Two Sides to Every Story
If you have been on the internet to read my blog then you have been on the internet to check facebook, browse youtube etc. There is a minute possibility that you haven't been acquainted with Kony 2012 - a drive by charity Invisible Children to rid the world of tyranny from Ugandan rebel leader Joseph Kony. Kony is accused and undoubtedly guilty of kidnapping children and forcing them to mutilate and murder to keep himself in power of the LRA (Lords Revolutionary Army), a marauding 30,000 (or so the video states) force of causeless rebels. Whilst I am by no means saying Mr. Kony is a wonderful guy, the film seems to over simplify the problem in many of the third world countries of Africa. Filmmaker and charity owner Jason Russell is shown in the film to break down the problem to his son that everything is caused by a Voldemort character that that must be stopped at all costs. He goes on to advocate direct military involvement from the United States military and explains that he was successful in lobbying the government to provide an advisory force sent of US troops to aid the Ugandan army. Call me cynical but as soon as I heard this bit in the video I thought back to watching Team America: World Police. I'm hearing beer swilling, sweat dribbling rednecks from Louisiana to Arkansas yelling in unison "AMERICA! FUCK YEAH!" My second thought came to mind that if Kony's army is comprised of child soldiers then sending Ugandan troops to combat the LRA means countless numbers of dead child soldiers ridden with bullets. Sure, they claim they just want to "arrest" this man but do you really expect him to lie in a six foot deep hole for three days so he can be tried and hung? Even arresting him, will that just solve the massive numbers of problems that Africa faces on a day-to-day basis? What about Mugabe? What about the Congo? Should US troops be deployed in all of these situations where human rights are routinely abused and horrendous atrocities are committed on a daily basis? Where do you draw the line?
Of course that's not going to happen because America doesn't involve itself in wars that don't involve "protecting its economic interests" (extreme paraphrasing of the video and an almost century old Wilson Woodrow speech) but why should this Ugandan situation be any different? You could sit and study the problem Rwanda faced in the nineties and whether humanitarian intervention actually works for four years and still not know whether the answer is "yes" or "no" but I see so many of you on facebook are willing to dive in head first in to the fight to spread awareness of this man and make him famous so that he can be captured and put to trial. You might even donate money to the cause but is this really the answer?
I want you to review the following websites before you come to a decision:
Chris Blattman's review
Tumbler: Visible Children
Both of these sites do a far better job of providing information from the other side of the story than I do. Again they don't make Kony out to be a hero, they just question the true intent of Invisible Children's mission, that even with their heart being in the right place their actions won't necessarily result in the desired result.
I don't want to talk you out of giving money for charity. I am no Ayn Rand character - altruism and concern for your fellow man is in my eyes a beautiful thing. Just consider what you are giving more before you donate. Don't jump on a bandwagon because all your facebook friend's posted it and don't kid yourself into thinking by signing up to something like this you're saving the world. People like Kony are a bit more complicated than the 2D computer game villain the video makes him out to be. Shooting him isn't going to mean rainbows and happy times for everybody. Do you really think that the Ugandan army is made up of good natured white knights (not in the literal sense, obviously)that ride to battle to bring justice and restore order to the land? No army is perfect and there is no evidence to suggest that the Ugandan liberation army is anything but far from perfect. In a war torn African country, Kony is a symptom of economic and cultural sickness. Curing this illness is going to take a lot of hard work and a lot of time that this fad won't cure overnight.
Wednesday, March 07, 2012
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
Dream Journal Shit
Tired of using facebook as my dream journal, I now give you summaries of what I can remember going on in my brain during my dormant state.
The first one I had last night seemed to be about trying to look after my mad five year old cousin, practically a nephew. In this dream he was running around my house trying to get a pack of super soaker toys out of my house that my mum had found on the street with the intent of giving back to the original owner. The kid then climbed into the box of another massive super soaker that was suspended by a string over my landing. I had to try and make the kid happy despite all of this nonsense. Somehow old school Eddy Murphy (Beverly Hills cop kind) became my best friend during all of this. Thanks Eddy.
