Wots dat?

Posted on December 8, 2008 by Hails

I’ve recently found myself back in touch with a large number of old schoolfriends thanks to the modern marvel that is Facebook.

It’s great, apart from the fact that most of them are now married and have children, which is decidedly disturbing when your last memory of someone is as a slightly irresponsible and giggly 18-year-old. They sort of freeze in your mind and stay exactly as they were then. Then, nearly a decade later, you find each other on Facebook and realise that they’ve become adults. You see the wedding photos, and the pictures of the kids. You see comments from other friends about motherhood and work and making the packed lunches. It’s awfully disconcerting, because in your head you’re still bunking off RE class with one of them to drink coffee in the prefects’ room, and passing silly notes to another one in English Lit., and thinking another one is just soooooooo cool because she has her own car and can drive a group of you to Portrush for the day.

Anyway, despite the weirdness of it all, it’s lovely to be in contact with my old friends again. Which is why I thought it might be fun to take it a step further and see if there are any past-pupil sort of groups for my primary school, now that I’ve become reacquainted with my Cambridge House buddies. Got to be even more bizarre to find out someone’s married, or a teacher, or a parent, or all three, when your last memory of them is as a gangly 11-year-old, right?

Unfortunately, things went rapidly downhill at this point, and I found myself on my primary school’s Bebo page. It was apparently for past and present pupils to join, which in theory is a nice idea. In practice, it turned out to be run by a pupil of the more “present” variety, and it is this that has plunged me into head-in-hands despair.

so tel me, if u cm 2 dis pg o mine ere n i woz wrtin lik dis wud u kep redin or wud u giv up n gt outta ere?

That “sentence” just took me five full minutes to compose, as it is in a language in which I am not (and shall never be) fluent – I had to keep referring to online resources such as the aforementioned Bebo page. It is, however, the way the majority of people (ppl) aged about 25 and under seem to speak these (dez) days, and I do not understand why it has been permitted to (2) take over in such a horrifyingly widespread way. I’m completely serious about this (dis). This is not English, kids (kidz).

I have given up pretending that I am not turning into my parents or grandparents or whatever, and so I’m just going to come out and say this: in my day, people were expected to use proper spelling and punctuation in their written English, and to follow a set of rules known as grammar. If you stuck an apostrophe in the wrong place, or structured a sentence in an awkward way, or made a spelling mistake, your errors would be circled in red, usually with a scribbled explanation if it wasn’t obvious. And what’s more, you’d be expected to correct it!

Apparently teachers aren’t allowed to use red pens any more. Pointing out mistakes is so last century – think of the poor child’s self esteem! This attitude makes me want to knock heads together and do some shouting. How is a child supposed to know if they’re getting something wrong? What is the point of letting them make the same mistake over and over again, for the sake of being encouraging and not denting their confidence? It’s perfectly easy to say “This is a great essay, with some very good points, but you need to take more care with your sentence structure – see examples”. This was the sort of comment our teachers made, and as a result, the majority of us know basic English. The same cannot be said of the kids coming behind us. They get mobile phones at the age of six, and as a result think that txtspk is actual, proper, written English. Argh! Arrrrrrrghhhh!

Txtspk is a great invention in the context of mobile text messages – where, of course, you have a limited number of letters per message, and so obviously want to write in some form of shorthand in order to save space (and therefore money). I get it, right? I ‘dig’ it, even. I use it myself when necessary. But a large percentage of children and teens now seem to think that it’s acceptable to write like this in any context! It horrifies and appalls me. Spelling mistakes and clumsy grammar are one thing (well, two things, actually), but consistently wrtin lik dis n tinkin its gr8 english isa nuder! Never mind the fact that I was one of the last few to make it the whole way through school without ever owning a mobile or sending a text message, and so am now seeing people only a few years younger than me (who spent their schooldays communicating in txtspk) becoming qualified as teachers.

I cannot convey how distressed I am when I see these people – people who are responsible for the education of the kidz, people whose job it is to set an example and maintain some level of literacy amongst the youth of today – exhanging Facebook comments along the lines of lol yea i love you’re photos!!! and your lookin gr8 wots da craic?!?!?. It physically hurts me. These are teachers. Teachers!

