After a few days of working, I was able to have two and half days all to myself, which is personally very stressful because I usually want to do and see EVERYTHING and two days is not that much time.  So, I decided to get up at like 5:00 am every day, both to go to the gym and sweat out my croissant weight, and to maximize my “seein’ Dublin” time.  The first day was jam-packered with stuff.

First, a work colleague of mine who is from Ireland decided to take me for brunch in a neighboring town called Monkstown.  We went to “Salt”, this restaurant/marketplace thing, which is part of this chain of food and store marketplaces called “Avoca“.  Apparently there was this old abandoned mill in Ireland that someone bought, and they decided to re-open the mill and sell throws and rugs, then there was like, some woman there who started making food with local Irish ingredients, then they released a bunch of cookbooks, then it exploded into an National phenomenon.

Since I was on a strict “Don’t Be Fat” diet, I got the yogurt and fruit.  It was preeettty delicious.  I have no idea what those red fruits halves that are filled with weird egg-sperms.  Do you know what they are?  They were really sweet for things that look like sperms.

We then went for a quick walk, but it was rushed because I was cold and we had to get back to Dublin in time for my VIP GUINNESS TOUR.  Ballin’ large, what.

After my delicious brunch I met up with my friend Amanda who flew in from London like a bad-ass to hang out with me for two days in Dublin.  First stop – a VIP tour of the Guinness Storehouse.  Not sure if I mentioned, but it was a VIP (Very Important Person) tour.  Due to my importance as a person.

First, a free lunch at a Guinness restaurant, a GIFT BAG containing MOUSE PAD AND SHOT GLASS, then a personal tour of the whole storehouse.

One of the most interesting parts of the tour was the advertising hall, which had tons of old ads and bottles and bottle openers and stuff like that.

Did you know that Guinness had this publicity stunt in 1959 on their 200th birthday and dumped 150,000 bottles in the Atlantic ocean with a numbered scroll in them for a free beer?  They are still being found today, as far away as Australia.

Did you know that doctors used to recommend Guinness to pregnant women as a tonic?

I told our guide Aaron that I KNEW SOMETHING about Guinness that HE did not – that you can apparently live for 7 years on Guinness alone.

Aaron told me, no no, stupid Canadian girl, that is stupid and whoever told me that is an idiot.

This is our tour guide, Aaron.  He was awesome.  Here he is getting us some Guinness for our personal tasting.

Then a trip to learn how to pour the perfect Guinness.  It’s serious business, just so you know.  There are six steps and all of them result in waiting longer to chug your beer.

Then we got our certificates for “Perfect Pours”, and walked our beers up to the Gravity Bar where we overlooked all of Dublin like ballers.

But wait, before that, Aaron took us to a “private VIP experience” at the “Guinness Beer Connoisseur Bar“, which is like really hard to get access to or something like that.  He said it was “the most exclusive bar in Ireland”, and since we are VIPs, that makes sense.

An interesting discovery while we were overlooking Dublin.  There is some tower with a green roof that is called “St. Patrick’s Tower”.  The reason I bring it up is because it looks like a penis with a boob on top. That is all.

After the Guinness tour, we were itching to go to a pub and drink.  We had a few recommendations from friends who were actually Irish, as we wanted to hang out in more “local places”, like every tourist wants to.  We asked our cab driver about them and he sent us in the right direction to Kehoe’s, which was very local even though it was so close to Grafton Street.  He also told us to  ”get rid of dem Guinness Storehouse bags unless ya want to be robbed.”  Which was sound advice.

The place got crowded *really* fast with the after work crowd, and there were a lot of guys in suits and stuff.  The bar was really fun and it felt like we were just hanging out enjoying life.

One man became very friendly with us and spent the good part of an hour talking to us about Irish things including how drinking Guinness makes you go to the bathroom weird.  His name was Dave and he happened to mention several times that he was divorced.

Pay no attention to my potato nose in the following images:

BEER.

The plan was to go back to the hotel, change, then go out to a couple of bars, but I was so tired (drunk) that I felt like throwing up.  So we pretty much crashed that night.  Tomorrow we drink several more beers in different locations.  It will be riveting.

Many items have been occurring that I have not been telling you about.  Mostly because I’ve been working like 70 hour weeks and want to shoot myself in the face most nights.  However, I think work might start to pull back a  little bit, so I wanted to keep you abreast of happenings and items and things.

