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HelpINTRODUCING: LIVE TALL
How do you live tall? Jake Rajsky, our Director of Brand Experience, is traveling the globe asking tall personalities just that. Following his recent whirlwind trip to Europe, he tells us about the importance of building a Live Tall community, the magic of Dutch sandwiches and trying to keep up with our personalities as they showed him around their cities.
AT: Tell us about your trip to Europe to meet with our first three Live Tall personalities?
JR: I was gone just over two weeks, first interviewing Sebastian. I found him through our Instagram account, reached and asked if he would show me around Amsterdam. We walked around the city for the day and he showed me the sights.
AT: How tall is he?
JR: He doesn’t actually really know. He thinks that he’s about 7’1”. I would venture to say that he’s a bit taller because when I stand next to him he really seems more than 12” or 13” taller than me. He’s a big guy. But there’s not really anywhere that you can accurately measure. I met with another guy, totally unrelated to this series, and he said that he was 7’2”-ish and I said, “How can you not know how tall you are?” And he said, “The only place that I can measure myself is at Home Depot because the height measurement at the doctor’s office doesn’t go that high.”
AT: Where did you go in Amsterdam with Sebastian?
JR: We walked the core to the big Amsterdam sign, back through the red light district and then back to the hotel. With such long legs, I had to run to keep up with him! I wanted to get some shots in front of him, but it was hard: I kept trailing behind. A common theme during my walking tours with these guys.
With each of these interviews, we wanted to get a taste of individuals in their every day lives, in their every day community, in their city to share with our tall community. People who are all “Living Tall.”
AT: And where did you go next?
JR: From Amsterdam, I took the train to Rotterdam and met up with Tim Waldekker of Giantific, who was really eager to show me around. I got there in the evening and he drove me a half an hour away to a different city to show me the coast, the boardwalk. We had a drink and got to know each other. The next day we did Rotterdam and it seemed a lot bigger than Amsterdam. It was an eight-hour day of walking and trying to keep up with Tim. He could be a tour guide: he knew everything about the different sites. And the entire time, he was taking pictures and I was shooting video, so it worked out: He stopped and took pictures, which would allow me to run, catch up with him and grab the shot I wanted.
AT: Did you have a favourite part of Rotterdam?
JR: We did so much. There’s so much to see there. There are so many buildings that are just bizarre—you don’t know why they’re there. The market hall is one of them: It’s basically a big horseshoe-shaped building that has a hollow interior. Inside it’s a market, but the building itself houses an apartment complex, and the apartment windows look into the market hall. It’s really colourful and cool. A lot of buildings are like that—you walk by and it doesn’t look like it quite fits.
AT: You got a taste for the city. Did you get a taste for any of the gastronomic specialties of Rotterdam or the Netherlands?
JR: I don’t know if it’s a Rotterdam specialty, but we kept stopping for sandwiches in the two days that we were filming. The style of each was very different, but there was some kind of amazing cheese in every one. That’s what struck me: Rotterdam has some amazing cheese. We mostly ate in cafés—we filmed the interview at an outdoor patio near the train station and another café near his apartment the next day.
WATCH TIM'S VIDEO NOW
AT: You also spoke with Rued Riis, of Tallsome, in Copenhagen.
JR: Yes! He showed me a couple of bars that he likes in his neighbourhood. We’re both into music so we played some stuff for each other. He walked me through his blog and talked about the inspiration behind it and then we did a big tour of Copenhagen. There were so many literal twists and turns: We would come out of a passage and he would say, “We just started our walk three hours ago there across the street.” And I had thought that we were on the other side of the city.
We went to his mother’s house and took in the city view from her roof. Whereas Tim’s Live Tall vlog is more about Rotterdam the city, Rued’s is more about him and his everyday life. Copenhagen was very friendly and small. There are a lot of young people there, many cool bars, restaurants and shops. Stores will sell the most random combination of things you can think of: coffee and shoes or picture frames and cactuses. And that’s all they sell. One of the places we went to had coffee and light bulbs.
With each of these interviews, we wanted to get a taste of individuals in their every day lives, in their every day community, in their city to share with our tall community. People who are all “Living Tall.” And that’s what we’ll continue to do as I travel the world meeting more members of our community. Stay tuned!