I have much more to say on this subject. I could rant for hours about the txtspk “language” itself, and how for something that is meant to be convenient and quick, it’s incredibly difficult to understand endless lines of vowelless “words”, many of which turn out to be absolutely nothing like the original. I could also wax lyrical about how it’s causing kids to have no understanding of how words are supposed to sound, since double letters seem to vanish (see how “another” becomes “a nuder”, which is probably pronounced “a nudder” – and shouldn’t be). I could ask numerous pained questions about the pointless nature of some translations, such as changing “OK” to “kk” (This one makes precisely zero sense to me).

However, I’m far too wound up now, so it’ll hav 2 w8. lololol! (That’s another one – if “lol” is “laughing out loud”, why in the name of sanity would you emphasise your laughter by saying “laughing out loud out loud out loud”?!)

Yes, I am old. I accept it. Then again, this sort of thing would have upset me just as much when I was 10 years old, so maybe it’s got nothing to do with my age, and more to do with the fact that I’m a bit of a geek…

Filed under: apostrophes, childhood, complaining, confusion, culture, foreign languages, freak-out, laziness, rant, sad, school, sheer silliness, stress | 8 Comments »

Christmas concerns (and doggy bags)

Posted on November 30, 2008 by Hails

What is the point of selling Christmas cards without envelopes? I mean, really. Even if you’re writing the card for someone you see every day, and will just be handing it to them in person, they’re still going to expect it to be in an envelope with their name scribbled across the front, perhaps in decorative curly writing. With a glitter pen. (‘Tis the season.) And you’re going to be even more likely to require an envelope if you’re buying the sort of cards that have touristy pictures of wintery Tallinn scenes on the front, surely? So why would those be the ones that are sold without envelopes? It makes no sense to me.

That was my first strange discovery today. The second was when I saw Santa standing at the edge of the Old Town, smoking a cigarette and urging passers-by to throw money into the large jar at his feet. This upset me slightly, partly because I didn’t know that Santa smoked (although I suppose it must be a stressful job, particularly at this time of year), partly because he seemed to have lost an awful lot of weight (possibly due to aforementioned stress), and partly because I never expected to see him begging for money. I mean, I know the world has plunged into financial chaos, but I just kind of expected Santa to be immune to all that. You know, maybe have some sort of emergency savings fund. Too many people are counting on him for a happy Christmas – what will happen if the people of Tallinn do not give him enough money to employ the elves to finish making all the toys? One shudders to imagine.

I tried to escape my Santa-related worries by going to see a film with Riho – there’s a film festival on in Tallinn at the moment. Tonight, we went to see Sina Olin Siin (“I Was Here”), as I really wanted to see an Estonian film. Yes, I have become so fluent in Estonian that I can now go and see Estonian-language films! It was very good (although the constant presence of writing in some other language at the bottom of the screen was a bit of a distraction).

The film was followed by dinner in a nice Italian place, where I couldn’t finish my exceptionally delicious meal and once again bemoaned the absence of doggy bags. Someone once told me that restaurants aren’t allowed to give you doggy bags any more because if you take food home and don’t reheat it properly and get food poisoning or something as a result, you might sue them, and they don’t want to take the risk. Which is just ridiculous, because surely if you’re that sort of person you’ll just blame a restaurant anyway if you do happen to get something resembling food poisoning? Anyway, I’ve never asked for a doggy bag since I heard this (which was years and years and years ago) – but then I went to the US a few years back, and upon expressing my horror at the size of the portions in restaurants, was informed that you’re not expected to eat it all at once. You just say “box it up” and they’ll bring you a little box with the rest of your food, so that you can have another meal the next day. It’s great! So surely if the doggy bag ban thing was true, the US would be on board? They’re more into the whole lawsuit thing than the UK, after all. So now I’m doubting the validity of the information I was given all those years ago, or wondering if I dreamt it, and I’m pretty annoyed at the amount of food I’ve wasted by not asking for a doggy bag, and indeed the number of times I’ve made myself feel ill by forcing myself to finish a far-too-big meal. Do you see? Do you see the enormity of the issues I face in my day-to-day life?

