The Girl Who Came and Asked Why

Yesterday afternoon I went to see my advisor at the International Office, whom I have been trying to get an an audience with for some three weeks now. It's like meeting the Pope, except this guy turned out to be an incredibly effeminate gay man who spoke no English whatsoever except for "Cheers." Using only that word and an elaborate system of improvised hand gestures/Pictionary, he was able to communicate to me that he no longer did whatever it was I was supposed to see him about, and that I should go see a fat woman in another office. She, of course was not there.

Trevor's First Law of Sweden: whatever you need, you cannot get it where you are. And when you get to the place that has it, that place will be closed. Always.

I wandered out of the office, which lurks somewhat anticlimactically under the shadow of the cathedral, and ran into Sarah, an American from Sacramento. She invited me to lunch with her friends at McDonalds--and who, really, could refuse?

Her friends proved to be Jody, a British biomolecular technology student, and Amy, who I think might have studied something somewhere once. We sat in the giant overstuffed lounge chairs they have in the McDonalds here and they swapped stories about their dads finding pictures on their cell phones of them having bondage sex. After that we spent two hours wandering around the city trying to buy tampons. I'm really not joking.
By then it had started to rain, so Jody begged off. The rest of us had heard vaguely about one of the nations serving pancakes and beer that evening, so we drifted over there. It turned out to be in this giant hall with a blue ceiling. The walls were covered in old paintings of priests and former rectors, all eyeing us disapprovingly. They must have known something and passed it on to their corporeal progeny, because very soon a worried Swede came up to us and asked if we had "signed up."
Now I've signed up for a lot of things in my life. I tend to regret it shortly thereafter. But I couldn't very well tell this guy the truth--that I had no idea who he was, where I was, or what these other people were doing here, and that I had planned to just show up, eat his pancakes, and make a break for it, perhaps using Amy as a distraction. Fortunately, nobody had apparently signed up, so when we got thrown out, it was in a big, unruly mob of Europeans. And you've never seen unruly unless you've seen Europeans thrown out in the rain when they think they're going to get free pancakes and beer.
We picked up another American there, also from California. Later on she was to tell the longest, most obscenely descriptive story I have ever heard, and also showed us the tattoo she has of a frog jumping into her asscrack. I'll work on getting you guys a picture.
We were wet and hungry and beerless, so we went to the closest nation, which was Norrlands. Norrlands is the very northern part of Sweden--a cold, dark, inhospitable place full of lemmings and the icy stench of death. Their pub is only a little worse. It took me three hours to get a garlic-sauce-drenched burger. We passed the time with four Frenchmen who asked us a lot of challenging questions about Melrose Place. When a group of about eight druidic cultists showed up (with giant spiked hair dyed alternating primary colors) and raised their brown canvass cloaks all around us and started chanting and singing, we decided to take off. One of the Swedes we met later asserted that they weren't druids at all, but in fact were part of the surviving remnants of Sweden's original death metal scene, but the lack of tight black clothes and giant pewter dragon rings makes me doubt that. Maybe I stereotype.
Anyway. We heard there was a party at Hotel Uppsala (which is the only block of student housing in the central city), so we wandered over there. The Frenchmen ditched us to go have red wine and tiny, overpriced food, which was wise of them because the Hotel Uppsala has these central garbage chutes which open onto every floor in the stairwell. So the entire building smells like if you took a giant hunk of Ass by Calvin Klein, wrapped in in smoked ass, and let it ass itself into a transcendent higher stage of ass so that its assery cannot be expressed with mundane words. Only with references to other asses. I'd call it a mix of Non-union Construction Worker, Welldigger, and Morbidly Obese Corpse...but I'm just using my imagination here. We got the hell out of there and took the trapped partiers there with us, out of compassion.
By now it's about ten at night. There's about twenty of us wandering the cobblestone streets of Uppsala in a thick misty fog, and I've had a sufficient number of Guinnesses that I'm explaining passionately to this Irish girl that it isn't the surplus value that's the problem, necessarily, it's the empirical econometric varification of it's expropriation. She agreed and drank some Jameson's and fell off the footbridge into the river, where she landed on a bicycle.
We made it to Upplands nation not long thereafter. It's got a basement pub with Bogart and Cagney (and, inexplicably, Wong Kar Wai) on the walls. The Frenchmen caught up with us there and sat around rolling their own cigarettes and looking really French. Ashley spent a solid half hour telling us this story about a sexual encounter with a guy in Oakland--it involved the flicking of an errant fly, acrobatics, and the controversial practice of motorboating the mammary glands. There were wild hand gestures and shouting and more onomatopoeias than I think were really necessary. She made a lot of friends.
At that point, the girls decided that we should a) leave, as it was beginning to rain again and we were trapped outside in tiny plastic chairs, and b) steal the beer glasses. I kept the wait staff occupied with my riveting debate with the Frenchmen over the effect of immigration on American voting demographics, and the ladies made a break for the door. One of the guys at the nation gave chase, but bicycles are suicide up cobblestone hills, so we made it back to Flogsta unscathed. The girls and I decided that there just hadn't been enough surreal things happening that night, so we retired to one of their rooms for pizza.
Now, this is one of those dorm rooms where you share a bathroom with the room on the other side. So the bathroom connects the two, you know what I mean? So it's like you really have a roommate you don't know.
Anyway, I was sitting there on the floor, with my back against the wall where the bathroom door is. And I started to feel this rhythmic thumping...and the sound soon followed. Indeed, it quickly became quite apparent that there were two people on the other side of the thin door engaging in a pasttime altogether different from parcheesi.
It went on for quite some time. We bit our hands to keep from laughing (or in my case from loudly saying distracting things like "WHERE THE FUCK ARE THE MIDGET'S PANTS?") and tried to give this girl some moral support, because she obviously had gotten overstimulated by now and was feeling too pressured to actually finish.
Now sometimes, in the throes of passion, people are given to saying things which often not terribly rational. Often these are religious pronouncements, or affirmations...but this girl posed a question. A question of profound existential importance the likes of which has stumped philosophers far and wide for milennia.
"WHY!"
We all looked at each other and tried to communicate furiously by sign language. Why indeed? I signed. Why not? Sarah signed back.
The questioning continued from the bathroom. "Whywhywhywhywhywhywhyyyyy....!"
And at that point, we pretty much laughed until we cried.