Lufthansa sucks

Lufthansa has an incredible advertising department. Really, before this flight I would've had only positive things to say about them. And that's because I'd never flown with lufthansa before. Cramped footroom, no personal little seat tv, and awful inflight meals (okay, airline food is never good, but still) made me almost go crazy. Thank god I had my little netbook. I can't believe how great this thing is. I watched two 2 hour+ movies and still had like 3 hours of battery life left. It's incredible. I watched Max Manus and the Lives of other people on the way over. Two films that make Germans look like total assholes in different eras. They were great though, and between free drinks (I had no idea drinks were free on international flights xD), bad food, good movies, and some music, I didn't really have to spend any time looking out the window bored out of my mind.

Anyway, when I landed in Germany it was 6am their time but still only like 12am for me. So I got out of the airport (EU customs are great btw, I showed the guy my passport and went straight through) and started looking around for a way into the main part of the city.

So I wander onto a German bus and ask the busdriver how much a ticket costs. He responds in German. I ask if he speaks English and he starts speaking more German. I remember that German is kind of like Swedish (actually someone told me that Swedish sounds like child talk to Germans) so I decide to try some of my very limited Swedish.

Me: Hur mycket for en bussbiljett?

Bus driver guy gives me a funny look and I feel stupid for thinking that would work.

Bus driver is running out of patience. I look down the bus at the 3 people sitting there.

Me: Anyone speak English?

*blank stares*

A girl who kind of looks like harry potter waves from the back and comes up to translate. Thank god... I tell her that I would like to get to Frankfurt and she starts rattling off a bunch of German(?) sounding things. Greeaaattt. I smile and try to look appreciative even though I have no idea what she's trying to tell me. Finally she points at the escalator and I hear the word "train".

Me: Haha okay thanks... I'm gonna set so lost.

I wave goodbye and step off the bus.

The Frankfurt train station is beautiful. In fact, most of the buildings in Frankfurt are. That kind of old world architecture is just so charming. It makes me sad that most of the buildings like that in America are gone now.

Anyway, the area right outside the train station seemed pretty shady. There were literally at least 3 sexshops/nude bars or casinos on every single block for like 5 blocks. Besides that there are a ton of muslimy looking immigrants just standing around. I kept looking over my shoulder expecting someone to pop out with a knife and mug me.

Eventually I got out of that part and by then it was like 2am my time, so I walked into this beautiful old church to sit down for a minute. People are praying up front, so I quietly take a seat in the back.. Shit, I need to cough. This is one of those places where the smallest sound can be heard in the whole building. Hold it hold it hold it hold it please hold it please please please. I get up and speedwalk out into the lobby and let out 2 really big coughs. Even there I'm sure they heard me, but at least there wasn't that awkwardness of breaking into a fit of highly audible coughs while everyone was praying...

Bare Bea - *SPOILERS*

Geez, in English that title sounds like a porn or something. "Bea bares all!" Which maybe isn't so ironic since it's all about Bea, a Norwegian high school girl who's desperately trying to lose her virginity. Line recommended it to me. She said it was really really awkward, but right now I'm almost half way through it and I don't think it is so much. Maybe i've just been desensitized by too many Judd Apatow and Steve Carrell movies, but so far (remember I'm not done yet) I think it's really endearing. I mean, it is awkward, but it's cute awkward. Like when your little cousin yells "PENIS!" at a family reunion. You want to laugh more than cringe. Right now I'm watching the scene right after Bea sends her sister home. Her friends have set her up with this guy so she can lose her virginity and just get it over with so she can hook up with the class president. The volunteer penis (i dont even remember his name) is supposed to be this experienced stud, but he seems like he's just a nice guy who's as nervous as she is. It's a little sad because he's treating it like a real date, and she's trying really hard not to get to know him. Anyway, i'm gonna watch the second half, so be back after that...

12:08am: Okay i'm not done yet.. but Bea and Volunteer Penis (from here on known as VP) just had sex. It was cute and awkward. I really didn't like Bea until the end of this scene when VP kisses her and she kisses him back. You can tell she likes him. Bea's not a bad person afterall :D

12:19: I hate Bea again. WHAT. A. BITCH!

12:20: Poor Anders :(

12:26: HAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHA. Daniel's expression when she tries the move on him is PRICELESS.

12:27: Bras suck.

12:31: I really hope I don't get proven wrong... but I love movies like this because of how honest they are. It's not like Beauty and the Beast where there's one obviously bad guy and one good guy who you know she's going to end up with. They're just normal people... Sure, Daniel's popular and confident, but he's a genuinely good guy. Anders is unsure of himself and kind of a loner, but he's also a good guy. Bea didn't realize what she was doing with Anders and now she's going to have to make a hard choice... Or is she? I hope so. Any other way would be boring.

12:36: Bea's at the foodstand... Anders sees her. Let's watch.

12:37: She offers him a drink! Geez, I thought that was going to get AWKWARD AWKWARD, but it's still cute awkward.

12:43: I KNEW it couldn't stay cute awkward forever. Anders just walked in on them at lunch and my heart's breaking because I know what's going to happen.

12:45: I hate Bea again. I hate her blonde friend even more. SUCH. A. BITCH.

12:49: Are those REALLY what hotdogs look like in Norway? Gross.

12:52: "I break up." That was adorable.

12:58: Do buses really stop in the middle of fields in Norway? Their public transportation is incredible...