Anyway, I couldn’t ask for a doggy bag here, just to see what they’d say, because they would most likely think that I was literally asking for a bag for my dog, or a puppy in a bag, or some such thing. It would all be horribly embarrassing. Instead, I wrapped up my leftover cannelloni in my napkin and smuggled it out of the restaurant in a furtive sort of manner, Riho laughing at me all the way. “What do you think they’re going to do to you if they see you?” he demanded, not understanding my secrecy. I couldn’t really answer him, as I was trying to conceal my dismay at the feeling of warm spinach and ricotta seeping through my napkin into my coat pocket. Once on the street, I removed the disastrous cargo, realised that I was never going to eat microwaved cannelloni with added pieces of napkin and coat fluff, and threw it into the bin. “You’ll never make it in the world of petty crime,” said Riho astutely, through his laughter.

And so I must rely solely upon honest work to earn a living. Which is more than can be said for Santa, whom we passed again on the way home, still smoking and apparently doing nothing other than yell at pedestrians in order to earn his pennies. “I mean, he’s not even fat! He is basically standing there on the street corner, smoking cigarettes and wearing a costume.” I said increduously, getting really quite agitated about the situation. “Who on earth is going to give him money for doing that?”

A passer-by rather irritatingly chose that moment to enter into friendly conversation with Santa and stooped to put money in the jar.

It is a strange world.

Filed under: cards, Christmas, complaining, confusion, Estonia, films, food, restaurants, weird | 5 Comments »

Suffering for my art

Posted on November 14, 2008 by Hails

You know that novel I’ve been writing?

Well, my protagonist is a bit of a hapless character to whom Things Just Happen. The blurb on the back cover would probably begin by listing all the things that go wrong for him despite his best efforts to lead a normal, peaceful life, and the list would end with “And then there’s his neighbour’s unsociable obsession with using power tools in the middle of the night…”. Ah, what fun I’ve had with poor old Will. I’ve wakened him every night with the sound of a drill or a chainsaw; I’ve had him using earplugs, trying to arrange his sleep schedule around his neighbour’s DIY hours, and simply screaming into a pillow; I’ve taken him round next door, red-eyed and weary, to negotiate with said neighbour. All of these things have had predictably humorous consequences, and I’ve taken some kind of sick pleasure in making the poor guy’s life a misery for my own amusement, building up an increasingly desperate picture to the point where the deafening noise begins as soon as he lays his head down on the pillow.

Ironically, I now find myself living in an apartment beneath what appears to be an overnight laundry service.

Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr! went the Loud Thing on the first night at about 10.30pm. Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr! It sounded like there was a washing machine right above my head. It Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!ed for about 40 minutes, then changed to a more urgent and frantic sounding Wheeeeeeee! like a washing machine doing its final spinning thing, and continued for another 10 minutes before stopping so suddenly that the silence almost frightened me, as I thought I might have gone deaf. Ah well. Someone realised that they didn’t have clean clothes for work in the morning. It’s excusable once in a while, right? Unfortunately, half an hour later, the whole process was repeated. And for the entire night, in fact, 40 minutes of Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr! followed by 10 minutes of Wheeeeeeee! continued to be broken up with teasing half hour intervals of silence. Regular as clockwork.

I cannot help but feel – in my slightly irrational, sleep-deprived and overly-emotional state – that it is punishment from the Universe for my treatment of Will. Payback, if you like, for my enjoyment of his distress. The landlord’s agents were informed after only two nights of sleeplessness, and to their credit they sent workmen to investigate yesterday morning, suggesting that it might be a fault in the ventilation system or something. Of course, the workmen arrived at 9am, which is when the apartment is generally bathed in blissful silence after a hard night’s Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!ing and Wheeeeeeee!ing. They probably think we are imagining things, or that the Loud Thing is simply a distant hum as opposed to an apartment-vibrating roar. And what more can we do? We don’t speak Estonian: our ability to insist that the problem be resolved is somewhat limited. And so every night at 10.30 comes the inevitable Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!, and we are faced once again with a challenge that is not unlike trying to get to sleep whilst curled up on top of a washing machine. Earplugs help to block it out slightly, but sleep is still not easy. And Riho, who steadfastly refuses to “put things in his ears”, is walking around with circles under his eyes that would put a panda to shame.

I am sorry for what I did to Will. Please make the Loud Thing stop.

Filed under: apartments, changes, complaining, landlord, noise, tiredness, writing | 3 Comments »

Obama is the Antichrist!

Posted on November 6, 2008 by Hails

I’m not one to throw myself passionately into politics, as you may or may not be aware.