1. My best friend in the whole world got engaged to the best guy ever.  Most amazing.  They are also working on something really exciting for the spring, which I will definitely be telling you about;
2. The weather has been up and down like a crazy person lately.  Bad news is that you’ll go to bed one night to a balmy 8 degrees, and wake up the next morning to a foot of snow.  GOOD news is that you’ll go to bed with a foot of snow and wake up to an 18 degree Saturday.  Fence-cat enjoys these days.
3. The quick freezes also led to some cool frozen skeleton-flowers.  Here is a skeleton flower.
4. Here is another skeleton flower hydrangea.  I kind of like it A LOT.
5. I had to go out to a “club” this Saturday (like a CLUB-club), and at first I wanted to wear this weird curtain-y hippie mini-dress with Shakespeare sleeves to be all weird and different and hippie-ish.
6. This is what that dress is supposed to look like on someone who isn’t awful-looking.
7. Here is what I actually looked like.  I did not wear the dress due to self-hatred.
8. Part of the trip to the “club” was a ride on a Party Bus.  I sat back and watched other people bust a crazy move.
9. Trav decided to be amazing and wore a shirt that lights up when music plays.
10. The Party Bus was a huge ridiculous escapade that included having to jump another Party Bus whose battery had died, and sitting at Queen and Dovercourt for 45 minutes while everyone went to the bus washroom.  Here is the sign in the bus washroom.  In retrospect, I’m pretty sure I put tissues in the toilet.
11. I got *really* drunk.  The next morning I spent 100% of my time snoozing with my love.
12. IMPORTANT DISCOVERY:  FRENCH ONION SOUP IS THE MOST AMAZING THING THAT WAS EVER CREATED.  I made this f-ing amazing soup with garlic toasts and Provolone and Gruyere and caramelized onions… I pity you for not having tasted it.
13. My vintage shopping has been on the back burner lately, but I managed to procure a CHANEL SUIT like a fucking BALLER.  It’s about fifteen pounds too small for me, so I have to lose fifteen pounds basically.
14. I have been drinking too much.
15. On that note, if you haven’t tried this wine from California you are missing out.  It’s like 15 bucks and it’s AMAZING.
16. On that note again, Bellwoods‘ retail hours has expanded so now I have a constant stream of big Bellwoods bottles in my fridge.

Despite the fact that the whiskering on my jeans makes my thighs look like two pork sausages, I like this photo because my letha makes me feel bad ass.

Anyhoo, second day in Prague I decided to get a walking tour to investigate the city.  It was significantly easier to get a walking tour in Prague than in Vienna.  In fact, there are at least SEVERAL THOUSAND walking tours operating in Prague every minute.  It is much much much more touristy than I thought it would be.

And when I say touristy, I mean that there are more tourist stands selling sparkly ”PRAHA!” magnets than there are molecules in the air.

Our tour guide was a pretty cool old man who spoke six languages and lived in twenty countries and like, fled Prague during the war and was an Acoustic Sound Engineer.  Made me feel pretty inadequate as a human being.

Yeah.  Tons of tourists.  At least in the main square.  Tours kept criss-crossing each other and getting all mixed up – we were *this* close to holding hands in a line like kindergartners out for a walk during recess.

The walking tour brought us over the Charles Bridge at around 11:00 am.  FYI – THIS IS NOT THE TIME TO WALK OVER THE CHARLES BRIDGE.  That is, unless you want to be overwhelmed with like, organ grinders with robot monkeys and people doing 5 minute caricatures of teenagers and Peruvian pan flute bands and people selling shitty homemade jewelry made of wires.

For this reason, I decided to take minimal photos during this walk over the bridge, and I ask you to wait until my next post when I’m a bad ass mutha and get up at 7:00 am to take MANY MANY arty pictures on the bridge *without* women in pink capris and fanny packs and Crocs gumming up the works.

There were lots of interesting things on the walking tour and I really recommend it blah blah blah.

After the walking tour I became fixated on going to find the John Lennon Wall, mostly because it made me feel like a cool guy.  It’s not that easy to find, and I got lost three times trying to find it and had to turn my iPhone roaming on so that I could see my map.  That made me feel less like a cool guy.

Anyways the wall was pretty cool I guess, AND it was the only touristy place where there weren’t very many people climbing all over each other to take pictures.  You know what that means… ARTY PHOTOS FROM ME HA HA HA HA

The one below is my favourite, mostly because I like the message, but slightly less mostly because of my awe-inspiring photography skills.

The walking tour and arty photo session of the John Lennon Wall took the majority of the day, but we still found time to squeeze in a beer before dinner.  In case you didn’t believe me DOGS ARE ALLOWED IN RESTAURANTS IN EUROPE AND IT’S THE BEST THING EVER.

Here is your first lesson on how to not be a tourist in Prague.  Walk two blocks away from the square in the opposite direction of Charles Bridge.

There you will find the following:

• People who actually live in Prague
• Czech food and drink, with no menu items entitled “Spaghetti Pasta Meatball Americanski”
• Cheap local beer
• Cheap local wine

We went to this place called “Lokal” which definitely seemed local-friendly.  I ordered the fried cheese with tartar sauce, which is apparently a speciality.

