Gamescom Diary – Day 1 – Fuckin’ Planes

To say the travel to Cologne today was a bit shit is a bit of an understatement. I’ve not done much of this traveling stuff before, but today just about everything that could go wrong did go wrong.  I mean, okay, we didn’t fall out of the sky and, as Mark rightly pointed out, I’ve not been raped, but it was a bit shit.  It all started at around 2am Tuesday morning, with a nice quiet drive to Glasgow airport. I was tired, sure, but soon woke up when Mark texted me to let me know he was nearly at Edinburgh airport. After shitting myself, properly waking up and nearly making the turnaround for the one hour drive to the right bloody airport I quickly called Mark, only to find out his taxi driver is a funny fucker.

We arrived at the airport, checked in and got through security with no problem (this is Glasgow after all, and we just don’t give a shit) and after a short discussion that revealed my lack of understanding of the speeds of space-craft and my inability to remember anything, ever, the flight was underway to Amsterdam. That is where part one of this fuck-up of a journey began. We were delayed by just ten minutes, ten minutes which would see our day completely thrown off.  The incredibly squish-faced stewardess told us that we could try and make it through to the gate and get our flight on time, or we could just reschedule.

We, as unfit gamer types, decided the best move would be to run the length of Amsterdam airport. I had been told that the airport was lovely, that it had free WiFi and lots of great shops. Much of that was a blur as we sped through it to get to the gate the furthest away from arrivals. I say a blur… like I said, gamers are not built for running, we ‘jogged’ to the gate five minutes before the plane was due to depart only to be told that we had wasted our time and that boarding had now closed. Well fuck you KLM.  Now suitably exhausted, we made the slow march all the way back to the transfer desk and, along with a bunch of other people, waited for about an hour to speak to someone. Finally we managed to speak to someone about getting another flight and headed off to Dusseldorf, where we were promised a taxi ride through to Cologne. We were finally underway and all was right with the world.

That was until we tried to reclaim our bags at Dusseldorf. It turns out KLM suck balls and despite telling us that our baggage would be transferred to the Dusseldorf flight, it was not and may be anywhere from Amsterdam to, apparently, Paris and we would just have to wait and find out. Luckily we were given a taxi ride to central train station in Cologne and got to share with a bunch of other poor saps who had transferred and were missing their bags.

Luckily they were all heading to Gamescom and the drive was made that little bit more interesting. One of the guys was a member of the retail sector traveling all the way from South Africa just to visit Gamescom – now that is dedication. It is also pretty god damn expensive, and apparently traveling to E3 last year had cost the guy more than twenty grand all in. There were also two guys from Florida who were “You Toobers” who both Mark and I recognised but forgot to ask them what the name of the show was. Pretty sure one of the guys was called Sanchez though and he had an insane beard/goatee thing (answers on a postcard if you know the channel).

Following all this, and with the help from a homeless girl with a train ticket machine, we caught up with young Ed and went to find our hotel. Now, during all of E3 Mark used his insanely accurate (read: incredibly expensive) GPS to find…well mainly the Cheesecake Factory. Turns out in Germany, GPS stands for ‘walk for miles in the wrong direction before you use Google maps like a normal person’ system.  Needless to say we were both exhausted, and finally reached the hotel after Mark had received about a billion stings from a wasp that had fallen into his shoe. No joke.  After all that, the poor bugger gets stung to shit on his foot. During a week where we are probably going to be walking miles.

I think we were due to attend the Sony conference but after all this it was unlikely to happen and Mark and I crashed out for a few hours. Apparently we missed a cracking conference and some amazing food, which was quite disappointing. We did wake to Mark having a crazy headache and feeling sick and with all our medical magic in our missing bags, lead us on a hunt for some aspirin.  Another four year walk ensued, starting with a very local pharmacy. Being men and Scottish we went in, couldn’t see the pills, decided this was actually a perfume shop and walked a good hour around town to find a proper pharmacy. Did you know, pharmacies in Germany are not allowed to display asprin or any painkillers on the shelf and so fill their shops with other shit to make it look more like a perfume shop than anything else? Neither did we.

With our luck, we wouldn't have been surprised if Norman Bates and his mother had been waiting for us...

So after all that we got some incredibly expensive painkillers and headed for home to get some proper sleep and prepare for the hectic first day of Gamescom, only to find that our bags had turned up and we had just wasted a lot of time, energy and cash on a hunt for stuff we already had.  So, that was day one. It wasn’t the best start but let’s face it, things can only get better from here on out.

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