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baldyza: I have now reached the stage that I use R instead of calc #Rstat

So I buy a shirt at most destinations that I travel.

I haven't been to Pofadder [yet], but will aim to buy a wardrobe full of so-entitled Pofadder tat, including a fistful of fridge magnets (everyone in my family is a winner!), the coffee mug, the shirt, and the obligatory snow globe with 'I [heart] Pofadder' on the base.

For now though, I managed to find the above t-shirt ("Absolut Svensk") on the streets of Stockholm. I have a Berlin one too, which I wear to board meetings, Green Peace picketings, and for when I met the president.*

The thing with tourist shirts as that you have to be so careful.

Peas: Look! A Sweden shirt for only [mental calculation ensues]...er...R5000. No wait. Five pounds.

Brit: You should get the 'I love Swedish girls' one.

Peas: They don't have my size.

[pause]

Peas: I'm going to wear it with my power suit to work tomorrow.

Brit: No. You have it all wrong, princess.

Peas: And why is that?

Brit: You can't wear a tourist shirt the moment you return from a destination. It's too keen.

Peas: Can I wear it in Sweden then?

Brit: Definitely no, on all accounts.

Peas: I have to wear this thing, it taunts me. It says 'Wear me now, wear me now.'

Brit: No no. You need to wait at least three days until you wear it to work. It's the fine line between cool and 'she-hasn't-done-her-laundry-in-five-weeks-so-has-to-buy-tourist-tat-at-tourist-traps.'

Peas: Three whole days?!

Brit: If it were me, I'd wait three whole weeks. THEN you wear it. Then you might get a , 'Say, didn't you go there this year?' As opposed to, 'Dude, did you get your clothes stolen in Scandinavia?'

Peas: Oh right.

Brit: I know it's hard. You just have to exercise some discipline. Your street cred is counting on it.

It's been two days. I wore it to work today. With a pencil skirt. I know I have jumped the gun, but frankly, I'm feeling a bit flat.

Already, my Welsh colleague: Nice shirt.

Peas: [blushing with pride and joy] Wow! Thanks so much!

Welshman: Where'd you git it?

[pause]

Peas: er, Sweden.

Welshmen: I know. I can see that. I was being ironic.

My Brit is in San Francisco for another week, I had to say goodbye to Poen last night, and two weeks yesterday, I turn 30.

Fuck.

For Poen's last night in the Big English, we drank champagne and ate dim sum. It was Ladies Night, so we got everything half off.

Score.

*I met Hillary Clinton once. She was almost the president.
I have also met Nelson Mandela, but it doesn't really count because I wasn't wearing my Berlin shirt.

baldyza: its very much a "the cat empire" day today.

baldyza: @jeezdude happy birthday sucker!

baldyza: breakfast situation sorted. Glad I am not a miner stuck in a mine.

baldyza: 9 oclock and I still have not had breakfast. not the best start to the day.

So Poen leaves London for good tonight, and my Brit is in the States for 2 weeks for work.

Shit times.

I'm going to miss having my best mate around. London is amazing in all its senses, but she's been a huge part of it thus far.

Sigh. Drinkie time tonight near Goodge Street (the names in this country, I mean seriously), a final thrash before she heads back down south.

But first I'll cheer myself up by bowing down to English place names.

Most aren't unusual, or by any means crazy, but I hear them on a daily basis, and I smugly smile to myself and think, 'Ah yes. I live in Britain.'

It's not like Fucking, Austria. *

Because if these were names in South Africa, or anywhere else, no one would take them seriously at all.

It usually goes like this: (The overland, which is what I take to work, not the tube. It has air-con and I can see out the windows into the stark** light outside. Plus the seats are less minging. And I smell less armpit.)

"This is a South West train service to [slight pause while the automated voice slots in]...Tadworth.........
This train will stop at Bognor Regis, Chertsey, Teddington, Chessington, Wadden, Chipstead, Moreton-in-Marsh...............before terminating at its final destination in Dorking.............Please mind the gap between the train and the platform."

*pronunciation Fookeeng. Which makes it even funnier.
**It is stark. Grey mixed with pale sunlight is stark.

baldyza: why I am always the only one who arrives early?

baldyza: last day of MSc, pretty sad and nervous.

