Hi

Yet Another Monday.
Mondays. They keep on comin’, don’t they? Week after week. What’s up with that?

Stockholm now seems like a distant memory even though my luggage only actually appeared yesterday. Air France has this tendency of losing my luggage every single time. You’d think it was deliberate. I say burn ‘em down. Let them accidentally navigate themselves into the Eiffel Tower for all I care. South African Airways is the only way to fly: Once you go SAA, you’ll go no other way. Right. Clearly no one should trust me with their advertising campaign. Moving on…

Me: Sweden was nice.
Friend: Nice??? Did you say NICE??? Tea is nice! Summer is nice! The old lady down the street is nice! Sweden? Fantabulastic!
Me: Uh, ok. If you say so.

Truth be told it was just an average trip. Nice to get away from the office, meet new people and visit a new city, but I wouldn’t want to live there. Its a little too dull for me. Just not enough action, and ya'll know I’m all about the action! Perhaps I was just hanging out in the wrong places or the visit was too short to really get the most of what the city has to offer since I stayed in within the confines of my hotel half the time, ordering room service and Pay TV. I innocently opted to actually pay for quality TV just to get assaulted with an array of XXX hetero porn (lets see what kind of Google hits I get now). Porn holds my attention for about 5 minutes and then it gets old, and frankly just plain gross. But they just HAD to devote three of the 7 Pay TV channels to it, didn’t they. Because obviously everyone who comes to that hotel is just dying to have sex and/or jerk off the whole the freaking day.

In between the 8-5 working hours, I managed to sneak in some sightseeing, good dining and ...well, a little hottie-ogling. There are actually tons of dark heads in Sweden. Who knew? Strangely enough, the object of my affection was Christine, my cute Italian-American colleague from New Jersey, not a hot Swedish blonde thing. Also, I quickly figured out it's a misconception that everyone in Sweden is blonde and hot because there are just as many darkheads and..um...well, a few unsightly individuals as well. I guess the difference is the Swedish blondes are extremely pale with almost-white eyebrows and lashes. Yeah I noticed. I was looking.

Nothing extraordinary happened though. Just did normal touristy stuff, didn't go to any girls only bars (couldn’t find any), I met some interesting people, went on a ferry down the river/lake thingy, went to a mini amusement park (will I ever outgrow those rides?), had a picnic with colleagues from different parts of the globe and visited my company HQ which happens to be in Sweden (there’s a special prize for anyone who can guess which well known company I work for).

The night before I left, my very lastest night in Sweden, we decided to go and spend all our leftover money on a sumptuous dinner a la Swedish. I think it was the most expensive restaurant in the entire country. You know the kind where they plop half a teaspoon of icecream in the centre of a large plate, sprinkle and squirt stuff all over the place and call it dessert, then charge you exorbitant prices for it. And all you're thinking is "You're kidding, right? I need binoculars just to see the food!"Probably like 100 Kronors (9 Euros) per square cm. Maybe it was special designer ice cream made from unicorn milk. Anyhow, credit to them, the entire 3 course meal was so delicious I was tempted to eat up my fork just to ensure i get every last drop.

We were like the United Nations at that dinner table: Hot New Jersey Girl, Simon from Dublin, Irwan from Indonesia, Fari from Nigeria etc etc... Spent time fondly arguing what Swedish sounded like and finally agreed it was a cross between German and Korean. The waitress was amazing, filling up our glasses as soon as we set it down. Having been a waitress myself once upon a time, i fully appreciate good service. So naturally, being the generous crowd we are, we tipped her like 30%. Then we were all kind of astounded to discover that if you add 30% on a very large bill you get a very VERY large bill.

I took lots of pictures with someone else’s Camera because I left mine at home. He promised to email them to me. He'd better or else... Simon - I know your name. And I know where you live. I'm watching you man. Like a hawk.

The weather was good though, not hot, but not freezing. Was semi-dark (never completely dark, I thought that was totally weird) - dusklike between 11pm- 2am before the sun started coming out again.

Nice experience though. Fun. Different. Interesting. And one more city I can check off my list. Unfortunately it was never on it.

*sigh*
I guess its back to work as usual then.