Conversations

Piotr, a great Polish guy who looks a hell of a lot like Harry Potter, was flinging pizza dough around with more gusto than was absolutely necessary. "In Poland," he said, "we are used to having this Santa Claus, but when Russians come boosh boosh they are going on television, radio, and everywhere they are saying now we will not have Santa Claus, we will have Frozen Grandpa."

While we had our pizza (which is turning into a weekly Saturday ritual, and is getting increasingly elaborate to the point where this one involved pepperoni, köttbullar, bell peppers, onions, mushrooms, corn, and goddamn bananas) and drank Krušovice, he explained to me the elaborate and impressive repetoir of Polish profanity. "We are having really amazing rude words in Polish," he said. "Like this word kurwa, for example. [Note: pronounced koor-va] It can be meaning anything!" He proceeded to conjugate it for quite some time. "It is meaning woman who is selling her body in a street shaped like this." He made U-shaped gestures. "And you can be adding to it all of these things like to sit, to stand, to run, to walk, to fall down--"
"To make a sandwich," I suggested.
His eyes lit up. "Exactly! You are understanding!"
Apparently, the most common word in Polish is pierdolić, which is their "to fuck" equivalent, and it can be modified to mean all kinds of things. Like this:
To beat up - napierdolić
To break - rozpierdolić
To run - spierdolić
To steal - podpierdolić
To throw away - wypierdolić
That and kurwa are used essentially as punctuation, so that you can have a sentence which literally says, "Whore! I fucked up. It was a whore-fucking whore day. I had a fucking whore drink and whore, then I was fucked. And then this fuck comes up, whore!" And your mother would answer, "Whorefuck!"
I bet you're glad to learn all this stuff. It was an especially enlightening conversation since Katka, this Czech girl was present. Czech and Polish are quite similar languages, to the extent that they can very nearly understand one another, except on some words which can mean entirely opposite things. I've never seen two people speaking three languages and trying so hard to figure out how to properly say "Assmonkey."

Some time later I was walking along Sernanders väg, all shrouded in mist and big yellow floating globes of the streetlights and Goran told me about The Hoffentotters.
Goran looks almost exactly like Mike, the second host of Mystery Science Theater 3000, except he often wears a Gatsby cap. He's a philosophy student, but I don't hold that against him. He's got the most comfortable chair in Flogsta, he drinks decent scotch, and he smokes a pipe. He lives in Amie-with-an-ie's corridor along with a crazy fucking psycho Swedish broad and a few shifty beta-male Swedes who he calls his Clan. He took a liking to me when he heard me talking about Diogenes, and he's got me hooked on the pipe, much to my displeasure, as it is by far the most pretentious manner of ingesting nicotine.
Anyway. He draped an arm over my shoulders and slurred, "Do you know about...The Hoffentotters?"
"Actually, no."
He made noises quite like a donkey. I will attempt to transcribe his broken, inebriated Swenglish as accurately as possible: "There was used to be a show Swedish with Finnish don't trust the bastards and they were fucking children's mind! Everyday when you open the door, BAM they are right there, and do you know what they are doing?"
"I have no idea."
"I'm going to tell you!"
"I had a feeling you might."
"They are doing...the dance of The Hoffentotters!"
"Sweet Jesus."
"Yes! Don't look them in the eyes! They are looking all happy like this" (he moved his shoulders up and down one at a time) "but then, the next day, they are CLOSER. And do you know what they do then?"
"I have no idea."
"Well, I'm going to tell you!"
"I had a feeling you might."
"They are doing the dance!"
"Of The Hoffentotters?"
"YES!"
"That's the worst."
I suspect this tirade (which continued unabated for another hour as we floundered into a party somewhere) had something to do with the impossibly hot blonde Finnish chick who was with us. I get the impression Goran either had a problem with her or with some other Finnish girl in the past and was trying to somehow warn me off, in his crazy moon-language.

Also. The crazy broad I mentioned? She rang my bell at about one in the morning on Wednesday night. I answered, not knowing who it was, and recoiled in horror when I saw her hideous, unbalanced form darkening my doorstep. She asked if I had any beer, and I told her hell no and closed the door.
I related this story to the Clan and Amie-with-an-ie, all of whom live in terror of this crazy broad. I hadn't really thought anything of it, until they suggested that it wasn't random at all, and that she was checking to make sure it was indeed me who lived there, and now she's gonna kill me or sacrifice a chicken in my room or something. Which is just pierdolić great.