If you’ve always been obsessed with Sweden or hot not-dykey looking Swedish lesbians the city of Stockholm, then it’s your lucky day.

If you don’t give a fuck or even a few rocks about Scandinavian shit, then I suppose you can stop reading.

However, hello? Durban has been bumped off my Top Five list (sorry Durbs, but I simply have to squeeze in Stockholm somewhere), and now it sits pretty next to Rio and Berlin as one fuck off incredible city.

Why?

It’s clean
Surgeons could perform hysterectomies on the pavements. There was a leaf blower at the airport at 2:30am, blowing away dust – I can only assume – it’s pristine. The air smells like Canada.


It’s socialist
It’s been researched and apparently Swedes are one of the happiest nations on Earth. They don’t see the sun for almost nine months during winter, and yet they’re flag-waving blonde, blue-eyed bundles of Scandinavian happiness.

The one thing I can only fathom is that it’s highly socialist. Sweden doesn't even like the EU much. It’s almost a communist state, except that everything works, people are happy, and there's pop music everywhere.

University is free. Nannies and childcare is free. Mums AND Dads get between them 450 days of paternity and maternity leave. The health system is free. The streets are clean, and shit works.

Stockholm has a population of just over 2 million people, so it’s hardly crowded. A third of it is made up of waterways of inky black Baltic sea, and the other ‘eco-parks’, running amok with elk.

Bjorn Borg and the Abba members aside, they’re a humble, rule-abiding nation, but without the [German] extremist bent.

It’s free until someone pops a cork
It’s all free. With one minor concession. You’ll get another asshole ripped out of you with taxes.
Taxes are synonymous with clean, well-run ‘everything’s free’ cities. But then you pay up to 80% tax on a cocktail.

We had a fair bit of Absolut Vodka (when in Sweden), and subsequently spent a night repaying a mortgage. Booze and food is expensive, as is accommodation.

What I spent in Stockholm in 4 days, is what I can happily live on in Africa for 3 weeks. (If nothing breaks. Which it is prone to do in Africa. So maybe it’s all even at the end of the day.)

You can cycle and not die
There are cycling lanes on every piece of road in the city. There are an abundance of parks and bridges. We cycled almost 30 k’s, across 4 islands in one day.

If you like islands, you might like Sweden
There are 14 islands that make up the city of Stockholm. There are another 24 000 off the coast further north.

We stayed in a prison cell
We paid for doing time. The Brit and I are getting good at this. We stayed in a converted prison in Oxford, and now on Langholmen (‘Long Island) in Stockholm. This one came with striped bed linen. Nice touch.
And so clean and nice, you could lick the walls.

Swedish sounds like something off the Spaceship Galactica
Honestly, we were in hysterics. It sounds like a script out of Star Wars.

”Zorg torg smorgasbor? Snus, hej. Sok torg! Hurney gurney hurney gurney?”

The people.
Are all Barbies. Even the boys. They are so exquisite, I found myself staring open-mouthed and drooling at this one girl in a coffee shop (alongside my boyfriend who was doing the same), to the point where I actually had to wrench myself away before she thought I was a lesbian.

They are a very very hot race. Strapping, but crafted from wax. Ridiculously beautiful, the lot of them.

The men all wear their hair in these gelled coifs, which is vaguely amusing.
And all of their jean pant are turned up.

We went to the Stockholm Ice Bar
Cost a fucken packet – but you go in, they give you coats, gloves and Viking hats (nice touch) and you drink Absolut in this ice cave. The glasses are made of ice, the walls, and the bar counter. It’s cold, so you can only really have two shots before it starts getting uncomfortable.

We saw Bjorn Borg’s holiday house
The barge guide told us so. Also a member of Abba.

We ate herring and pickled salmon for brunch one day
Should’ve bought a Volvo. Would’ve cost the same.

All houses are either red clapboard barns, or look Flemish-like, or are otherwise castles with full on turrets.
They sound more ostentatious than they are. Stockholm is a rich city.