1:05: It's over... What a great movie. Every couple minutes I would try to predict what would happen next and I'd end up feeling so stupid when I was wrong. Not about the big plot points, but about how each character reacted to the events. Stuff like Bea handing Anders the drink, or her chasing him up a tree.. I really expected dramatic arguments and fights, but that's not who he was. I guess I've just seen too many hollywood movies about teens, but the characters in Bare Bea are uniquely real. Even Mia surprised me! I totally expected her to be a carbon copy of Regina from Mean Girls, but she wasn't. Anyway, that's it for now.

PS: Agurk, sykkel, vann, pose and barbie!

Robin Williams and Poker

I wanted to write something really nice for Line tonight because she always says goodnight in the sweetest, most thoughtful ways. I usually get a nice long note in Norwegian (and even though I know a lot of the words she uses by now i still need google translate :P), but tonight she wrote me a cute little poem too. But I was really hungry, so before starting I cooked a steak and opened up pokerstars to distract me a little while I ate. There was a freeroll entry tournament to win a Lamborghini, so I joined it thinking I'd have a little fun and be out by the time I'd finished the steak. No way. I was getting the best cards ever. Even when i didn't have the best cards I'd suck out on the river and beat some guy with a WAY better hand. Anyway, the tournament started at around 2am just when Robin William's standup special began with 8,879 players and ended a little more than 3 hours after that. After the first hour I was pretty consistently in the top 50 players, and in the last half hour i never left the top 10. I finished the tourny in 4th place with a stack of just over 1,300,00 chips (we started with 1,500 each). Now we have another tournament to play in with a $100,000 prize pool, and then another one with a $250,000 prize pool (plus first place wins the Lamborghini!). Anyway, I'm sorry I didn't get to write anything nice for you tonight Linecakes, but maybe if I win any money I'll make it up to you ;)

Carrots!

I love carrots! Well.. okay, I don't love them, but I like them very much. In salads, soup, or just eating them plain old raw, carrots are great! Unfortunately I don't have any good stories about carrots. Although one time when I was little I stuck a baby carrot up my nose and almost had to go to the hospital. Sooo instead i'm just gonna list a bunch of fun facts about carrots.

• Did you know that in World War 2 the British developed high-carotene carrots to enhance the night vision of their pilots?
• As a joke, Caligula fed the entire Roman Senate nothing but dishes made of carrots at a banquet in the hope that their animal natures would overtake them and he could watch them "rut like wild beasts."
• Besides orange, carrots come in purple, red, white, and yellow!
• China is the world's top carrot producer. The country produced 35 percent of the world's carrots in 2004. Russia is the second top producer and the United States the third.
• Carrots are about 87% water.
• Eating too many carrots can cause a person's skin to turn yellowish orange, especially on the palms or soles of the feet. This is called carotenemia.
• The Japanese word for carrot is "ninjin"!
• The Greeks who hid in the Trojan Horse ate lots of carrots so they wouldn't have to go poo.
• Mel Blanc, the guy who voiced bugs bunny hated carrots! :o

So next time you're at a frugally catered event with plenty of carrots and dip, hopefully you'll remember some of these cool carrot facts for some interesting conversation!

Listening

Lately I've been thinking a lot about what it means to listen. I think that for most of my life I've been too scared to listen to other people. I hear them, but I don't really try to silence my own thoughts and fully pay attention to what they're saying. I think this has made me very stupid in some ways and ended up making me very isolated from other people.

As I've become more aware of this, it occurred to me that more often than not people are more like me than they are different, and it makes me wonder why listening is so difficult. I don't know why, and maybe this sounds a little stupid, since everyone always tends to romanticize the past, but I think it's modern media. Almost as soon as I was born I've been immersed in it. Television, radio, the internet, advertising. It's all around us all the time. We don't really have a choice, so we become force-fed consumers of all kinds of ideas that have been polished to look meaningful, even though most of them lack much substance at all. They come at us so fast that we consume, but we rarely digest, and I think that's the real problem. We're so accustomed to being force fed this garbage that we respond the same way when another human being wants to connect with us. We sit there and go through the motions of listening, but we're not. We consume what's said to us and continue on with our day as if we've just heard another pointless radio advertisement.

zombies and crackheads

Last night I had a dream ... Me and my mom were driving to a Marriott to meet a family friend, but as we got closer and closer everything began to look really run down and decrepit. When we got there the place was overrun with zombies. They were slow and they looked worn, like the zombies in the resident evil movies but if you got too close they'd bite you. For some reason I had a gun, so i started blowing zombies away while we made our way to the elevator to meet the friend (when I woke up I realized how dumb it would be to take an elevator in the middle of a zombie epidemic; ALWAYS take the stairs). So we make it up to like the 10th floor and meet up with the friend (who's like the only non-zombie in the whole hotel). I don't remember how they got back down, but I jumped from the 10th floor window and landed safely on the ground. It was pretty awesome.

After that I hopped in the car and we made it into a zombie safe-zone where I met Dillon, my best childhood friend. We say hi and I go to the cafeteria to get some food. While I was paying (apparently there are no free meals, even during the apocalypse), I look up and realize the cashier was Dillon's older brother. I say hi, but he's clearly not all there. There are half finished lines of cocaine everywhere and he's twitchy and super high. As I leave for home with the food I run into Dillon, we just nod, but I can see the uncomfortable sadness in his eyes.

i wonder...

Just came back from costco... as I was walking out to my car I saw a mexican dude loading 5 mattresses into the back of his pickup truck.