The place focused on (surprise) “local & fresh” ingredients and stuff… they even had their own beer brewery storage cask things so you could get the beer super fresh.

The Czech beer thing is Pilsner, Pilsner, Pilsner, everyday Pilsner.  I’m not crazy about Pils because they are so fucking hoppy that it tastes like my throat is eating itself from bitter horror, so I bought (several) glasses of cheap wine to make myself feel better.  Perhaps too many glasses…

Yes, one sexy lady.

In order to keep my extremely unattractive buzz going, we then walked BACK over the Charles Bridge to this small little wine bar where they have hundreds of wines and you can get a taster glass of ANY of them for 1-3 Euro. 

I forget the name of it because I was drunk, but I do remember that you have to take a sharp right when you get off the bridge, then basically walk almost back under the bridge and it’s beside this sketchy hostel that looks like it’s from the movie “Hostel” and when you go to the bathroom in the wine bar you realize that it’s actually a shared hostel bathroom and there are people in there washing their armpits.

Other than that, the wine bar was awesome and I rediscovered the loveliness of a off-dry white.

Then baaaack over the Charles Bridge in a drunken haze…

To re-discover the most amazing, delicious, fantastic thing in the world…

PALAČINKA!

If you don’t know what palačinka are, then I feel sorry for you because you are less of a human than you could be.  When I was a little Croat girl my mom used to make me palačinka all the time and I LOVED them and they are delicious.

They are basically big ol’ flat floppy pancakes that are stretchy with delicious things in them. They are NOT crepes.  They are palačinka.  They are better.

For my first night, I chose to eat a chocolate and banana palačinka.  See below for pending deliciousness.  I assure that is not poo.

 WOO HOO.  I say my “first night” because I managed to buy palačinka SEVERAL times while in Prague and I will tell you all about it.

Then, back to the hotel, drunk and full of wine and palačinka to discover that my big-pimpin’ bad-assery had led to the hotel leaving me a little treat in the hotel as a bedtime snack. 

Piiiiiiimp. 

What flavour of palačinka will I eat TOMORROW????  The anticipation is killing you, I know.

Third day at Oktoberfest was our last.  Le boo.

Anne and I tried to get our shit together and wake up early so that we could walk around and pretend that we saw at least *some* of Munich outside of the beer tents.  We gave ourselves a solid 60 minutes of walking around time.  More than enough to see a giant city with no map, right?  Here is what I look like in the morning – puffy eyes galore.  Annie is the cutest.

Being extremely resourceful (read: stuck without a map and no data roaming on our iPhones), we stumbled down a random alleyway into a small courtyard in the middle of the deserted city.  Where we found this:

What is this, you ask?  I have no fucking idea.  It looked like a giant community of German folk bands all standing together in the middle of nowhere, looking at each other.  You would *think* they would play their instruments at some point, you know, having instruments in their hands and all, but Annie and I stood there waiting for over 30 minutes waiting for something to happen.  And they just stood there shuffling slightly to the left or right.

Finally, we decided to go into the adjacent Starbucks and get a coffee so that we had something to do while waiting for SOMETHING *BIG* TO HAPPEN with the German folk bands.  I went to the washroom, too.  DID YOU KNOW that washrooms at Starbucks’ in downtown Munich are like, in super fucking cool underground CAVES?  Where you have to go into what looks like a haunted cellar door, then into the basement of a fucking underground LAIR?  YEAH  IT WAS PRETTY COOL.

Finally the bands played like three bars of music then they stopped and started looking around again so we we left to walk around some more.

See all the Police?  What is going on you say?

Two things became quickly apparent:

1. It was a national holiday in Germany and there were police EVERYWHERE to prevent drunk German mob-fighting; and
2. In order to be a female police officer in Germany you have to be tall, blond, and smoking hot.

What with all the underground washroom caves, the blond policewomen, and the instrument-holding-stand-around mob, it was shaping up to be a fabulous day.

On to the tent we booked for day three: Hippodrom.

As you can see, we welcomed the morning with another huge log of cheese paste and salted turnips.

Hippodrom was supposedly the “exclusive” tent that was really “hard to get into”, not unlike a “hot, hot club”… so of course I was automatically a bit skeptical.  I like my beer tents “trashy and non-exclusive”.

There WERE a larger proportion of ladies with fake tits… and we saw two ladies with fake breasticles doing a line of coke on the table next to us… so yeah, very similar to a “hot, hot club”.

However, the tent was beautiful, they had an all-day live band and the beer was delicious.  So I was happy.