The next dream seemed to involve a doctor, a beautiful yet three eyed version of Natalie Portman and a zombie outbreak. This was all based in one of those suburban parts of Belfast like the streets of Four Winds, sitting on a grassy knoll. The doctor at the time was trying to forumate a cure for the infection, whilst Natalie had been infected the doctor had used some kind of drug that stopped the infection from fully bonding with the rest of her cells, keeping it in some sort of dormant state. I was on look out to see if any zombies were coming and had the chance to kiss miss Portman, but chose to decline feeling that at any moment she could mutate and bite the shit out of me. I finally woke up when I saw hordes of zombies running out of a house like a crowd of spastics.
Tired of using facebook as my dream journal, I now give you summaries of what I can remember going on in my brain during my dormant state.
The first one I had last night seemed to be about trying to look after my mad five year old cousin, practically a nephew. In this dream he was running around my house trying to get a pack of super soaker toys out of my house that my mum had found on the street with the intent of giving back to the original owner. The kid then climbed into the box of another massive super soaker that was suspended by a string over my landing. I had to try and make the kid happy despite all of this nonsense. Somehow old school Eddy Murphy (Beverly Hills cop kind) became my best friend during all of this. Thanks Eddy.
The next dream seemed to involve a doctor, a beautiful yet three eyed version of Natalie Portman and a zombie outbreak. This was all based in one of those suburban parts of Belfast like the streets of Four Winds, sitting on a grassy knoll. The doctor at the time was trying to forumate a cure for the infection, whilst Natalie had been infected the doctor had used some kind of drug that stopped the infection from fully bonding with the rest of her cells, keeping it in some sort of dormant state. I was on look out to see if any zombies were coming and had the chance to kiss miss Portman, but chose to decline feeling that at any moment she could mutate and bite the shit out of me. I finally woke up when I saw hordes of zombies running out of a house like a crowd of spastics.
Sunday, December 18, 2011
Back in Black
The title of course refers to the hugely popular AC/DC song of the same title, made even more famous by the first Iron Man film. It also refers to me getting back into uniform - black shoes, black apron, black trousers and black shirt. That can only mean one thing: waiting and boy is it hard work.
Not to say I'm not capable of doing hard work but I don't exactly have bundles of waiting experience. Bar work, yes but it's a somewhat different ball game. With bar work, it is generally accepted you have a station - behind the bar, mixing, pouring and serving with waiting there is a lot more running around, often covering multiple areas within the restaurant. You might have to prepare the drinks then carry a tray stockpiled with said drinks and run them down to a customer without spilling them. It's a job many of us will have done by the end of our lifetimes and it is a job that most of us should at least try. In a waiting job, simple fetching and carry jobs become a lot more complicated than they seem. Not only will you have to learn to balance multiple hot plates at once but you'll have to do it with the accepted etiquette. Meanwhile, every one who works there and eats there will have another request from you. This is especially during the Christmas months where every big company decides it wants to have its work do in your restaurant. You can barely move without somebody demanding a pepper shaker and of course you have to be the little lapdog that fetches said condiment that does the task with a big smile and a curtsey. I think it goes without saying that I'd take working in a busy bar over a busy restaurant any day of the week. When you are behind a bar, serving drinks to people wanting to get pissed you almost act as an authority figure. If people act like dicks, you have the right not to serve them, deciding they are too drunk to receive their beverage. If someone is a snob in a rest you just have to take it on the chin and be their little bitch. It's a fairly humbling experience and I recommend taking the job on to anyone who thinks they are too big for their boots. There's no time for cocky swaggers in a waiter's world.
That's not to say I'm unhappy to be doing the job. I might not enjoy it that much but I was lucky to have been given the role as quick as I was. I'd been back in Belfast for just under a week when I stopped in Deane's in the off chance they would have something. Truth be told I didn't expect them to have anything, never mind have a trial shift for me the very next day. I got through the hour long trial shift ok and was told I could come in for more shifts albeit on a temporary basis that can be cancelled any time within the first three months and within a week I was told I needed to improve fast or I would find myself looking for a new job. That kind of depressed me for an entire evening. They had found me to be inexperienced, clumsy and essentially.. dozy. Not that I can really argue with any of these descriptions. My experience with waiting was largely limited to working the odd functions through the TA, rowing clubs and part time hours in the Europa (both the most bombed hotel in Belfast *BOOM*) that had me serving coffee to hotel guests and resetting tables for breakfast. My lanky limbs make me unabashedly clumsy and as for dozy - I would say alertness in a waiting job comes with experience. The ability to keep track of multiple things in one environment is a lot easier when you know what things you need to keep track of. Lets not make too many excuses though - sometimes you're just crap at a job and you have to give it time before you see any signs of improvement. If I do end up with more shifts this week in Deane's then I will get to see for myself if I have improved any. Fingers crossed.
