Alex's Alliterative Adventures

There’s a pirate party happening in my building tomorrow. In a mildly unrelated note, I’ve also seen at least one guy in my classes sporting what I think is gear from thepiratebay.org. I’ve noticed it’s also been cooler than normal, all of which point to one incredible conclusion: the Pastafarians were right.

I have a mild problem: I left my pirate costume back in the mother country.  I must ask all of you: what’s a guy to do when he’s in need of a pirate costume complete with eyepatch, stat?  The more homebrew and cheesy your costume ideas, the better.

In class, we were taught that the correct way to ask for a beer was to say “en öl”, which translates to “a beer.”  Today a friend taught me a little civility.  To appear slightly more dignified than a two year old who’s a bit cranky because he’s late for his nappykins, try “Jag skulle vilja en öl”, or “I would like a beer.” You’ll get a few impressed looks that way. For a sure conversation opener, try “Min igelkot e inte dum,” which means “My hedgehog isn’t stupid.” As explained by this brilliant man, no one will believe that that’s the only thing you know to say in Swedish, and they’ll instantly badger you with questions.

Anyways.  I learned how to politely order a beer with a classmate of mine and his girlfriend.  We went to one of the nations and had one of their cheap dinners.  50 SEK (7.75 CAD) got you a double burger with bacon, egg, and pineapple.  Pineapple. If I still had a phone, I would’ve shared its gloriousness with the world, but instead my stomach got all the fun.

Last friday one of my mentors had a crayfish party.  It’s pretty much what it sounds like, only more surprisingly delicious.  My mentor just sent around some pictures from the night, so check them out. I really wish I could remember more than 5 people’s names from the party.

HEY: I didn’t realize that I hadn’t put up a permanent link to the gallery.  You guys have to tell me about stuff like this, you can’t expect me to notice on my own. I don’t read what I write, I just spew it out to you. <3

Apparently, Lund is on a hill.  I live at the bottom of the hill.  My classes are at the other end of the city, at the top of said hill.  I climb 70 vertical meters on my bike each morning to get to class.  If that’s not motivation to stay home, I don’t know what is. I know it’s true, some tenor told me so.

I also learned that this August was Sweden’s rainiest since the 1940’s, quite possibly the rainiest in recorded history.  If the bike mechanic who lent me his tools is to be believed, there was over 300mm of rain this august, compared to the usual 60 and change.  The previous record (possibly in 1943) was around 230mm.  dayumn.

In other news, the fact that I paid roughly $300 CAD for a piece of crap phone was getting to me.  I returned it to the store and bought myself a shiny new palm treo from everyone’s favourite black market, ebay. It’s a sexy, sexy beast.

One of the guys on the Copenhagen trip whipped up a cool little montage of the day. Unfortunately, my internet connection is roughly the equivalent of yelling binary numbers to a blind and deaf scribe and having him mail the transcript to the bottom of the ocean, so I’ll just blatantly steal from him.  Get the video off of his server.

On Sunday night, my floor had an international dinner.  Everyone was supposed to make a dish from their home country and potluck it up.  This provided me with three problems:

1. I can’t cook.
2. We have no roasting pans or casserole dishes, so delicious lemon-stuffed chicken was out.
3. What the hell is Canadian food?! (bacon and maple syrup aren’t meals, they’re just delicious)

After hours of googling, I found many French-Canadian and Eastern-Canadian foods, as well as a few deserts that I’d never heard of before.  Since Canada is so huge, these dishes could’ve just as well been from other countries.  This is when I realized that my dilemma really summarized the Canadian identity.  When I’m at home and I’m lazy, I cook or order Italian. The school diet is almost 100% asian. My family’s cooking could best be described as British.  Our favourite fish & chips place (a British specialty) is run by Chinese people. Canada’s food is just like Canada’s people: multicultural, diverse, and just plain delicious. I couldn’t think of what I would consider Canadian food because such a thing doesn’t exist; I’m used to an ethnically harmonious palette experience.  Proud that I could excuse my culinary failings with national pride, I ended up preemptively following Jamie‘s advice: “fry it and have pig in it and put maple syrup on it.” The solution: Maple-braised apples and pork, as suggested by the government of Ontario. Verdict: Delicious.

edit: I almost forgot, I joined a men’s choir. The sound of 50 men all yelling Carmina Burana at the top of their lungs is something to be reckoned with. I don’t laugh at the conductor’s jokes, but that’s just because they’re in Swedish.  I’m sure he’s very funny.

Unfortunately, the choir recordings were unusable, so you’ll just have to trust me when I say that they were really good.

We toured Copenhagen properly yesterday, it was a lot of fun.  After the changing of the guard, we saw a lot of statues and monuments, including two of the most famous, the Gefion Fountain and the Little Mermaid.

According to legend, a women named Gefion was to be given a reward from the king: she could have as much land as she could plow in one day and night with four oxen. She turned her four giant-begotten sons into oxen and plowed like it was going out of style.  The oxen were so plow-y that their plowing loosened the land and sent it into the sea, making the Danish island of Zealand.  Crazy ol’ Danes. The Little Mermaid was a gift from a Carl Jacobsen (of the Carlsburg Breweries) to the city of Copenhagen. He had it commissioned after he saw a performance of the ballet of the Little Mermaid.  I decided to defile the Danish landmark with my Canadian patriotism:

We then saw a Danish military wedding, climbed the Round Tower, which is a large observatory in central Copenhagen, and then we decided to find food.  We ended up in Freetown Christiania, which is a partially self-governing neighbourhood in Copenhagen. This place was the craziest shit I’d ever seen.  It was like walking into a mixture of one of Picasso’s paintings and a heroin overdose. The only phrase I can think of that even begins to describe this place is a post-apocalyptic drug trip.  The ground was littered in beer bottles, stray dogs weaved in and out of tourists’ legs as they were trying to eat, and a man ate a burger out of a garbage can in front of us.  We weren’t allowed to take pictures inside the neighbourhood itself, so we couldn’t properly capture the sousaphone player belting out his bass line to the beat of the marching drummers while the rest of the wind players in white robes played along. (Iulia, I think you’d really like this place) The community functions on consensus, so the residents that want the communities public hash trade to disappear have met a lot of resistance.

There were lots of people taking lots of pictures, so hopefully I’ll connive some of them to hook me up with photos that don’t suck.  The photos I did take are available in a new album.  Check out the clock, it’s great. I won’t spam them all here, but I will leave you with the first photo I’ve taken here that I’m particularly proud of:

Especially waking up to catch a train at 9:15 on a Saturday.  Seriously, who’s awake that early on a Saturday?  Satan, that’s who.

There might not be a few updates for a day or two, seeing as I’ll be exhausted.  The men’s choir was cool, though, I’ll see if the recordings I made actually worked.