The other main difference between this tent and the others is that this one served alcohol *other* than beer.  Two of the girls in my group (I feel the need to clarify that neither one is me…), are not partial to beer… for them, the first two days were not as enjoyable as they could have been, alcohol-wise… so this was a way for them to get drunk with a bit more comfort.

The two non-beer ladies chose to order Champagne.  Two bottles.  So like, one bottle each.  You is some cra-zhy guys!

Things started a bit slow.  I mean, everyone looks just like, sober and normal.

Apparently, I decided that on day three I was going to try really hard to look like a transvestite man, as you can see below.

 This picture is only *sorta* getting a little sloppy… Travis is pulling the fart eyes down there in the corner.

…and then Sarah drank a whole bottle of Champagne to herself…

…and then other people started acting like idiots.

Awwwww, look how nice the picture below is:

You would never know that this was the picture taken immediately before it:

The transvestite man is unhappy about something and decided to shout her/his disapproval in a low baritone:

At some point we left the tent.  I remember walking slowly in the sun aimlessly.  Then I remember sitting outside at another tent.  Which tent? I have no idea.

What I DO remember is that there were no places to sit on the outdoor patio, and they don’t serve you delicious beer unless you are sitting down.  We then noticed a table for eight with only four people seated at it.  The waitress said to us “Seat?  Seat?  Seat over there! THERE!” …and ushered us to this table.

Unbeknownst to us, these four men had been belligerent all day… had broken several glasses on the table, and were so out of their minds incomprehensible drunk that the waitress couldn’t even speak to them to kick them out.  She thought if we sat down they would get the picture and get up and leave.

But no.  They befriended us.  They really liked me and my low-cut dress.  One man made me sit on his lap as a “toll” for us to sit at the table.  So yeah, vomit in my mouth.  They were all Eastern European and REALLY liked that I am Croatian.  Oh yeah.  They liked me.  They liked me a lot.

The Serbian gentleman pictured below has no teeth (he also stole my hat):

The gentleman pictured below sat in this position for about two hours straight speaking to no one:

At some point we all realized that we should probably leave… some people threw up… some people cried… it was a clusterfuck, really.

This part got a little fuzzy – I seem to remember three of us girls having SERIOUS trouble figuring out how to get back to the hotel for the following reasons:

1. Walking was out of the question due to drunken fatigue and no sense of direction;
2. We had no idea where the subway was; and
3. There were no cabs.

I have this vision of us walking around for the Oktoberfest gate for 30 minutes… wailing to each other in drunken loud obnoxious girl voices “HOWWWW  are we going to get bAAAACK”…

…while walking in circles around a Rickshaw.  Like OVER AND OVER AND OVER:

All of a sudden, it was like we had been standing next to the rickshaw for twenty minutes wailing, when we turned around and were all like “THERE’S A RICKSHAW!!!” Like we had invented the idea of a rickshaw.

Please see below for a shot of Tomas, our rickshaw (to make it extra German you have to put emphasis on the “mas”, like To-MAS).  PLEASE NOTE HOW MANY RICKSHAWS THERE ARE AROUND HIM THAT WE DID NOT SEE.

Drunnnnk ladiiiieeesss, takin’ pictuuuuures!  Every drunk lady thinks pictures are a great idea.  It’s science.

Oh To-MAS, you so crazy.

Then we went to Pizza Hut.  End of day.

Incidentally, since posting about the two first days, I have come across some additional pictures.

From day two – Here we are sitting with the table of German people next to us for a photo.  Please note how “familiar” the gentleman in the lower right-hand corner is being with Anne…

But Anne doesn’t seem to mind.

Agnes is *very* happy about the fact that cotton candy cost the equivalent of 30 cents.  She kept yelling “DO YOU KNOW HOW MUCH THIS COST?  DO YOU?  THIRTY CENTS!  I LOVE EUROPE!”

And then from day one below… some pictures of me sitting with a table of guys from Holland.  I do not remember this occuring at all.  Let’s also note that I am holding a cookie necklace that is not mine, and I have clearly crushed it with my overzealous man-hands.  The man sitting directly across from me is pretty upset with me – look at his kill-eyes.

Also – WHEN did my hair get French braided?  By whom?  These are still mysteries.

But award for best candid photo is the one below, where I am obviously trying to steal cigarettes from Holland Jared Leto while giving him my digits as a distraction.  I can just imagine myself being like

“…uh yeah… 1-1-3-2-4-5-6-2-24-4-2-3–6-4-3… but like, that number might not work in Holland.”

Next post is about my one-day adventure in Vienna, then off to Prague!