Quite frankly, a lot of it bores me. Switching the TV on to a scene of a lot of old farts in stuffy suits, attempting to argue whilst holding marbles in their mouths and prefixing every remark with “the honourable gentleman”, is guaranteed to instantly turn me off. Plus there’s my previously mentioned apathy and fatalism – difficult to become enthused about something if you can’t see how it’s going to make any difference to anything, right? And of course, there’s the additional hindrance of having grown up as a John Lennonesque sixties-style hippyish dreamer in Northern Ireland – and, more specifically, Ballymena. Politics, to me, meant bickering, sectarianism, bitterness, idiocy, hateful murals and vicious graffiti. So I steered well clear of it all, locking myself away from the nonsense, refusing to follow the news, and playing Imagine at full volume in my room. I’m like a child who sticks her fingers in her ears and yells “Na-na-na, I can’t hear you!”, only I’ll be singing rousing peace anthems instead.

However. It has become something of an impossibility to avoid all the hoo-hah about The Big Election, even having managed to sail through the last few months blissfully unaware of any details more specific than the names of the major candidates. Yesterday, to my genuine surprise, I found myself reading about the U.S. Electoral College system in an effort to educate myself; today, I was halfway through an interesting blog post about the potential effects of the results on Baltic and Scandinavian countries before I even realised it. And last night, having read and inquired about a little walk that was taking place in London, involving a group of people in Guy Fawkes masks, I found myself being forced to watch V for Vendetta – which turned out to be one of the best films I have ever seen, and perhaps the most disturbing. But that’s another post, I suppose. The point is, I think I’m shedding some apathy. Yikes.

To return to my main point (I think I had one), I still don’t have any particularly strong feelings about the U.S. election, nor about the new president, nor about the defeated candidate and his sidekick. What is getting me pretty riled up, though, is the astonishing series of Facebook status updates on the subject. Now, I don’t claim for a second to know what the atmosphere is like in certain parts of America right now; to know what it feels like to have a strong preference for a particular political party and then have to watch that party lose; to know what it’s like to worry about raising your family in such an uncertain economic climate. I do, however, know that it’s pointless to gripe about something when it’s done, just because it didn’t go your way – and the constant flow of negative, depressed status updates along the lines of “everything’s going to hell”, “it’s the end of the world as we know it” and “hello Communism” have me completely baffled. The most amazing thing about it to me is that the majority of these bitter, hopeless assessments come from devout Christians.

Now, obviously the problem here is the fact that Obama is clearly the Antichrist. That’s evident to anyone who knows the Bible. I’m not suggesting for one moment that it’s utterly outrageous to attack and condemn another human being before he’s even had a chance to prove himself, based on evidence as overwhelming as him (a) being popular with the masses, (b) having a first name that rhymes with “Iraq”, “Hussein” as a middle name and a surname that’s almost “Osama”, and (c) promising to work towards peace. It’s quite clear from that that he’s here to lead the world straight into the Tribulation.

No – no, you know what? I can’t even do the sarcasm thing here, because I want to scream. This sort of thing is exactly what has led me to drift further and further away from the fundamentalist, closed-minded and quite honestly verging on insane version of Christianity that I allowed myself to become entangled with in Norn Iron. I won’t let anyone tell me that I’m not a Christian; however, I’ll be horrified if anyone thinks it means I’m this sort of prejudiced, bigoted, irrational… well, OK, I’m a bit irrational. But definitely not the other two.

Here’s the thing. Even if this Obama guy is the Antichrist, even if he has a series of devilish plots up his sleeve for the destruction of humanity, even if he is basically a satan in a suit (and I swear, that is what a large number of people seem to believe)…

Aren’t Christians meant to trust in God?

So what is the point of all this hate mongering, hysteria and woe-is-us caterwauling? Even if you firmly believe the whole Antichrist story, which you’re perfectly entitled to do, surely you should then believe that if Obama is the One, he had to come to power in order for prophecy to be fulfilled? So what’s the surprise? Why all the bitching, if you were convinced of his identity and therefore knew that there was no preventing his election victory?

But what gets me even more is the sheer childishness of this bizarre “now we’re done for” attitude in the first place. What about hope? What about faith? What about not judging your brother? What about loving your neighbour? What about – here’s a meek suggestion – not deciding that a fellow human being, innocent until proven guilty, who has worked hard and wants to make an effort to pull a struggling nation up and out of troubled times, is the Antichrist? What about giving him a shot (I wouldn’t normally feel the need to clarify that I’m not proposing the assassination of the new president, but now I’m too scared not to) and sharing in the fresh hope and excitement of the rest of your nation? What is the point of all this doom and gloom? What will it change? What will it achieve?

