You're in a desert, walking along in the sand when all of a sudden you look down...

Hmm, Blogspot is fucking me today. I have some very silly photos I took of Crille and some random crap today but I can't get Blogspot to upload them. A pox upon your cruel silicon fueled shenanigan's! A pox I say!

Today was pretty funny. I went over to Crille and Mahlen's palace and hung out for a bit. We drank tea, watched Java tear up the room, and talked movies. Then it got interesting as we took off for a little walk around Sodermalm. Totally cool having a guide to a new city. The major street on this island is Gotsgatan and it is chock-full of cool stuff. We wandered around and I saw not one but two surf shops here in Stockholm. Surfing is the new thing here and is simply exploding into the pop psyche. Two shops! The closest beach is four hours away. It's freezing. The waves are, at best, chest high. It's freezing. What's fueling this explosion in waveriding? How did Crille's friend import and sell five hundred boards in three months? In short, wetsuits are way better than they used to be and a 6mm wetsuit can get you into frozen wastelands that you could not have surfed even ten years ago. That and this is Europe and a good trend can't be ignored. I really wonder how many of the people buying boards are actually going to stick with it and keep surfing healthy in Sweden. Crille and his crew are dedicated but I don't know about the rest of these guys. I'll have to get down to the south coast whilst here and shoot some photos just so I can prove that there are people looney enough to surf in the frozen waters of Sweden.

Oh, very funny: we went to this hilarious Thai restaurant and had to lock up the stroller outside. Literally, a lock and chain and a metal bar welded to the side of the building. I have a photo but, again, Blogspot is fucking me today. The inside of this place is amazing, full-on, no bullshit cheese. There are blacklights and fluorescent lights and Christmas lights everywhere and bamboo hutches. There's even a deconstructed tuc-tuc fucking a table and a stream running through the whole place. Halfway through a very good meal the lights went down and the genius running the place started blasting the sounds of a tropical rainstorm through the sound system. It sounded like it was raining, complete with rain drops zinging off both bamboo and tin roofs. Hilarious! It went on for about twenty minutes and was impossibly loud. If nothing else it lent the situation a certain verisimilitude that I for one appreciated. Photos next time, I swear. You kind of have to see this place to believe it and enjoy it fully.

My plan for a Sunday afternoon buzz were confounded by the fact that every bar I looked into was completely empty except for a few guys. Most were the kind of guys that make people say, "Oh, Euro-trash. This bar must suck." You know, track suits, lots of rings, really expensive bad hair, and the ubiquitous driving moccasin. (Driving moccasins? Why? No one around here seems to actually have a car. What are you gonna drive? The subway? Get the fuck outta here with that, youz!) I ended up walking home and ducking into every bar, including The Viking Bar, and being sorely disappointed in the seeming inability of the average Swede to drink on a Sunday night. C'est la vie. We'll try again on Friday with some Swedes like my second, Bjorn. Yeah, his name is Bjorn, so what.