Simon’s

Here’s the photo report of the second day of the Double King contest held in Rome a couple of weeks ago, this one’s from the Hood Dirt Park in Tivoli, just outside of Rome. The place rocks and Fabio, the head behind it, just finished its newest attraction, a foam pit!!! Make sure to check out the park’s website dirt.hoodbmx.com

Of course here are the pictures from day 2 of the contest, as usual, enjoy them!

So finally, even tough a litte late, here are the shots from the Double King street-dirt MTB and BMX contest held in Rome on november 8th an 9th. It took me a while because I flew to Beirut right after and was without internet for a few days, but that’s another story…

So anyways here’s the first batch of pics from saturday, were street riding was on the menu. Lots of good stuff, some of which you will see in a future feature on the magazine I work for, Mountain Bike World.

Here’s the action, enjoy it!

Small bikes are fun, especially at night. Dual King contest is coming up this weekend, it’s going to be a sweet event, more info here.

The riders in the pics are Luca Lucchese (who will be one of the judges of the contest) and Fabio Pacifici, promoter of the contest and head honcho at Hood BMX Distribution and Hood Dirt Park. Props to Fabio, Tiziano, Sandro, Ale Ceci and everyone else who is working hard to make this contest happen! It’s gonna be a sweet weekend!

In the meantime:

When Singletrack magazine asked me to put togheter a story for their photo issue about what’s like to travel around the world with a downhill racing team I was stoked. But I was even more stoked to see the final result: as usual the guys at Singletrack have done a wonderful job with picture choice and layout, they respected the captions I sent them and wrote a brief introduction, so here is a sneak peek of what you can find in Singletrack magazine, issue 45, available now in the shops or for download online!

Last post from Estonia, or, better, last post about Estonia, as I flew back home monday the 20th of october. The last weekend in Tallinn was pretty chilled, and that is a good things. Being with your girlfriend after so many months away on the road (about which you can read about here - www.playbiker.com) is really good, there is so much time for relaxing, catching up and even little treats like…

…this! Home made pancakes for breakfas - two days in a row!!!

Saturday night was pretty mellow, with the highlight defenitely being the dinner in the georgian restaurant Prosomani, super tasty and incredibly cheap, only 30€ for both, including a POT of tea that Ely ordered thinking it was just a simple cup. We managed to catch a taxi home thanks to the very kind restaurant owner, who wasn’t too happy when I sat on the piano given to him as a gift by the georgian president…oh well - guess I didn’t know how to say sorry in russian!

Sunday we visited the very very nice Estonian National ART Museum KUMU which is located in the Kadrihog park in the center of town, a green area built around a zarist era mansion. The museum building is very modern but still very well placed in the context of the whole park:

The collection is not super impressive but very interesting, considering that during the soviet regime it was difficult for estonian artists to work freely. What impressed me most in fact was reading a letter from a soviet minister of culture about art during the communist era, it sounded something like “Every artist is free in the USSR, as long as its work is compliant with socialism and its purpose”. What did this mean? Well…I guess that they were not that free…

Estonia keeps surprising me for the extreme politeness of its people and for how things are managed here: for example on every floor of the museum you could get free stools which also folded up to act as walking sticks. Good to sit and watch the movies or read the longer texts in the exhibits!

A few shots from the museum now! The curvy interior:

Some pretty neat armchairs made of recycled tyres:

“The Strawberry Eaters”, an example of 20th century estonian art:

A crazy corner hall full of sculpted heads and the recording of all their voices playing:

And finally the nice weather outside:

After a nice soup and croissant in the museum’s café (with free wifi everywhere in the museum, of course!) we headed home and prepared for the next venue: the swimming pool! No, I am not joking, here in Estonia there is a big tradition of having grand publich swimming pools and saunas and a mere 5 minutes walk from Ely’s house sits the Kalev Hotel and SPA. Kalev is basically the richest man in Estonia, he owns hotels, spas, magazines, restaurants and TV stations. The Kalev SPA is S-I-C-K! You can get an entry ticket for one or two hours and a full day, a full day is only about ten euros and you can use an olympic size swimming pool, various hot tubs, jacuzzis, saunas, steam baths and three crazy waterslides which are freakin’fast and fun! We swam, bubbled in the jacuzzi, got steamed and so on. Oh, and if you fancy taht there is also a gym! And a poolside bar! So you can swim a thousand meters, have a beer and then jump in the sauna!

After all this swimming we were in the mood for fish, so decided to try out a sushi bar in the center which looked good: I can say I had some of the best salmon and tuna rolls of my life! It was then time for a quick beer with Elisa’s italian friends in Tallinn and then off to bed. I think I didn’t sample the estonian drinking life fully, since the day after we went to the supermarket and I found this:

It was then time to pack and leave…pretty sad because I had a blast here and it truly felt like a holiday! I hope to be back soon!

You might be wondering why this series of posts is called “Established in Estonia” if I am here only for 10 days…well my girlfriend is actually here for  months so that should do it, right?

