Back for...a week. :P

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I’m finally sitting down in one place for more than a day, WITH my laptop so now I can write in my blog again, hurray. Okay fun facts to sum up the below: spent a week in Berlin, chilling, working, drinking a lot of mojitos, came to Sweden for three days, had my computer completely die on me, gave up trying to fix it, and went to Dublin for a week for St. Patrick’s Day, partied it up with a bunch of Scandinavian/Nordic friends {in Ireland, haha} and a few perpetually drunk Tazmanian/Aussie folk. Spent our last night dancing in Dublin until four am, and got to school {in Sweden} by eleven am to do a presentation. {I love Europe} Came home for two days and am now on the barge, where I have fixed my laptop, but have no numbers, or associated punctuation for some reason. So, no exclamation marks, but pretend that I’ve written something exciting nonetheless please. So that’s the short version. Here’s the long version:

Berlin:

We went to Berlin on a bit of a whim really. Decided we missed it and got more work done there than here so after finding a fifty dollar flight, tax included, we thought, to hell with it, we’re going. So we went. First couple days were spent nursing a seriously twisted ankle: Note: While wearing a massive camping backpack, do NOT text message and walk down a long flight of stairs in a Metro stop, or anywhere really, but especially not a place with concrete surfaces. Ow. After I decided not to pay attention to the pain anymore, we toured a few art galleries and I met up with a friend in Berlin who’s from that group of performance media artists that I showed you the video from before, where they did the performance of projected shadow/dancing/interactive/light thingy at Transmediale. We went to a bar called the Erdbeer Bar, the Strawberry bar, where all drinks were made of Strawberries, everything you can imagine, but with Strawberries blended in, oh so good. Thank you Daniel for the suggestion. We discussed all the fun happenings with interactive art and ended up at my favourite neighbourhood bar, Marie Bar in Kreutzberg, which is just this tiny candy-apple red bar that’s simply fantastic. A few days later, Mads and I met up with a dancer from the same group and went for Indian food. It was good to know people in Berlin, felt a bit like a ...fourth? fifth? Home. Lol. We went out that night and had the best mojito night, starting with going to a fancy art gallery photography exhibit opening where there were tons of people {with little dogs, sigh}, and the presentation was in German, French and English until they gave up speaking English and French and left me grasping at the German. We tried ordering mojitos there, but first, it took nearly fifteen minutes and then we saw the waitress reading a recipe, so we left. We headed out to find a few bars closer to home, and did a bit of bar-hopping which turned out to be fantastic. Played some foosball, found a good mojito place, found a bizarre and funky old garage/hanger turned club called “Lux” and then finally ended up at an old theatre which was playing crazy punk rock and we danced around like rockstars for most of the night. The trip was fantastic except that the EVIL airport made me check my so-not-oversized backpack so I was a bit peeved. {Ended up switching it for a new backpack when I got home to avoid that mess from now on}

Dublin:

I’m going to live in Ireland. At some point, I will. Its quite obvious. Dublin was like Nottingham in many ways and I felt at home in the same ways. I loved our Hostel and recommend Barnacles in Dublin to anyone. Where to start? Kim and I spent the first day just relaxing and unpacking our many girly things. Our room looked like a movie star’s dressing room most of the week, straightners, makeup, high heels everywhere. It was good to just relax the first day, and turned out that we desperately needed to do that considering the following days. Thursday. We went and toured “Dublina” which is some sort of Viking thing to do with Ireland. Turned out to be a waste of euros unless you’re like ten years old. So we acted ten. We played with everything and took really quite bizarre photos with the statues. Moving on....we met up with Amanda’s Swedish friend, Henrik and his friends for dinner. Cue madness. This was the start of an amazing weekend with these fantastic people. Included were Murat from Bosnia/Germany/Sweden, Jussi from Finland {which is a NORDIC country as I was repeatedly told}, and Maja and Axel from Sweden. We had dinner with them and quickly moved on to another bar {with a brief pit stop for some redbull} and on to shots. We went to a place called The Mezz which had live music. The night progressed from shots to insane dancing and rehurting my ankle {including a rather odd apology on my behalf that I wasn’t wearing heels, sorry}, to some really fantastic photos, and the makings of plans for the weekend. We went home around stupid o’clock, which was fine with Kim and I but painful for the rest because they had to get to work for six am. We went back to our hostel and on the way up to our room, decided to kidnap a Tazmanian guy, {Bob} who happened to be wandering in the stairwell. We {read: Kim} talked his ear off and released him back into the hallway later on, {He’ll come back to our story later}.

