Welcome shredders, I’m Marc Costa, a guy from Barcelona who has been brought the opportunity to be teaching skimboarding all summer long in La Coruña, a big city in the north-west of Spain and working with Voodoo skimboards. These days I’m going to be reporting my personal experiences all summer long with weekly-articles, showcasing the highlights of the week, explaining the evolution of the skimpark I’m working at, the workshops we’ll be doing in a few weeks, etc. For those who are curious, I’m working for VooDoo Skimboard, a Spanish company, and we are in a shopping center called Marineda City, the biggest shopping center in La Coruña. The skimpool is situated between some big shops and lots of people who come to buy also stop in the skimpark to let the kids have a great time. I’m a lucky guy, I’ve never imagined I would be spreading the sport I love the most to so many people!
Day 1 – 09/07/2016
I woke up at 6:10 AM and only slept 5 hours. The previous day I finished my last exam at 8:30 PM so I didn’t have any time at all to rest a little bit. My plane was flying at 9:15 AM, and fortunately everything went as expected (the company I was flying with had lots of issues with cancelled flights all week long). As soon as I entered to the plane, I sat next to a girl around my age and we started to talk. She had been working in Barcelona and was moving back to his hometown, La Coruña, so she explained me the places to visit there. After talking about everything, we arrived to La Coruña at 11:00 AM. She was so kind that she got me to the shopping center, Marineda City, as I was starting to work the same morning. I got her phone number so I could have someone to spend my free time with and let me introduce to the city, where I didn’t have any friend yet.
I arrived to the skimpark, where my boss Horacio and a friend of us, César, were already working. I joined them and finished the skimpark which you can see below.
At 2:30 PM we had a break and went having lunch in the same shopping center. We ended up at Foster’s Hollywood, and after having a well-deserved meal we were back to work at 4:30 PM and opened the skimpark to the first kids of the day. I also met my working partner, Rodrigo, a really nice guy and pro-skater from La Coruña, we’ll have a huge time there. Everything went well enough, even though we corrected some little mistakes and optimized some working liabilities, so we could improve day after day our monitor skills to let the people enjoy the best skimboarding experience.
We ended our journey at 8:30 PM. After that, Horacio, César and me went to dinner in a restaurant called “El 10”, where we had an orgasmic meal, everything was absolutely delicious!
After some wine and beer we ended up having dinner, we get a taxi and drove me to the building I’ll be staying the next weeks. The flat was so dirty when I arrived that I was truly frightened about my possible living partners. I said bye to Horacio and César, who were going back to Barcelona the morning after, and I went to sleep.
Day 2 to Day 5 – 10/07/2016 to 13/07/2016
The next day I woke up really curious about who my living partners were. I met a guy of my age (around 21) after I woke up who has really nice but so damn dirty (in the living-room there were 2 dishes of pasta from 4 days or more ago), and in the afternoon I met two sisters who were staying in the room next to me and were relatively new to the flat. All 4 will be staying there until the end of August. It was Sunday so I had some time to rest my body after a stressed journey the day before, I slept 12 hours and went to explore the zone around the flat. I bought some food, went back home and didn’t move all day long. I had never been so exhausted before. I just talked to my friends and family to say that everything was okay and went on.
Now we are moving to the next week: I’m working from Monday to Saturday from 16:30-20:30 PM and Saturdays too from 12:00-14:00. Monday was the time to demonstrate that my partner Rodrigo and me were a great team and we could run smoothly all the skimpark. Things went really well, we had an amazing time with all the kids and didn’t have any problem at all. All the people who came out were kids below the age of 14, and the fathers of those kids were enjoying as much as them. It was a really satisfying day!
Tuesday and Wednesday were basically the same, even though more people showed up and tried to skim. The problem with kids under 10 is that they can’t throw the skimboard, so we must drop the table for them so then they just have to run and jump on to the skimboard.
What’s also curious is that Decathlon (sports shop) gives us for free the stuff we need for the skimpark, mostly because we were missing some things like some tool for cleaning the pool, some way to secure the box we let the skimboards in, some whistles if we needed them, etc.
After closing on Wednesday I was told to clean the skimpool alone, and I can promise you it’s a hard time doing it… I’ll tell you how in the next article, where I’ll be also sharing with all of you our methodical procedure to let the people learn how to get started in skimboarding, how we do function, some photos of our uniforms, some new invent we’ve been trying… and more!
Thanks for reading and let’s spread the word of skim!!
Skim & Fun
Marc Costa Lucero
Learn more about the Voodoo Skim Park here: Voodooskimmagazine.comm
Follow there Instagram here: @voodoo_skimpark