So the next day at Oktoberfest was my birthday.  Truth.  Birthday at Oktoberfest like a piiiiiimp.  I was pretty excited, because it gave me an excuse to do the following things on my birthday without being seen as a “self indulgent weirdo”:

1. Dress in costume;
2. Drink copious amounts of beer; and
3. Demand attention from old German men.

As you can see, the day had all the ingredients to be amazing.  We had reservations at the Schottenhamel Tent and we got started early.

So, apparently there is this thing at Oktoberfest where you buy people you “like” cookies that have various German sayings on them.  Since my friends are completely awesome, they all pitched in to buy me a HUGE (and expensive) German necklace cookie that said “Happi Borsdai”.  It was like two feet across and like ten pounds.  

We started the day with some ‘cheese paste’ and turnips with salt on them.  You know, the good stuff.

They really like their salted turnips.  Trust me.  Look how drunk I am already:

Alright, let’s get down to the nuts.

There’s this thing at Oktoberfest called “chugging”.  If you haven’t heard of it before, it’s when you “chug” the contents of your beer down your throat all fast-like.  Since the steins at Oktoberfest are a full litre, it’s understandably a big deal when you chug your stein.  There is this tradition around it and everyone goes MENTAL when you chug.  ESPECIALLY if you are a girl.  So the deal is this:

1. Stand up on your table
2. Chug your beer to the insane drunk cheers of your thousands of new European friends

If you succeed in chugging your whole beer, you get to revel in the idolatry of inebriated old German men while sunlight shines down on you like in the beginning of The Lion King when Moufasa holds Simba up in the air.  If you fail, you get simultaneously pelted with pieces of old pretzels by hundreds of people.

So… it was my birthday…

And… I can chug a tidy beer…

And… I had on my giant birthday cookie of confidence.

So I decided that today was the day that I was going to stand on my table and chug a litre of beer. 

Let me preface this story by saying I intentionally traded in my “half full” stein of beer for a “totally full” stein of beer before I started chugging because I didn’t want to be a “giant pussy”.

Let’s view the video below to see how things went:

YEAH.  I was about 2/3rd of the way through my LITRE of beer, when the German security guard stopped me.

WHY??? You ask?

BECAUSE APPARENTLY, girls aren’t “allowed” to chug full steins.  GIRLS AREN’T ALLOWED.  That’s what the guy told me after. 

Now, I can understand that this rule is *probably* based on past experience they’ve gathered from years of girls trying to chug full steins then projectile barfing all over everyone.  However.  THOSE GIRLS AREN’T NATALIE.  Natalie can chug a litre of beer then ace a Physics exam.

At least I can take comfort in the fact that the whole tent of drunk people was on my side and booed the security guard then threw a bunch of pretzels at him.

The thesis of this story, as you can probably tell by my previous displays of awesomeness, is that I AM TOO HARDCORE FOR OKTOBERFEST.

Anyways, I was happy that I worked up the nerve to even try.   Incidentally, should you ever try to chug a litre stein, here is a tip – make sure you take a deep fucking breath, because it’s not the beer that’ll get ‘cha, it’s the fact that your nose and mouth are fucking sealed off in a glass with no oxygen for like a minute. 

Personally, I was *SO* nervous that I was breathing like an overweight Texan, so it was ten times worse.  Here is an artist’s rendition:

The table next to us was full of nice German people, and they took a liking to us, probably because we were playing Uno, which is apparently the United Nations of card games. 

They were SO nice that they even gave us their desserts, which were the most fucking delicious apple crisp things with apple sauce on the side EVER.

In the afternoon we decided to walk around the fairgrounds and go on roller coasters and drink more beer.  This roller coaster is called the Munchen Pooping, and it was in the shape of the Olympic rings. 

Since Munich hosted the Olympic games in 1972, and since there is no real other reason for it to be in the shape of the Olympic rings OTHER than the fact that it was built for the Olympics, that makes this roller coaster (that gets torn down and rebuilt every year by carnies) FORTY YEARS OLD.  I did not ride it.  I chose to stay back and drink more beer in the sun with my giant cookie.

That night, we went to an amazing dinner at a German restaurant and I ate  more ‘cheese paste’ and salted turnips.  IT WAS AMAZING. 

I also was instructed to bring my giant cookie to ensure my embarrassment would be as prolonged as possible, which was also amazing. 

Plus, the restaurant was so wonderful and nice that they gave me a free ceramic birthday stein. 

Incidentally, with my toque and my weird cookie and my cup everyone thought I looked like a homeless person and we were so drunk that it was hilarious to everyone.

Best Oktoberfest birthday ever.  Despite lack of full chug.  Here is an arty picture I took while we walked home drunk:

Tomorrow, my last day at Oktoberfest , but then on to more European adventures…  stay tuned.

I know there has been a black hole in your life for the last month.  A black hole that can only be filled by sweet, sweet Natalie.

