Germany 2022

Tour party: Zio, Graeme B, Big Pete, Ali, Keith, Kenny & Fred

Finally, after many postponements, cancellations and changes of plan, the group’s annual Deutschesfußballwochenende took place in April 2022. Once again, the city of Köln was the chosen destination with games involving Fortuna Düsseldorf against Dynamo Dresden, Schalke against Werder Bremen and Duisburg against 1860 Munich being selected.

The tour started well with the kitty contributing to two typically German-sized meals on Thursday night and Friday afternoon as the photos will show, indeed how Fred managed to finish his Calzone pizza on the Friday defies belief! 

On Friday night, however, things started to go wrong with neither key for the Barrie Bros room working and indeed as the electronic key was also used to get into the hotel, it was a good job the rest of our keys worked. Poor from the hotel in not having a night porter or an emergency phone number as our rating of the hotel will testify. However, we did manage to muddle through with G sleeping on the chair in Zio’s room and Pete sleeping on a kiddies bed in the presidential suite shared by Fred and Keith.

Our bad luck seemed to continue on the Saturday as the train we were to use to get from Oberhausen to Gelsenkirchen ‘fahlt’ (had broken down). Zio managed to speak to two Schalke fans(Wolfgang and Kalli) who invited us to follow them in a regional detour, while doing so, generously shared the (large) amount of beer they had with them. Indeed at Mulheim where we had to change train a further supply of beer was purchased by both them and the kitty! On finding out that our plan was to go to Duisburg the following day, they gave a rather discouraging description of that city and invited us to go with them to the RW Oberhausen-Preußen Münster game the next day. After a quick discussion we agreed to do just that. Saturday night was spent in several bars in Köln including the inevitable trip to Shorty’s shots bar where I believe we set a new team record of having 8 shots!

In spite of the previous night’s excesses the group managed to get to Oberhausen and meet Wolfgang to go to the game where we met and swapped badges with several of his friends, some of whom were dressed as if they were still going to 70’s football with cut-off denim jackets with team badges ad scarfs wrapped around their wrists! A poor game saw Oberhausen well beaten giving us a score of 3-9 in favour of the away sides at the three games we went to. Incidentally it would have been worse had we gone to Duisburg as they were on the end of a 0-6 thrashing.

Sunday was spent back in Köln with our only visit to Asia Gourmet in the train station and then some drinks in the area of Eigelstein-Torburg.