Marathon walks and Irish Car Bombs
Paid 100 kroner (little under ten bucks) last night to go to a welcome dinner for international students. Went with Sarah (from Sacramento) and met Handcuff Jodie and her crazy Irishman there. The governing logic was that the dinner would also provide us with the cheapest booze in Scandinavia: along with dinner they gave us two glasses of wine, two Czech beers, and a shot of Swedish vodka, which is actually a cleaning product. Sat across from an Italian girl who had arrived three hours before and had her luggage lost along the way, and her friend Martin, who is a German jazz pianist and who looks exactly identical to Hugh Grant.
So some things happened and some witty things were said and I think we ate some potatoes. We sang a long of songs. My favorite was entitled "Finnish Drinking Song" and goes like this:
Nuuuuuuuuuuuu!
That's it. That's the song. Towards the end of the dinner Jodie went around and let everyone know that there was a big party in her housing bloc, and that we all should go.
So we did, of course.
Now, some backstory: I mangled my bicycle horribly day before yesterday in an unfortunate incident with a kebab stand. Therefore I walked to my class yesterday morning from Flogast (3 km), then walked home with Sarah...except that we took a shortcut which went by way of Oslo. We seriously walked for about three hours in the rain, and probably covered a good 8 km before we came upon Flogsta from behind. Then we walked back into the city for the dinner (3 km). Then we followed Jodie to her housing bloc by the math building (again in the rain), which looks like a weird Alps ski resort. I was rather jealous, because Flogsta looks like Soviet utilitarian People's Housing, and she has quaint red buildings with white trim and stuff.
Anyhow, the place is 7 km from the dinner, so that walk put me at 21 already for the day. I wasn't feeling it much that point, partly because of the Swedish vodka, and partly because I spent the walk finding out that Martin has been performing jazz piano in Berlin for 15 years and is now going to single-handedly build a jazz scene in Uppsala.
We got to the party at Jodie's and found that it occupied three of the four buildings there. In order to get in, you had to take off your shoes and pile them in a giant heap, then squeeze your way through drunken, gesticulating Europeans. We did this, and after a lengthy expedition to the back end of the party we discovered the horrible truth: there was no liquor there.
So of course we found some shoes that fit and proceeded on to the other buildings, which were more low key and actually had liquor. We sat around for an hour or so while the crazy Irishman made me Irish Car Bombs (which, if you don't know, consist of Irish cream and Irish whiskey poured into a Guinness...and then you have to drink it really fast before the cream curdles).
Then someone blundered in wearing a silly hat and said that we really should go to the other party.
We scoffed. We'd been to the other party. It sucked.
No, the guy said. The other other party.
So we followed this guy through the woods for a while and finally came across this giant goddamn tent which was packed full of about a thousand people having some sort of wacky Swedish rave. Martin and I stood outside and watched a group of the pointy-haired, brown-cloaked cultists I mentioned in the previous post lead a group of about fifty people in a complex choreographed dance. It looked sort of like a cross between the macarena and eating babies. More and more people kept materializing and joining this dance, much to our great alarm. We tried desperately to crack the impenetrable code of their eldritch movements, but to no avail.
Some time later, when their ranks had swollen with the twitching damned, they turned as with one mind and charged the goddamn dance floor in a big, drunken, beer-clenching phalanx. People flew, beer cups shattered, and at least one table went over, taking a tent pole with it. The cultists jumped up on the stage, stuck out their posteriors, and began their ominous dance.
At that point, we thought we were probably hallucinating, so we decided to leave. Some time later, we realized that meant we had to walk back to Flogsta. That was a 10 km walk...and it brought my grand total for the day up to 31. For those of you who have no idea what the goddamn metric system means (and I am among you), that figures out to about 18 and a half miles. It sucked.
Goin to a pub crawl tonight. Gonna take the camera, and hopefully get a picture of those cultists.
So some things happened and some witty things were said and I think we ate some potatoes. We sang a long of songs. My favorite was entitled "Finnish Drinking Song" and goes like this:
Nuuuuuuuuuuuu!
That's it. That's the song. Towards the end of the dinner Jodie went around and let everyone know that there was a big party in her housing bloc, and that we all should go.
So we did, of course.
Now, some backstory: I mangled my bicycle horribly day before yesterday in an unfortunate incident with a kebab stand. Therefore I walked to my class yesterday morning from Flogast (3 km), then walked home with Sarah...except that we took a shortcut which went by way of Oslo. We seriously walked for about three hours in the rain, and probably covered a good 8 km before we came upon Flogsta from behind. Then we walked back into the city for the dinner (3 km). Then we followed Jodie to her housing bloc by the math building (again in the rain), which looks like a weird Alps ski resort. I was rather jealous, because Flogsta looks like Soviet utilitarian People's Housing, and she has quaint red buildings with white trim and stuff.
Anyhow, the place is 7 km from the dinner, so that walk put me at 21 already for the day. I wasn't feeling it much that point, partly because of the Swedish vodka, and partly because I spent the walk finding out that Martin has been performing jazz piano in Berlin for 15 years and is now going to single-handedly build a jazz scene in Uppsala.
We got to the party at Jodie's and found that it occupied three of the four buildings there. In order to get in, you had to take off your shoes and pile them in a giant heap, then squeeze your way through drunken, gesticulating Europeans. We did this, and after a lengthy expedition to the back end of the party we discovered the horrible truth: there was no liquor there.
So of course we found some shoes that fit and proceeded on to the other buildings, which were more low key and actually had liquor. We sat around for an hour or so while the crazy Irishman made me Irish Car Bombs (which, if you don't know, consist of Irish cream and Irish whiskey poured into a Guinness...and then you have to drink it really fast before the cream curdles).
Then someone blundered in wearing a silly hat and said that we really should go to the other party.
We scoffed. We'd been to the other party. It sucked.
No, the guy said. The other other party.
So we followed this guy through the woods for a while and finally came across this giant goddamn tent which was packed full of about a thousand people having some sort of wacky Swedish rave. Martin and I stood outside and watched a group of the pointy-haired, brown-cloaked cultists I mentioned in the previous post lead a group of about fifty people in a complex choreographed dance. It looked sort of like a cross between the macarena and eating babies. More and more people kept materializing and joining this dance, much to our great alarm. We tried desperately to crack the impenetrable code of their eldritch movements, but to no avail.
Some time later, when their ranks had swollen with the twitching damned, they turned as with one mind and charged the goddamn dance floor in a big, drunken, beer-clenching phalanx. People flew, beer cups shattered, and at least one table went over, taking a tent pole with it. The cultists jumped up on the stage, stuck out their posteriors, and began their ominous dance.
At that point, we thought we were probably hallucinating, so we decided to leave. Some time later, we realized that meant we had to walk back to Flogsta. That was a 10 km walk...and it brought my grand total for the day up to 31. For those of you who have no idea what the goddamn metric system means (and I am among you), that figures out to about 18 and a half miles. It sucked.
Goin to a pub crawl tonight. Gonna take the camera, and hopefully get a picture of those cultists.
posted by Eccarius | 7:29 AM
1 Comments:
The proper way to do an Irish car bomb (other than blowing a hole in a Brighton hotel housing Margaret Thatcher) is to pour a measure of Irish Cream (don't use Bailey's either, it should be one part whiskey to one part cream) into a shot glass, drop the shot - glass and all - into a pint of Guinness (Shamrock motif in foam optional) and down the whole lot. Then sing a traditional song to which every fifth line is "the English are all bastards".
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