Rest assured that I have been scurrying about, adventuring and making mistakes with my life for the sole purpose of entertaining you.  As per several earlier posts, you may know that I have been counting down to a huge, mega-baller vacation to Europe.  It arrived, finally, and it was just as sweet as I imagined.  Sweeter than that moment when you add in the powdered cheese to your Kraft Dinner and it starts to react with the milk and margarine in the pot and then it melts and get all ‘non-powdery’ and you think you yourself “I’m going to eat this Kraft Dinner in less than 60 seconds.”

COULD anything be sweeter than that moment?  Yes. Yes it could.

Let’s rewind to the week before, when I was working 13 hour days for what seemed like three weeks straight to ensure I could actually take vacation in good conscience.   I literally worked until 1:00 am the FRIDAY BEFORE MY FLIGHT, then decided to just get fucked on cheap shitty Wine Rack wine, and at 3:00 am packed my flight essentials:

As you may or may not know, I have a disease called “Bitch Can’t Sleep on Planes”, which makes me unable to sleep on planes.  I have tried sleeping pills, Gravol, neck pillows, back-to-back movies starring Kristen Stewart, but none of it seems to work.  This time I again packed sleeping pills, but also created five “jelly bean surprise” snack-packs for each 90 minutes of plane time so that I could give myself a treat to pass the time if I didn’t fall asleep.

As a side note, I think I am actually, honestly, no-jokes-this-is-serious-and-should-go-to-counselling… addicted to jelly beans.  But let’s leave that for a later post.

Airport beers are the best beers because it makes the airport less awkward. And the airport is pretty awkward.  ALSO, this beer indicated the start of my vacation, so he deserved to be commemorated.

I didn’t take any pictures on the plane.  I don’t know why.  Usually I take those arty “picture of the wing-slash-picture of my knees-slash-picture of the sunrise over the clouds-slash-picture of the skyline as I’m leaving” pictures.  I guess I was too busy eating jelly beans.

The picture below is the first picture I took in Germany:

Please note that there are FIVE… FIVE different types of sausages on that plate.  EACH SAUSAGE WAS MORE EXHILARATING THAN THE LAST.

There was also Kartofflen Salad, which I quickly realized was German for “Fucking Delicious Potato Salad with Like Dill and Other Delicious Shit” and which was available EVERY-WHERE.

I must have been tired, because there are no other pictures of the sausage plate.  This is the next photo:

Top view of our table at Hofbrau Tent at Oktoberfest.  If you look closely, you can see the top of my boob.

OK.  So.  First stop of the trip was Munich, where I was fortunate enough to meet up with six of my friends who were also being ballers and travelling through Europe.  We made a pact to meet at Oktoberfest and fuck each other up.  Three days and three Oktoberfest tents.

This was day one.  Hofbrauhaus.

Wait, let’s take a look at that last one again:

And let’s just get some stuff out of the way:

Apparently this is the “rowdy” tent.   If you have not been to Oktoberfest in Munich, it is basically a huge fairground  that spans several football fields with about ten giant beer tents that hold like, five thousand people each, and everyone is drunk and dressed in costume (EVERYONE), and smashing huge litre glasses into other huge litre glasses and shattering them everywhere and people getting up and chugging and people throwing pretzels at them and stuff.  I think we were all a little jet-lagged, etc., because this was the day of which I have the least recollection.

You have to “reserve” tables months in advance by pre-buying several litre steins of beer and one half-chicken per person.   Anne is pleased with the prospect of chicken:

Ok… so… there was a point in the day when things started to not be that clear anymore…

I remember the table of guys next to us kept pushing their butts up against us, trying to take up precious “Bench Butt Space” as the space in the tents is scarce.

Then I remember being out for a smoke with them.

Then I remember them all like sitting at our table playing Uno.

Like, who’s this guy?  I have no fucking idea.

Who are these fucking chicks?  I have no recollection of this whatsoever.

Nope, never seen that guy in my life.

Yep, no idea.

For your consideration, in the image below, none of the men sitting with us is from our group.  Do we seem concerned?  Of course not.  There is a pretzel of unity at the table.

Best part of the picture above is the “Drunken Slow Drink” face of the guy on the left.  We called him “Holland Jared Leto”  because he was from Holland and he looked like Jared Leto.

Agnes is going to kill me for posting the picture above but I love it because it’s like a pure, visceral depiction of pure drunken joy.  BEST.

Ok, so one of the Holland boys sitting at the table took a liking to me and for some reason I gave him my email address.  I do not recall doing this, and the next morning when I woke up (more on that later…), I found these two pictures in my email, entitled “Drunk Photo”:

I think he bought “Boiled Kartofflens” and I stole one off his plate ate it out of my hand like an apple.  I also had the hand burns to prove it.

