for the weekend is Phillip a German who speaks far better English than I speak German (luckily) and who seems to want to make me feel as welcome as possible, which is nice, but a little unnecessary. One of the other producers is Julian who was very helpful whilst we had some issues with HLTV during the night. Oh, yes, I didn’t tell you did I. I am here to cover the ESL Masters season 3 from Montreal. Aka the Global Challenge. It really needs a shorter name.

Yes, id love to be in Montreal covering it live, but its expensive, so instead we are doing what a lot of TV companies do around the world and covering it remotely, hence the need for HLTV to behave itself.

An old friend is in Montreal to run the tournament, TheRogue and he helped cure some of the problems with HLTV and I have to say, its great to have a friend over there I can talk to when we have problems. There is a great deal to be said about having good networks in gaming, you never know when you will cross paths with people.

My night was pretty uneventful as we didn’t get to cover CS 1.6 in the end. Not that I cared too much, after all I watched some HLTV with mibr demolishing everyone, including a 16-2 rout of EG.canada. Today the better games will begin and hopefully we get to cover some games live this time.

Staying up til 5am didn’t help my sleep pattern, but I got up just after mid day having slept well, showered and walked the streets of Koln for an hour, taking in the (very Turkish) shops and even practicing a bit of my bad German on a poor unsuspecting lady in the coffee shop next to my hotel. I got a milky coffee though, so it can have been that bad. I even said thanks and goodbye. In German.

Its nearly 2pm and time to head to the studio once again. This time for a much longer period. We will be on air around 5pm tonight and going right through to 5am tomorrow morning. And we still have Sunday to come!

p.s. Does anyone know how I ask for an eight inch long, Italian bread with swiss cheese, mushroom and ham, toasted from Subway, in German, im starving.

Don’t forget to tune in at www.tv.esl.eu and why not join me in IRC esl.tv or quadv