It was so beautiful.

baldyza: windows needs a reboot.

baldyza: RT @shahil: I don't get jealous when I see my ex with someone else coz my mummy always told me to give my old toys to the less fortunate :-)

baldyza: might need to find a place to sleep tonight.

baldyza: my grooveshark has turned into a pink theme! Is not appropriate with my selection of music today.

baldyza: listening to some plan b

baldyza: trying to engage cube neighbour on my other side. I hung my jacket on his cubicle corner this morning. No response so far.

baldyza: not much to say today.

Now that I am on the other side of the weekend and have, by and large, survived, I can say it was a super one. My body is broken from 10 hours of dance rehearsals during the weekend. It didn't help that for the majority of those hours I was suffering heavily from various hangovers and sleep deprivation.

I'm still alive, right? On Sunday morning, I was wishing otherwise. Can't remember the last time I felt that horrible. It's inexplicable how terrible I felt. I kept on falling asleep at rehearsal, much to the amusement of the girls. Mental note never ever to mix beer, vodka, and whisky ever again.

Talking of dance, the show is in 6 days. JC still isn't walking without her crutches, but she should be ok. Then there's the krumping piece which we are doing, which is way too fast for me to piece together in my mind and perform.

There's a lot of banter from the boys in the office. It seems they'll be turning out in numbers to jeer, hoot and howl. Just to make a menace of themselves. I'm getting very nervous, generally just because of that krumping piece.

I was watching So You Think You Can Dance on Saturday, and it made me feel very inadequate. Gave me a lot of tips and tricks. Perhaps I'm hard on myself, seeing that I have been dancing for all of 5 months, but I would have it no other way.

It's gonna be a nervous week, one missing vodka and whisky and beer.

baldyza: dissertation done. Weight off my shoulders.. aggghh

Can you say, what the fuck did we do in Guernsey last night?

Arrive on the island to driving, pissing rain and wind. Umbrella immediately turns inside out.

Go on cute coastal walks, check out the war barracks that the Germans put up when they occupied the island, went shopping, ate a fuckload of seafood.

Went around this random manor (everything in Guernsey is random. It's Guernsey), where this dude showed us around and gave us a ghost tour. All very pretty and quaint, giggling the whole time.

Then went out last night and thought I didn't have gas left in my tank now that I'm almost fucking 30, and discovered that I was pleasantly wrong.

We met these random people, one dude reckoned he was famous becuase he spins the wheel on the national lottery at 1am in the morning, but bought all of us bottles of Moet.

Therein lies the craziness. Saffa girls on tour, gone wild. On a Channel Island.

Christ I'm hungover.

We kidnapped this dude from his sister's birthday party, made him buy us a shooter, and then delivered him back to his table (wtf?), and then got invited to a lock-in.

Now a lock-in is a very very cool thing to be invited to.

The pub owner chases everyone else out, doors get locked, music gets pumped, everyone smokes inside - unheard of in normal circumstances in Europe - and he hosts this private party. We were bouncing around everywhere, one of my mates carrying some dude's wallet around with a pair of tongs (wtf?), Poen and I doing that drunken 'I love you so much you're my best friend ever' hugging, me rolling off a chair.

And this all started with them insisting we celebrate my 30th early and therefore had to choose one of four dares. ("Chaps this isn't my hen's party. Fuck off.")

The dares:

1) Stand up in the middle of the cocktail bar and say Bridgette Jones' speech about the launch of Kafka's Motorbike. ("The greatest book of our time. Yours wasn't bad either, Mr Rushdie. I'll now introduce you to Mr Titspervert.....because...that is his name.")

2) Leopard crawl along the floor of the cocktail bar. (I was keen.)

3) Walk up to a bunch of dude's and get their digits and ask what they think of Chechnya.

4) Go behind the bar and make my own cocktail like I owned the place.

Got the digits, we joined their party and henceforth got hammered.

We all thought we were hilarious. I haven't laughed this hard in ages, fuck it was cool.
Especially to jam with my mates on some random island called Guernsey that's definitely not exotic and beachy like Spain.

Tonight I go to Stockholm for some Scandi fun with my boy.

Best I smash a pie and sort myself out first.