At some point we left the tent and walked around aimlessly in the fairgrounds.

Anne and I ran into these guys and naturally asked them to have a cigar and wear their hat.

Just so you know – those hats with the like bush-y, barber’s brush-type feather thing on the back are like THOUSANDS of dollars.  Why?  I don’t know.  I didn’t care enough to continue my research.

“Tongue sticking out in photo” is classic.  Classic.

Anyways, sorry to be anti-climactic about the throw up part but I woke up at 2:00 am and basically painted the hotel bathroom in vomit.

heh… read on tomorrow, when I discover I am TOO HARDCORE FOR OKTOBERFEST…

1. Friday night I got drunk by myself and watched “This Movie is Broken“, which is actually pretty awesome, except for the end where things kind of don’t make sense.  DO they get together?  DOES that guy do the deed with that other guy, or do they just make-out nude?  Ah, the mysteries of life.
2. Because I got drunk by myself I felt the need to take a “Sneaky Selfie”.   My eyeball looks all deform-y.
3. Heel Boy still has a bunch of summer stuff on sale and I saw these HA-UGE platforms from Dolce Vita on sale for $60 from $250.  Suede?  Browny-poo colour?  Perfect fall-transition shoe, I say.
4. On Saturday I spent LOTS of time listening to records while wearing my favourite boots in the dark drinking beer…
5. …here is my view up after I drank three beers and laid down on the carpet like a bum.
6. I also met Lauren for beers at Rhino and wore my wonderfully fantastical new hat.  I am so pretentious with my hipster Indiana Jones hat, and yet, I care none.
7. Saturday night.  More beers at Grand Electric, where I gorged myself….
8. …but not so much that I couldn’t stuff my face with Honey Nut Cheerios, which I did when I arrived at home.
9. Speaking of food, dinner on Sunday was Morroccan Lamb Stew with apricots and sweet potatoes.  JEALOUS MUCH?
10. Holiday Monday I took Molly to TB.
11. Here she is begging for treats in front of Clafouti.
12. Here she is sniffing the butt of a huge dog.

That is all.

 This is a picture of a rainbow, taken while trying to avoid a frizzy hair explosion due to rain in the awning of Parts and Labour.  Note, my hair-shielding attempts were unsuccessful and my hair turned into a lion-mane the likes of which you have never seen.

My friends were generous enough to comment that my “natural” hair looked “good” when I met them for drinks, but I think we all know that my appearance was bordering on crazy, and not the good kind of “crazy because it means I’m interesting” crazy, but “crazy because it means I might try to bite you” crazy.

Regardless, it was wonderful to be out (AT NIGHT!) with a bunch of some of my favourite people.  We went to 416 Snack Bar, which was amazing. 

Here is Sarah making the “put it in the hole” motion:

Yes, it was funny.

Aidan tried a duckface reprise.

We ended up staying out late (!) as if I was young again.  We tried to go to Get Well but there was a gross-ass line up outside, and, as expressed several times while pondering our course of action, ”We’re not fucking twenty year-olds so we don’t wait in fucking lines to go in bars.  FUCK!”   Hopefully I’ll have another wave of good luck and I’ll be able to go out at night with my friends at least one within the next several years and we can go into a bar (!).

Below you can see the remnants of my lion mane, except this time it is very strategically covered by my new Brixton hat, which I love more than one should really love an inanimate object.  Even though hats can be kind of (read: REALLY) pretentious, and even though this hat is pretty much a 9 or a 10 on the pretentiousness scale, I love it and would wear it to bed and to work and in the shower if that were socially acceptable and/or logistically possible.

In other news, remember last fall when I basically mutilated my garden due to extreme lack of knowledge and/or extreme lack of motivation to find said knowledge?

Well, back then I totally KILLED this huge plant with mystery flower bulbs all over it (or, as I put it, “HACKED at the roots like an insane pirate for about 10 minutes”) because I didn’t know what it was, and rather than taking the time to find out like a normal adult person with a garden, I just fucking destroyed it.

Well, it came back!  And surprise, it’s clearly an expensive and beautiful flower tree-thing. 

YEAH, NO BIG DEAL, just the most beautiful flowers you’ve ever seen.  I’m sure it would have been 10 times more bushy and beautiful if I didn’t mutilate it last year, but at least now I know to leave it be.

Please take a close look at the insect above and tell me what it is.  You would THINK that it’s a moth or something, but it has fucking freakish striped legs and it ACTUALLY HAS FUR on its back (zoom in if you don’t believe me).  It has been hanging out beside my door, about 2 inches away from my doorbell, for the last week and I’m pretty sure it’s some kind of genetically modified moth/ghost/snow leopard that is plotting ways to burrow into my brain and feast on the delicious skull innards.

