We’re back from Essen!
To be correct we obviously came back more than two weeks ago, but I haven’t find enought time to update the blog until now. Family and university were in the middle.
There are many things to say about the journey and the fair, I’ll try to remember everithing.
The journey to Essen was veeery long, 14 hours in a car can be a test to your knees and back, but after all it wasn’t so tiring (I wasn’t driving, of course!), even if we encountered what seemed a car accident and works in the last part, when we where after Koblenz. The journey back on the other hand, was really painful, only 9 hours but I sat all the time in the small space left in the back of the car, after all the baggages and (primarily) games were loaded. My neck and my back and my knees were aching all the way from Switzerland to Italy.
The hotel was really a surprise. We stayed in Dortmund, all the affordable hotels in Essen were complete, and so the city of choice became Dortmund. It was a good choice. We stayed in a NH Hotel, and the room was really nice and confortable. The breakfast was good and generous. Next time I’ll definetly try the sauna at the topmost floor.
The fair was a surprise too. It was really big, a little more than I expected. As soon as we arrived we found Angelo Porazzi and Pierluca Zizzi in the booth they shared with Mario Sacchi of PS Giochi. At the same booth we found Gabriele Berzoni and Guglielmo Ruberti from AmiciLudici.
Wandering through the halls we found other friends, in particular Claudio Gelosa, author of Esagek, had a huge wooden version of his game which was attracting many of the passersby.
We found a booth with Japanese game, Make You Gunfighters , I’ve passed a few moments talking with the designer and the other people in the booth, they were all really nice and I really enjoyed talking to them.
There was too much to see and too much to play, and obviously too much to buy.
As expected I was drawn into purchasing the new games from Eggert Spiele, Cuba and Hamburgum are now mine availing the obvious “fair discount”.
While Simone went in a “wild buy frenzy”, specially when we passed near any abstract games booth, I’ve made some “wise purchase”: Conquest Of The Empire (18 €) and Bootleggers (15 €) both from the now resurrected Eagle Games.
We participated to the Giro D’Italia Ludico, a very nice idea from our friend Jost Schwider, creator of the website Spielepizza.de.
In the two days we passed at MesseEssen we talked to many people and we were actually inhebriated by the fair. The only regret was the absence of a Forge Booth this year. We have some ideas about it we will put forward with some new German friends.
The icing on the cake of our german days has been the dinner at the Zwiebel Brauhaus. Jost and his wife took us to this really nice brauhaus in Soest, the city where they live not too far from Essen and Dortmund. We learned new things about german food and most important we ate very good german food, and drank very good german beer. The Soester Dunkel Bier we drank was so good we decided to take some bottles in Italy.
In the end, I really enjoyed this journey in Germany and all the things we were able to do, to buy, to eat, to drink and to play.
In my flickr page there are some photos that show how much we enjoyed this experience.