What’s done is done. Stop the superior, “people should’ve listened to me, I know better” whining, and give the sulking a rest. It won’t change anything, and it’s just making you sound like a spoiled child.

I feel the need to apologise for this post, because I’m generally too afraid of offending people to risk posting about What I Really Think. But I’m not going to.

I can be all superior too, you know.

Filed under: america, anger, apathy, changes, complaining, confusion, rant, sad, sheer silliness, woe | 10 Comments »

Say it with swords

Posted on October 1, 2008 by Hails

Last night I finally got to go for dinner at Peppersack, a really nice Medieval-style restaurant in Tallinn Old Town. You know… good hearty cuisine, candles, wooden beams, waitresses in traditional costumes, sturdy furniture, stone walls, and a bit of a swordfight when you’re waiting for your coffee.

I’ll admit that this last one is a little unusual, but there really aren’t enough live brawls in restaurants around here, if you ask me. Bickering, yes – elderly American tourists are always good for that. It’s great when you find yourself seated next to Mr. and Mrs. “How Awful!”, although usually you’re not lucky enough to get much more than a bit of cringeworthy dialogue. Like the prim and proper couple in the Embassy Of Pure Food who complained in great detail about the dryness of the melon. Which they’d consumed in its entirety, with great enthusiasm. The poor waitress was extremely confused. It wasn’t like she could take it back and get a fresh one, nor did they want second helpings. They didn’t want an apology or to speak to the manager. In the end she just sort of stood there, hovering uncertainly, with no idea how to respond – but of course, all they wanted to do was make their point. Estonia is a terrible, terrible place, where all the melons are dry! It would never happen where we come from. Ah, America… now, there’s a country!

Slightly more dramatic was the “gentleman” in a nice little bakery in Vienna, where I’d stopped for some lunch. I was eating my Unidentifiable Pastry and people-watching at my table by the window when an almighty roar filled the air. I said I wanted coffee! The Texan accent boomed out as if through a megaphone, and everyone swivelled nosily to see what was going on. It turned out that Mr. Texan had been given a cappuccino instead of an ordinary coffee – which wouldn’t have been so bad in itself, if only he hadn’t already been shortchanged at the counter. The coffee just tipped him over the edge. I’d love to say “…and then the staff tipped the coffee over him“, but unfortunately they just grovelled and quivered and rushed around in a panic to get the correct drink and make the shouting stop. This was not good enough, however. A full-on speech about customer service and The Way Things Are Done In America ensued, for the benefit of not only the staff, but everyone in the place. It wouldn’t hurt you to smile, either, he finished up, glowering at the young girl who reached him his drink. Several people rolled their eyes. I resisted a very strong urge to get up and tip the coffee over his head myself as an act of assistance to the girl, who was clearly bound by the rules of her workplace and unable to give the necessary punishment without fear of reprisal.

I was a little surprised, then, when she gave him a beautiful smile and said in a clear, sweet voice Thank you, sir, and it would not hurt you to remember that you are no longer in a country where arrogant customers can say whatever they like to workers without the workers having the right to point out that they are being a complete asshole. Admittedly, her colleagues looked a little surprised too, so I can’t caim that this is the way things are done in Austria as a rule. However, I hope that it is. Abuse of staff by customers is one of my top pet hates (and I must remember to tell you about the time when, working in Sainsbury’s in Glasgow, I was verbally and vegetably assaulted by a screaming Chinese woman who later tried to sue me for racial discrimination), and nothing pleases me more than seeing one of the oppressed rise up against the – well, assholes. I nearly cheered. Someone at a nearby table gave a brief round of applause, though, so I decided to stay out of it and let that speak for everyone.

Last night’s was the best yet, though. We’d just finished dinner and were contemplating coffee when some bickering started on the old wooden staircase nearby. One of the waiters, it seemed, had been caught with one of the waitresses, who apparently belonged to another waiter… it all looked a bit complicated, and we couldn’t understand anything they were saying, but we got the general gist of it when the girl ran off and her secret lover was attacked by a rather irate young man waving a sword. To our great alarm, a full-on swordfight followed, and they came crashing down the staircase and almost into our table before finishing in a sort of stand-off back on the stairs. I found myself cheering when the girl returned and gave them both a quare slap roon the ja’, as they* say.

