skate journal: I GOT TO SKATE STALIN PLAZA IN PRAGUE!!!!!! (sept 25, 2023)
After a long bus ride and walk through the city I arrived at the long stairway to the granite fortress known as Stalin Plaza. They were filming a movie on one set of stairs and told me it was closed so I had a pretty good panic attack as I went up the other side. But it was good and I arrived to an empty plaza and sat to calm down for a while, did some warm ups then cruised around and checked it all out. It was way larger than I had thought. The lower level was cool too but some annoying kids and rollerblader had shown so after a couple noseslides and slappies I went back to the main area. For about an hour I felt pretty good on my board. I had a really fun run on the higher pinkish ledges of noseslide to fakie, halfcab noseslide then crooks. I had posted up and did a few crooks in a row. It felt great to get a few. Like it was the whole reason I bought a new board when my luggage went missing. I also got a couple slow front 50s that took way too long. Then skated lines for a bit just having fun. Switch front nose, halfcab flip, crooks, noseslide, bail a treflip. I didn’t try many flippers though, wanted to take advantage of the granite. Tried noseslide 270 shove for a while. Kind of got one somewhat quickly, but couldn’t get a better one. Some other people showed up so I stopped selfie filming. My body had also mostly shut down so everything had become a struggle. I didn’t do much more, enjoyed watching some dudes play some really good games of SKATE. Then Liz and India showed up, filmed me do one last crooks and we bounced off to the castle. Felt pretty amazing to skate this spot and made me want to be much better at ledges if somehow that is possible getting into my 50s.
(setup 8.25 flower, mob grip, venture 5.6 shake junt v-hollows, spitfire 51mm f4 99a classic, new balance numeric 288 b/w no insoles size 11.5)
(pain level 5/10)