Friday night was spend tapas-bar hopping as we explored the wonderful joys of wine and tapas at a number of places throughout the town. We found a great place that had amazing anchovies and a nice red wine, in a cellar-looking place that had candles everywhere; and somewhat confusing sink taps - I and another woman were stuck with soap all over our hands trying to figure out how to turn on the taps. Amusing for outsiders, horrifying for us. We survived. Saturday Kim and I browsed through town and visited the Guinness factory, which although terribly touristy - they even guided us in three times - {go here and then go over there for tickets and then yet ANOTHER person to show us the entrance, how dumb do they think we are? Oh my}. It was a great tour though, and considering that you end up having about two pints of Guinness and a small square of bread {I mean quarter sized here, like SMALL} we ended up enjoying the tour even more. We went back to our ‘dressing room’ to prepare for the evening which was Henrik’s house warming party. We had two visitors from Australia randomly drop by our room, play some hip hop and try to talk to us over the volume of the music. We finally got going and headed to Henrik’s, on the way having to tell the taxi driver which streets to turn on because a. he didn’t know where he was going, b. He couldn’t read his GPS mapping system and c. We happened to have printed out a map, how helpful of us. The party was great. I even got special rules applied to me and a friend alone, which was quite funny. No shoes in the house, no outside music, and me and said friend were not allowed to interact with one another while IN the house. We worked around that. The party was quite fun, with loads of people from everywhere but Ireland, and a silly Finnish man thought he could out-vodka me. We’ll try again sometime, with pickles. {apparently the only way to properly drink vodka is straight, with a pickle}.
Sunday was relatively uneventful as everyone was resting up for St. Paddy’s day. We met a nice person from Quebec who’d been through hell and back trying to move to the UK and get work there - apparently never use the service called “Scotia” to book jobs for you overseas. We ended up going out with him for the night and toured some of the bars around our hostel. Did I mention that our hostel was right in the very, very centre of everything? We had to walk literally less than five minutes to get to any bar or club in the area.

St. Paddy’s day was Monday. We dressed up, Kim had a masquerade mask, and we both wore a theme of green and black, complete with sparkly sequined green panties, on the OUTSIDE. We went to see the parade, and got trapped in amongst a million people all wearing green hats, a sea of madness and eventually went full circle back to our hostel to watch from a point closer to there. It was however, freezing, and Kim had the flu so while she was high on painkillers making her not feel anything, I was dying from the cold so I headed back early. We had some food and headed out to meet Henrik and friends at “Slattery’s” bar where we had some proper green pints of beer, and got started on the official drinking of the day. From here we went to another bar, Sin E where we spent a good part of the afternoon. Kim got into a verbal match of wits against an Irish guy in our entourage, which was quite fun to watch, the English versus the Irish on St. Paddy’s day. Quite entertaining, thank you both. After that, Kim went home as she was quite sick with the flu. I came back and met up with Jussi, we went to a local ‘booze barn’ type place, and got some rum and coke and headed to another friend’s house. We were greeted at the door by a girl asking if we were there for the party, we said yes of course, and then realise she might mean another party, she did, the Polish party upstairs as opposed to the Swedish party downstairs, are there any Irish people in Dublin? Lol. We had a great little rendezvous trying to drink up some at the house - somehow, my body along with everyone else’s had started not reacting to alcohol any longer and drinking was just getting pricey without being useful any longer. Sigh. We headed to Whelans and danced the night away, meeting at the bar, two...you guessed it, Swedish girls. How is it possible that I managed to leave Sweden and spend my entire holiday with Swedes? I don’t know. It was great though.