Probably completely staged for tourists, you know. But part of me desperately wants to believe that you can be sitting at your dinner in a medieval restaurant in Tallinn and witness two lovestruck young men in frilly shirts duelling earnestly to win the love of a woman.

* and by “they”, I obviously do not mean the Estonian people.

Filed under: complaining, contemplation, conversations, customer service, Estonia, fighting, foreign languages, fun, restaurants, swords, tension, unexpected | 3 Comments »

Withdrawal. Again. (Or “In which I kindly, with the patience of a saint, refrain from exploding and injuring all the imbeciles that seem to surround me”)

Posted on September 22, 2008 by Hails

Hey Hayley! screams the irritatingly enthusiastic message from Facebook. Now you can throw a spaghetti cat at your friends!

Isn’t that marvellous?

I have been up since the early hours, on train after bus after train and all but strip-searched at the airport by a possible witch (with PMS). I have been shaken around inside one of those fluroescent tin cans that Ryanair call planes, with my knees somewhere near my ears and my right ear so severely popped that no amount of swallowing is prompting a return to a normal level of hearing. I have only vaguely recovered from my food poisoning incident, and so the ridiculously-priced sandwich I attempted to eat earlier is now lurching around quite dangerously in my stomach. I have in my hand a ticket from Riga Airport to Riga Coach Station to Tallinn Coach Station – only it appears that there is no bus to Riga Coach Station, despite the fact that I have paid for it, and so now I must find a bus into the city and do all the ridiculous Excuse me, do you speak English? nonsense again. And probably pay more money, too. There is also a small child running up and down the airport lounge screaming blue murder, and his parents appear to be deaf or just defeated.

I may also need to mention that I have not had a cigarette since approximately 10pm last night, and I want to kill the small child, its parents, Facebook’s Superpoke team, Eurolines bus company, hotdog vendors worldwide, Michael O’Leary, and the Swedish airport shuttle driver who tried to draw it to the attention of the entire bus when I accidentally tried to pay him in Slovakian money, not really seeing the difference in the notes. I will not, of course, kill any of these people, because underneath it all I am actually a really nice person. Not quite Julie Andrews, but perhaps at least a little bit Marge Simpson.

And then I log into Facebook and see a new notification. Ah, I think gratefully, a little note or message from someone who loves me, is thinking about me, or just wants to say hello! But no. It is a message that proudly explains my new ability to throw spaghetti cats at my friends, as if it is something I have been longing for, and indeed something that will genuinely improve my life. I am disgusted with everything in general. I have just purchased a vodka at the bar. I do not care that I can’t afford it. It is the only way I am going to survive.

And it tastes crap without a cigarette. As does the world.

Filed under: airport, anger, cold turkey, complaining, decisions, mental health, rage, rant, smoking, tiredness, travel | 8 Comments »

Money Matters

Posted on September 20, 2008 by Hails

Blimey, Sweden is expensive.

I don’t mean that Sweden itself is expensive, obviously. That would be crazy money (especially for a struggling freelance writer), and I’ve no idea how you’d go about it anyway, or even if it’s possible to buy a Nordic country privately. I’ll check on Ebay when I have a better internet connection; you can find pretty much anything on there.

Anyway, what I mean is that things in Sweden are, in general, very expensive. At first my alarm at being charged 18 for a little bottle of Fanta amounted almost to panic, until I realised that despite the very “Euro” feel of Stockholm, they have their own currency and not the Euro. Still, finding out that 18SKr is about £1.50 didn’t help much. I would never have been able to afford the public transport fares had I not discovered a 7-day pass which turned out to be slightly more economical. And buying a book for my journey back to Tallinn was quite a painful experience, to be honest.

Disappointingly, this meant that I had to abandon my plan to treat myself to a proper sightseeing tour of Stockholm, around all the places that I wanted to see, complete with a guide who might be able to tell me lots of interesting stories and fill in all the history. I could not justify the thirty quid that this type of 1-2 hour tour seems to cost, on average. I would also have had to go without food for a few days, but that’s beside the point. Still, I managed to have quite a pleasant time alone with my map in the Old Town, wandering happily around the royal palace, giggling at the cute little guards in their funny uniforms, and letting the occasional statue inscription trigger vague memories from my history classes.