That back in black part doesn't refer solely to being back in uniform though, it also refers to being back in the 'fast lane. I'm back home again and it's proving to have its ups and downs. About a year ago I would have told you that part of the reason that I like travelling so much is that when I come back home I appreciate it that much more. I can't say that this argument is holding true as much. Sure, I get a nice warm bed, clean clothes, nice food and a few good groups of friends around me. It comes at a little bit of a price though. I need that warm bed to hide from the bitter cold. If I'm working late then I miss out on the festivities that said friends are having and as for the food - I love my mum's cooking but I still feel like I'm missing the opportunity of rocking up to El Pollo Rico on Sant Pau for a big bowl of hangover-killing Estofado. At least I can get boojums again though. To me, Belfast's strength is also it's weakness. It might be a helluva lot safer than it used to be. It might even be one of the safest large-ish cities in the UK but consistent is synonymous with mundane. There isn't too much that excites me here any more. Even the Christmas/Continental market has lost its magic - it pops up so regularly that I'll be rather unfazed when its gone. Maybe the novelty of washing my bison burger down with a stein of German lager has slowly dissipated with me because I've traveled or it has faded into the fabric of our city.
For me my life in Barcelona has given me a taste for madness. My goals now are to acquire as much money as possible to see Asia later on in a few months time and get back to Barcelona for the Summer. We'll see how that plan assembles itself though.
What about Dr. Rancho I hear you ask? Well he followed me back from Barcelona but I haven't heard too much about him in recent weeks. He told me some crazy story about his promotional job during the last week of Barcelona. His work had stationed him outside one of his favourite pizza joints in the Gothic quarter when a rather drunken crack-head looking motherfucker with a trail of Christmas tree fairy lights protruding from one of his jacket pockets had been thrown to the ground by one of his friends that works in the pizza place after the crackhead had threatened the pizza guy. Apparently the drunkard had lay in a sleepy heap in the street for about ten minutes before he roused, poked his head up and produced a plastic flute from the inside pocket of his jacket and blew into it. After a little bit more blowing the crackhead began swearing and cursing at the pizza guy and took to his feet. At this moment in time, two women with bodys from Baywatch but faces from Crimewatch attempted to catch a cab from the street whilst a bunch of the Pakistani beer sellers wolf-whistled at them. The crackhead stuck his flute in the grill of the cab's bonnet and held up traffic for a few minutes. Dr Rancho perhaps unwisely chose to push the drunken dreadlocked fool out of the way - meaning solely to speed things up a little. Instead of a gentle push the shove had the black guy sprawl to the ground once again, just as two officers of the Guardia Urbana came around the corner. Dr Rancho explained his actions to the police but they didn't seem to mind so much, explaining that this guy was a fairly constant nuisance in the area and they weren't going to do much about his misdemeanour. Imagine Dr Rancho actually getting along with the Spanish police force for once. Miracles will never cease. Unfortunately though every Moroccan thief/drug dealer in the area decided they were going to lecture him about how to behave whilst working a corner and how he shouldn't have done that. Rancho's response was something like "It is my business how I behave here and if you don't want to end up in a heap on the ground like that guy I suggest you stay out of it." Rancho, if you are reading this, threatening known pushers might not be the best way to live life.
Apart from the odd dubstep night in a club here called the Stiff Kitten where he in his own words "chomped down MDMA like it was popcorn", it sounds like Rancho has been lying low since coming to Belfast. Sounds like a wise move doctor.
Well that's that for this post. I'd say expect a top 5 ways of not being a complete dick customer to your waiter but I know I don't like to give false promises. I might have the best intentions of writing a follow up post but it might be another month or two before I take the opportunity to write a blog entry.
Stay safe.
Conor
The title of course refers to the hugely popular AC/DC song of the same title, made even more famous by the first Iron Man film. It also refers to me getting back into uniform - black shoes, black apron, black trousers and black shirt. That can only mean one thing: waiting and boy is it hard work.