This post actually took a bit longer than expected to complete so it covers quite a lot of time…

Last weekend we did a bit more exploring in Tallinn but mainly at dusk and at night…why? Because we were at home most of the day making a glorious tiramisù for Elisa’s colleagues, here is a moment of the long and energy sapping process:

As soon as we finished the culinary marathon we managed to go out for a walk in the beautiful Troompea, a.k.a. the Old Town of Tallinn. Here is the (slightly blurry - I don’t have my trusty Canon IXUS, so we have to rely on Elisa’s “old faithful” S50) view from the top of Troompea hill:

We then stopped in really cool bar called Noku, which means either “little nap” or “little pea”, that was not clear. It is such a cool place that it has no sign outside and the door is locked, you need a magnetic card to get in. Problem is, we didn’t have it. And since the place itself is on the first floor, nobody can see you from the windows. So we waited quite a bit until two girls came out: we propped in the door and we were in! Hopefully Elisa will get a card in the near future so we can go in a legitimate way!

This was sunday night…I spent monday, tuesday and wedensday catching up on some work, as it was deadline time for my magazine and I had 4 stories due in. So lots of sitting in front of the computer in nice cafés with free internet connection. Sorry, no pictures!

Actually on wedensday night we treated ourselves to a couple of things: first was a drink at the bar on top of the Radisson-SAS hotel, one of the tallest buildings in Tallin. It was an incredibly nice place, the drinks were unbelievably cheap for such a posh location and the view was epic.

It’s amazing how on one side you are facing a medieval town and on the other you have ultra-modern buildings, but it seems to be the leit motive of this country!

After this we were off to dinner in a restaurant called “House”, which also has one of the best sushi bars in Tallin. We got to seat in our own private “cave” (well, more of a hole in the wall!) eating from a low table sitting on sultry cushions, with the waitress kneeling down to serve us every time…a bit embarassing, but the sushi was good, as well as the local beer.

Yesterday (thursday oct. 16th) I finished up all the work and then went for a walk in the Old Town by day…not much to add to what we already saw, except a visit to the national Photography Museum. Entrance fee? 1 euro. In total 3 rooms which were a prison’s torture chamber in past times (eeeek…scary!), with two old ladies managing the place. Learned that the legendary Minox mini-camera was originally invented in Estonia!I wandered some more in the Old Town and an alcohool’s store windows caught my eye:

I had read about this vodka in Roberto Saviano’s book “Gomorra”, but unfortunately it wasn’t available for sale…

Today I did something I consider pretty strange for myself: I wanted to do some more sightseeing but the weather was horrible (cold and drizzly) and most importantly Tallinn is a small city but very long. Yes, long. The two extremities of the city are almost 20km away, and the various neighbourhoods stretch along the shoreline. This makes it quite hard to walk to all the interesting areas, and public transport is good but not very clear, so I invested in a 24 hour ticket for those city tour buses which you have in almost every city. I took two tours, up to both extremities of town. Both were cool, but the best one was the one in the afternoon, which went to the Pirita area. There is a beautiful park which encloses a river, I saw so many trails that would be SWEET to ride on, and also another cool thing: a small jump and a rail for snowboarding, already in place for when it snows…like a mini-snowpark! Also, right next to the national songfestival grounds, there is a skatepark that looks really good…will try to check it out on the weekend! The tour drove up to a TV tower, which, at 314m, is as high as the highest point in all the baltic states. It was built for the 1980 Olympics, and during the soviet era you had to show your passport if you wanted to go to the observation deck on the top, because from there you could see the lights of Helsinki which is a mere 2 hours away by boat, and foreigners were not allowed up! Crazy…Anyways the tower is now closed for renovations but it still stands as a quite eerie symbol of the past…

On my way back home I saw a small building with somme oddly pained metal balls outside…turns out it is the national mine museum: apparently in the communist era Estonia was considered as the border between the Soviet Union and the rest of the world, so its coastline was heavily guarded and the coastal waters peppered with mines of all kinds. Plus during the past world wars Estonia was always involved in some way, so in its coastal waters there has been an insane amount of mines, some of which are still out there, as the mine hunting missions have been going on until 2007!

I’m off to my last weekend in Estonia now, fingers crossed for decent weather!

Apple launches its new laptops, and I, being the Mac geek that I am (I admit it) immediately run over to their site to check them out. Ultra-thin, a-ha, multi-touch, a-ha, but…wait…isn’t that…oh yes, it is…mountain biking! Here’s the “sample” screen shot the guys at Apple used to showcase their new Macbook Pro (this is from the italian website but on the US one it’s there and it’s even bigger):

Now I am pretty sure those two shots featuring Santa Cruz Syndicate’s riders are from Forrest Arakawa, who, as far as my best knowledge goes, is based in Nor Cal, right where Apple is…could this be the start of a cool collaboration between the biking industry and Apple? Or it’s just a coincidence? Anyways those new Pros sure as hell look nice!