Back at the hostel, Kim was wide awake and still sick, at three am and hungry so I said I’d make some food. I went downstairs to the kitchen, only to trip over Bob who was sprawled across the hallway with his two friends. The situation went like this: He was eating pizza, laying in a hallway. I stepped over and kept walking, he yells, stop! I say, yes? He says to his friends, ‘this girl knows me really well, and she knows that I don’t like pizza’.... as he’s eating the pizza. His friend with the pizza box mutters something and drunken incomprehensible talk continues. I say, I’m going to go and cook some cous cous and noodles now, see ya, and then get interrogated over the validity of eating cous cous ‘well its not real is it? Its fake. Its tiny, fake rice that pretends to be rice’...and then over the noodles... ‘that’s not a pack of a noodles, its cheese! You’re going to cook a block of cheese!’ and then...even over being Canadian “liar, you’re a yank, i know you are!”. None of this from Bob, nope, from his crazy pizza-box-bearing friend. I escaped to the kitchen only to find it locked so I went back and told them the sad tale, and was presented with a kebab, I’m not sure where on earth it came from, but somewhere in amongst their pizza festival, they had a kebab, so I took that and took it up to Kim. She was overjoyed and phoned Bob to thank him. He decided to come visit. At four am. And he brought a friend. Both Bob and Dave were so insanely drunk that they barely made it up the stairs, and then decided to pass out - Dave on the floor and Bob crawled into Kim’s bed...as she crawled into mine. Classic moments: Bob saying to Kim, as he is trying to get more comfortable in the bed he’s just completely taken over... “you’re putting the move on me aren’t you?” um...no Bob. Then Dave, “I need the window open, its hot in here, hot, hot, hot, open the window, its the window of opportunity and it must be open!”. Jaffa cakes. Long conversation about those.

The next day we met up with Bob and Dave and their Italian friend for some final Dublin drinks as our flight was the next day at 6am. We thought we should go out in style and so we went from bar to bar and ended up dancing like crazy fools until 4am when we got an amazing burger - they’re always amazing at that time, and headed off to the airport. It should be noted that I arrived in Copenhagen at ten am, got to Sweden for eleven am, had a team meeting and presented at one pm. Yes, I am a rockstar, thank you.

And now...I’m on the barge where I’m busy re-wiring some diodes, and organizing several upcoming events. Its getting quite fun, working on setting up these events, making proposals to places to get our work accepted, entering design competitions...speaking of... I won a design contest based on Liquid Place... I wrote about how people experience learning in different situations and environments so...now that I’ve been in Sweden for two days, I’m spending this week in Copenhagen - with the exception of Thursday when we go to Sonderburg to present our project at a design conference - I will be going to Italy next week to present my paper there at the conference. Its exciting but terrifying...I know this is all good for my career but in the meantime, its just loads of money to travel and do these projects and its freaking me out a bit...but hopefully its all worth it in the end. I’m positive...I feel great about all of this and think that its good for me and for my career so I hope I’m right!!!

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Comments

[Nick]

Wowzas!
That is a definitely crazy way to spend your St. Patrick's Day. Australians are almost incomprehensible most of the time anyways, I know this this very well since I work with one from Melbourne and one from Perth. For some reason they believe that Shawarma and souvlaki (Meatsicle, sounds so wrong) is the the ultimate hangover food, I believe otherwise. Poutine is where it's at. Good luck with your travels, take tons of pictures (Like I even need to ask) and best of luck to you! When in Italy, only drink Cappuccino in the mornings for breakfast, and expresso in one gulp. It's the Italian way.