On the way back to the train station, I found an internet cafe, and went in to see if they’d let me print out my boarding pass. They did. It was one page, in black and white, and they charged me 20SKr for it. In moments of surprise or annoyance, I’ve realised that I tend to lapse back into my natural Norn Irish. Away on! I said this time, looking outraged. 20SKr is about £1.70 or something like that. For one page?! In black and white?!!! Obviously I had Dumb Tourist written in neon letters on my forehead. I explained this to the man (the “one page” bit, not the Dumb Tourist bit), and he looked a little startled, although it was amusing to see how quickly and meekly he cut the price in half, having expected me to hand over a twenty without questioning it. Still, though. I’m pretty sure that printing used to cost something like 10p per page. Am I showing my age now? Or has the whole world gone mad? Or is just Sweden?

Counting the coins from my pocket as my tummy rumbled, I got off the train and saw a little fast food stand next to my bus stop. Intently, I surveyed the menu. I did not understand any of it, but there were pictures, at least. And then I saw the word “hotdog”, and beside it, “10Kr”. I looked at the change in my hand. Hooray! I could afford dinner!

Having lay here on my mattress for the past two hours, groaning, my face flushed, pains shooting through my abdomen, my stomach churning, and my insides in general making sounds that I’m not accustomed to hearing them make, I have been forced to admit to myself that buying an 80p hotdog, from a roadside vendor, in a country where a sandwich and a drink can cost you a tenner, was probably not the most sensible thing to do.

You live and learn. Hopefully you live, anyway.

Filed under: complaining, food, pain, sheer silliness, Sweden | 7 Comments »

Buzzzzz! Zzzzzip! The downward spiral into insanity.

Posted on September 1, 2008 by Hails

Zips, eh?

They were probably a wonderful, innovative idea when they first appeared to assist us in our efforts to join/close/seal things, but has anyone bothered to try and improve upon the original invention? It just seems so rudimentary, really. There’s bound to be an improvement just waiting to be made, most likely involving some kind of noise reducing device.

Spend a single night in a hostel, and you’ll grow to loathe and detest the apparently innocent and helpful zip. It is the single most frequently heard sound in this environment, closely followed by the high-pitched whine of the mosquito circling your body in search of a decent feeding point, and the inevitable retching of the latest youth to have consumed too much Heineken.

Zzzzzzip! goes the suitcase/backpack as the latest person to enter the dorm searches for her pyjamas.

Zzzzzzip! goes the sleeping bag as someone gets into bed.

Zzzzzzip! goes the sleeping bag as someone closes it around them.

Zzzzzzip! go the jacket and jeans as someone gets undressed.

Zzzzzzip! Zzzzzzip! Zzzzzzip! go the zips, all night long.

Something has to be done about it. Little silent slidey things like on ZipLock bags, maybe. Buttons. I don’t know. I’m not about to start campaigning for the abolishment of all zips, because I realise that they are important part of modern life, but I feel that there’s a definite opportunity for some improvement, if anyone cares to rise to the challenge.

And while I’m ranting, I must return to my now long-running pet hate: mosquitos. Why do they love/hate me with such a passion? How is it that I can be staying in a large hostel, two floors up, in a dorm where the nearest open window is at least a two minute walk and two staircases away, where there are no insects in sight, and yet when I’ve been lying in bed for approximately 10 minutes I hear the inevitable buzz around my head? It’s gotten to the stage where I’ve just given up on trying to defend myself. I don’t jump up and try to swat them away. What’s the point? They’ll just divebomb me in my sleep anyway. And so I lie there, weary and defenceless, letting them land on me and have a merry little feast on my blood. Every morning I wake up and perform my morbidly fascinated daily routine of examining my skin for new bites, and there they are: fresh evidence of the nightshift, in the form of new, pink, itchy lumps next to the scratched and bloody scars of previous onslaughts. Throughout the day they will itch and be scratched raw, finally reducing in size by bed time, when they will without fail be replaced with a new batch.

I do not know how many diseases they have infected me with to date, but I suspect that I am an epidemic waiting to happen. Eventually I will have no blood left in my poor, bitten body, and they will find me drained and lifeless on a hostel bed somewhere.

Zzzzzzip! the body bag will go. And all the mosquitos will be dead within a day, because no one else’s blood is good enough any more.