So here I am in Tallinn, Estonia, visiting my girlfriend who is here for 6 months as part of a job exchange program. She’s working in a cool design agency called something like LOVOOOOOLLLLLL (with a bit less Os and Ls but you get the idea). I landed here yesterday not quite knowing what to expect from a country this small and with so little people living in it, the magazine on the plane said the population is roughly 1.300.000…that’s not even on third of Rome’s inhabitants! Anyways the place looks neat, everything is pretty tidy and it looks a lot like a scandinavian country. My first glimpse of Tallinn was a quick walk in the historic city center which is super nice, with well preserved buldings, lots of restaurants and cafes and no cars at all! There are plaques on every interesting building so you can read its history, neat!

This is the (blurry) Town Hall square in Tallin, really beautiful!

On the first day we had quite a slow start, thanks in part to the really bad wheather, cold and gray: thankfully the buildings in Elisa’s street all are pretty colorful, as you can see above. We decided to have lunch in a nice café and we paid just 13€, everything included (even free wifi!)…you’ve got to love the exchange rate!

This is part of our lunch: potato and scallion soup, chicken and mango salad and a meat pancake! Yummy!

Then we were off to a russian market, this in contrast was pretty strange, looked a bit like it was back to the post-1991 era, a bit eerie actually but maybe it’s because we went there when it was almost closing time. There is a soviet memorabilia stall that I want to check out later in the week!

Talkin of eerie, this defines it pretty well: would you ever buy a tombstone at your local market? Yep…they even had an engraving service available!

Pork feet and assorted internal organs from various animals seemed to be the hot sell in the butcher’s section…

Since the weather didn’t seem to get any better we decided to go check out some shops since Elisa had to buy ingredients for tiramisù (for her colleagues…I don’ get to eat it!!!). The minute you step in a shopping mall the contrast with the market is striking, it all looks very western and in some cases even much nicer than Italy. We stopped in a cool bookstore which stocked tons of magazines from all over the world, I managed to find a copy of the new issue of Dirt magazine here well before I could get it in Rome!

For a mere 2€ you could sit down in the bookstore’s café and enjoy this cappuccino in a fancy cup. The supermarket we went to was an experience in itself, super facny and with all sorts of ready to cook foods, international stuff and a selection of spirits to rival a drunakrd’s wildest dreams! We saw some guys and girls, probably coming from Finland, stocking up on beers and vodka, they usually do this because the taxes here are much lower and Helsinki is only a 2hrs boat ride from here! I bought some things for dinner which I didn’t exactly manage to identify, anyways we just ate them and it seems like we had a local fare composed of prok meatballs, a kind of cereal salad and mashed potatoes. Now it seems we have a meeting arranged with the rest of the italian community in Tallin for a night out in the old town…I hope I will be back on tomorrow morning without a massive hangover!

Take mountain biking, add an engine, bigger helmets, multiply the riders by then, then seal in a big sports arena, pour in music, go go girls, fireworks and a cheering crowd and there you have it: supercross!

It was a cool night out, a great way to celebrate the end of the racing season! Freestyle was cool as well, but I guess in my opinion racing can’t be beaten, but damn those backflips cliffhangers make a good halftime show for sure! It’s great to see how such a cool two-wheeled sport can be taken indoors, to the heart of the city, and provide a good saturday night of entertainment to thousands of people, including families with kids…I wish we could do something similar with mountain biking, the potential is there, I believe… Right after the SX race we wandered in the pits for a few hours, amazed by the size of the team’s trucks, drooling over their setups and thinking how cool it would be to show up at a World Cup with such a monster…in some places it wouldn’t even make it up the road to the venue!

We decided to drive back to Pila so the next day we could clean our condo and hang out with Edo and his family, which were kind of our adoptive parents for the whole summer. Edo has built a sweet new pumptrack and we sessioned that heavily until it was dark. Edo was on his 20″ and ripping the place apart, I had only my MK III but with the shock pumped rock hard, the forks wound down to 110mm travel and NO CHAIN it was a mean machine! So much fun, I want one here in Rome too! Tizz was ripping it up on Edo’s 20″ as well, as shown here!

We then said goodbye to Edo and his family after another home baked pizza feast, and in the following days drove back home with all our bags, gear and bikes. It was strange to go back in a big city like Rome after 5 solid months of travelling and going back to our house in the alps in Pila, but I am slowly readjusting, my house is a mess and there is tons of work to do…so I better start doing it now!

Just a quick post to say that more of my work from this season is coming out in magazines, catalogs and websites alike.

This time is a photo from the Cannondale Factory Racing Team photoshooting I did last april in Finale Ligure, a picture of Duncan Riffle has been chosen for Cannondale’s international catalog as well as for their website, pretty nice! Here’s the link to the page http://www.cannondale.com/bikes/09/cusa/gravity.html otherwise you can check it out here:

It was a couple of days of work and I am glad it paid off. I am now home briefly to say goodbye to a very loved one leaving for a few months to go work in a cold, cold country, then it’s a short stint back to Pila and then home, finally, for the whole winter. Or just a few days?