World Cup 2006: More sex than football!

I’m not a big fan of watching sports I don’t participate in so I won’t be visiting German for any of the activities described below which are planned for next year.  Lots of other people will though and it sounds like people will have lots of fun “making friends” even when they aren’t watching ‘football’:

BERLIN: Prostitutes, many of them from the neighbouring eastern European countries, are expected to flood Berlin and other cities in Germany during next years football World Cup.

Prostitution is legalised in Germany, and those involved in it are supposed to register with the authorities, and pay tax and employee health insurance. This also applies to brothel owners.

German capital Berlin, already has close to 10,000 prostitutes working in the city, and this number is expected to be greatly swollen once the World Cup gets underway. The same goes for Leipzig, Dortmund, Munich and Gelsenkirchen, and other cities where games are taking place.

A wealthy Turkish nightclub entrepreneur, anticipating a boom in the sex trade business during the World Cup, recently opened a four-storey, 40-room luxury brothel in Berlin’s Wilmersdorf district, at a cost of 5 million euros.

The brothel is just three S-Bahn (municipal overhead railway) stops from Berlin’s 1936-built Olympic Stadium where key World Cup games will be played, including the final.

Named “Artemis” after the virgin goddess of hunting, the facility is considered a “state-of-the-sex-art” facility. Atop the building, a giant red phallus billows in the wind.

Its owner says that unlike in most other city brothels, the girls active there are free to negotiate their own rates with clients and don’t have to pay “pimp money”.

Artemis is equipped with a FKK (nude) “Wellness Club”, massage, and solarium and a gaily-decorated spiral-ascending stairway. Its owner says entrance costs 7 euros with payment for sex “extra”.

“Romy”, the establishment’s manager, says up to 200-300 men a day have been using its premises in its “opening phase”.

Once the World Cup is in progress, “we are considering staying open 24 hours”, she says with a broad smile. Massive security will be in operation during next summer’s World Cup matches. FIFA officials are saying there will be an unprecedented level of surveillance at matches, so that if violence does flare it can be dealt with swiftly by crowd control experts.

While in city centres a vast body of police will be on duty.

But at Artemis, the staff do not anticipate any trouble at its premises. “We are a pleasure facility,” enthused one of the staff.

Hundreds of sex establishments are to be found in Berlin, as well sex cinemas, massage salons, and a huge number of night clubs catering for every kind of saucy, eyebrow-raising late night titillation. In Germany, the World Cup slogan “A time to make friends” can, it seems, be understood in a number of ways.

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