Filed under: bloodshed, complaining, hostels, insects, rant, zips | 9 Comments »

Cheddar Cheese and Bagels

Posted on July 8, 2008 by Hails

I was a little saddened to discover the lack of decent cheese in Estonia.

 But, hey – I was moving to France. They’re mad about cheese there, I thought cheerfully, there will be loads of cheddar-like varieties to choose from. But no. A significant portion of Friday’s visit to my local supermarket was spent anxiously perusing the selection in the cheese aisle. I mean, honestly. 3.2 million types of cheese, and nothing even remotely resembling a block of mature cheddar. Surely this cannot be right?

Soft cheese, cream cheese, holey cheese, white cheese, orange cheese, flavoured cheese. Cheese with bits of fruit in it, cheese with a selection of crackers, cheese that smells really bad. Mild cheese, blue cheese, sliced cheese, spreadable cheese, blocks of cheese, tubs of cheese, balls of cheese, wedges of cheese, stringy cheese, smoked cheese, crumbly cheese. Every type of cheese imaginable, and more cheese on top of that. But no cheddar equivalent. Pity about that, France.

And while I’m on the subject of absent foods, why, oh why are there no bagels anywhere? This is most distressing to me, as someone who is particularly partial to a sesame bagel with cream cheese, or an onion and poppyseed bagel with scrambled eggs. Thorough searches of several supermarkets in Tallinn, one in Helsinki, and three in Lyon have revealed that I have clearly been taking too many things for granted.

On the plus side, though, I can’t help but feel that French crème fraîche, coffee, and croissants are, in their own special ways, kind of making up for the distressing lack of cheddar cheese and bagels. Mmm-mmm-mmm…

Filed under: bagels, cheese, coffee, complaining, Estonia, French, Lyon, sad, strange, Uncategorized | 5 Comments »

Ma olen haige.

Posted on May 22, 2008 by Hails

(I am ill.)

It’s nothing serious, but I do feel like death not even very slightly warmed up. So, what to do when you fall ill in a strange land where you still can’t speak the language? Determinedly, I googled my symptoms. Aches and pains, insomnia, very sore throat… it’s like I have the flu. But good old Google pointed me to a more accurate diagnosis, and one which I had completely overlooked.

Look, the past few months have been very stressful, OK? I succumbed. Then I left the Cancer Sticks behind me in Ballymena, determined that they would not be a part of my new life. There was a brief blip at Dublin Airport, where in a moment of nervous panic I became beyond desperate and tried to buy a cigarette from a young girl who was smoking outside, but she turned out not to speak any English, assumed I was asking for money, and the whole thing was just very embarrassing so I just had to leave it. Anyway, I’ve been fine since then, despite the fact that (a) they don’t keep the smokes behind the counter here and I have to stand right beside them when in a shop queue, (b) a pack of 20 costs roughly 80p – £1, and (c) I have developed a much newer addiction of walking very closely behind smokers on the street, breathing in as much second-hand smoke as I can without them catching on and just offering me a cigarette. It’s all completely under control.

Apart from the fact that quitting smoking is apparently killing me in a much less subtle way than just smoking. So, it was off to the Apteek (chemist) to perform a very apprehensive search of the shelves, attempting to find something to ease the pain, something to soothe the throat, and something to fix me, in general. Nothing was in English, and my Estonian language skills, while undeniably excellent, still need a little tweaking, so it was basically a case of ‘study the packaging and see if it looks anything like products you’re familiar with’. Which is probably quite a dangerous method of choosing medication, but I was desperate. I came away with some valuvaigisti for the pain, some “most likely to be lozenges” for my throat (based on them having packaging similar to Strepsils), and some vitamiinid for the afore-mentioned general fixing of self. Who says I can’t cope in the Big Bad World, eh? I haven’t died yet, which gives me complete confidence that I’m not accidentally taking horrifically strong and inappropriate medication designed for stroke victims.

And until it fixes me/kills me, I shall lie here on the sofa, groaning and feeling sorry for myself. This is what quitting smoking does to you, boys and girls. I really don’t recommend it. It is very, very Not Fun. I suppose the moral of this story is “don’t quit”, but that seems a little irresponsible. I’m sure I’ll be able to see the true message once I’m through with the Agonising Pain and Unbearable Misery.

Woe.

Filed under: complaining, coughing, Estonia, foreign languages, irrational behaviour, pain, smoking, stress, woe | 4 Comments »

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