I’m pretty sure that Molly is really disappointed in me as a mother because I don’t play with her constantly all day and all night and she’s starting to just treat this gross green ball with stinky dirt all over it as my replacement.  She is literally either licking it, chewing it, hugging it, or chasing after it 24 hours a day, and she appears much happier with the dirty ball pressed up against her smush-face than when I try to snuggle or kiss her.  One time I think I got subconsciously jealous and I accidentally threw the ball over the fence, but the next door neighbour who is super nice and actually surprisingly cute found it in the alleyway a week later and he left it in front of my door.   Molly was so happy when she saw it again that it hasn’t left her side since.

Due to extreme jealousy, I am considering throwing the ball over the fence. 

 One of my friends turned 30 last week, and since his wife is totally awesome, she organized a pirate party on a boat.  Not sure if you’ve noticed, but I pretty much salivate at the mouth anytime I have the opportunity to wear a costume, so I went all out.

The sad/amazing thing about my costume is that I already owned almost all of it.  The only thing I had to go out an procure was the WICKED AWESOME hat. 

We were all speculating as to the sweatiness level inside the plastic hook-hand…

Travis, the birthday boy,  looked appropriately piratey.

There was also a Somali pirate.

Time to drink.

And drink we did. 

See below for a picture of me when I am incandescently happy, even though my head appears to be resting on some sort of uncomfortable-looking metal access-door.  Sun, beer, and costumes!!!

After a day of fishing, swimming, screaming, and gorging ourselves on food, it seemed fitting to blow up a bunch of expensive fireworks into the bowels of nature.  So some of the boys decided to let their wieners hang low and set up a handy “setting off explosives” area at the end of the dock, right next to the gas tanks in the two boats.

We had a choice between the “$85.00″ fireworks and the “$250.00″ fireworks at Costco, and being reasonable people who aren’t rich Kings of Siam, we decided to go with the $85.00 ones.  These ones were HUGE and lasted like ONE HOUR and we still didn’t get through them all (due to a brush with death-by-fireworks, we decided to stop). 

And then, as is inevitable when blowing up fireworks, there was the one firework that went horribly wrong, almost killed everybody, and blew up a big planter at the end of the deck.

Fortunately, the only scars from the incident were of the “emotional” and “wiener-deflating” kind.  Thankfully, we had the “smaller fireworks bonanza” package from Costco.  I can only imagine the number of limbs that have been lost as a result of the $250.00 Costco fireworks package.

Fast forward to the next day, where we had some EXCITING ADVENTURES planned for Molly. 

Being a city dog, Molly is not used to having free reign in the wilderness.  So my fear is that she would run off, get killed for fun by a pack of small wild rats, and never be seen again.  However, I wanted to give her some liberty to enjoy herself in the backwoods.  She is a fucking dog after all.

So I got all amped up to have her swim in the lake.

NOW.  To preface this next photo, I want to emphasize three things:

1. According to my intensive Internet research, snub-nosed dogs don’t swim very well because they have trouble breathing AND it’s hard for them to keep their stump-snouts out of the water.
2. Molly had never really swam before.
3. I am a crazy person.

SO I BOUGHT HER A LIFEJACKET.  OK?

YES.  Get all your making-fun-of-me-ness out.  Although I’m sure she could have swam without it, I know she would be labouring, and we were all drinking… and I was just being careful ok?  OK?  LAY OFF ALREADY.

Anyways.  HOW CUTE IS THIS SHIT:

YEAH PRETTY CUTE.  Who’s making fun of dog life jackets now, you heartless asshole???

Anyways.  She was not exactly *loving* the water, so we gave her a few toots in there and she ended up just pooping out on the pontoon boat for the rest of the day with Cece.

That night, another huge, delicious pasta meal.  Sausage and peppers what.  I literally (like, I weighed myself before and after) gained ten pounds eating all the food this weekend.

After we ate so much that we all almost threw up, we decided to play a game.

The game was called “The Game of Things”.

At first, we were all apprehensive about The Game of Things.

But then we starting playing The Game of Things.

Essentially, there are a bunch of cards.  On each of the cards, it asks you to write down a “thing”.

For example, it might ask you “Things that you shouldn’t say to a police officer”… or “Things that make you feel young”… or “Things that you wish existed but don’t.”

Then, everyone secretly writes down their response, they are given to someone who reads them all out.  Then you all have to guess who said what. 

As you can imagine, with a group of drunk adults playing this game… things got a little out of hand.

The game got understandably competitive. 

By the end of the night, most answers contained the words “blow-job machine”.

So all in all, it was a good night.

The next day, we left. 

Everyone was exhausted.

Especially Molly the Adventure Dog.