Not to say I'm not capable of doing hard work but I don't exactly have bundles of waiting experience. Bar work, yes but it's a somewhat different ball game. With bar work, it is generally accepted you have a station - behind the bar, mixing, pouring and serving with waiting there is a lot more running around, often covering multiple areas within the restaurant. You might have to prepare the drinks then carry a tray stockpiled with said drinks and run them down to a customer without spilling them. It's a job many of us will have done by the end of our lifetimes and it is a job that most of us should at least try. In a waiting job, simple fetching and carry jobs become a lot more complicated than they seem. Not only will you have to learn to balance multiple hot plates at once but you'll have to do it with the accepted etiquette. Meanwhile, every one who works there and eats there will have another request from you. This is especially during the Christmas months where every big company decides it wants to have its work do in your restaurant. You can barely move without somebody demanding a pepper shaker and of course you have to be the little lapdog that fetches said condiment that does the task with a big smile and a curtsey. I think it goes without saying that I'd take working in a busy bar over a busy restaurant any day of the week. When you are behind a bar, serving drinks to people wanting to get pissed you almost act as an authority figure. If people act like dicks, you have the right not to serve them, deciding they are too drunk to receive their beverage. If someone is a snob in a rest you just have to take it on the chin and be their little bitch. It's a fairly humbling experience and I recommend taking the job on to anyone who thinks they are too big for their boots. There's no time for cocky swaggers in a waiter's world.
That's not to say I'm unhappy to be doing the job. I might not enjoy it that much but I was lucky to have been given the role as quick as I was. I'd been back in Belfast for just under a week when I stopped in Deane's in the off chance they would have something. Truth be told I didn't expect them to have anything, never mind have a trial shift for me the very next day. I got through the hour long trial shift ok and was told I could come in for more shifts albeit on a temporary basis that can be cancelled any time within the first three months and within a week I was told I needed to improve fast or I would find myself looking for a new job. That kind of depressed me for an entire evening. They had found me to be inexperienced, clumsy and essentially.. dozy. Not that I can really argue with any of these descriptions. My experience with waiting was largely limited to working the odd functions through the TA, rowing clubs and part time hours in the Europa (both the most bombed hotel in Belfast *BOOM*) that had me serving coffee to hotel guests and resetting tables for breakfast. My lanky limbs make me unabashedly clumsy and as for dozy - I would say alertness in a waiting job comes with experience. The ability to keep track of multiple things in one environment is a lot easier when you know what things you need to keep track of. Lets not make too many excuses though - sometimes you're just crap at a job and you have to give it time before you see any signs of improvement. If I do end up with more shifts this week in Deane's then I will get to see for myself if I have improved any. Fingers crossed.
That back in black part doesn't refer solely to being back in uniform though, it also refers to being back in the 'fast lane. I'm back home again and it's proving to have its ups and downs. About a year ago I would have told you that part of the reason that I like travelling so much is that when I come back home I appreciate it that much more. I can't say that this argument is holding true as much. Sure, I get a nice warm bed, clean clothes, nice food and a few good groups of friends around me. It comes at a little bit of a price though. I need that warm bed to hide from the bitter cold. If I'm working late then I miss out on the festivities that said friends are having and as for the food - I love my mum's cooking but I still feel like I'm missing the opportunity of rocking up to El Pollo Rico on Sant Pau for a big bowl of hangover-killing Estofado. At least I can get boojums again though. To me, Belfast's strength is also it's weakness. It might be a helluva lot safer than it used to be. It might even be one of the safest large-ish cities in the UK but consistent is synonymous with mundane. There isn't too much that excites me here any more. Even the Christmas/Continental market has lost its magic - it pops up so regularly that I'll be rather unfazed when its gone. Maybe the novelty of washing my bison burger down with a stein of German lager has slowly dissipated with me because I've traveled or it has faded into the fabric of our city.
For me my life in Barcelona has given me a taste for madness. My goals now are to acquire as much money as possible to see Asia later on in a few months time and get back to Barcelona for the Summer. We'll see how that plan assembles itself though.
What about Dr. Rancho I hear you ask? Well he followed me back from Barcelona but I haven't heard too much about him in recent weeks. He told me some crazy story about his promotional job during the last week of Barcelona. His work had stationed him outside one of his favourite pizza joints in the Gothic quarter when a rather drunken crack-head looking motherfucker with a trail of Christmas tree fairy lights protruding from one of his jacket pockets had been thrown to the ground by one of his friends that works in the pizza place after the crackhead had threatened the pizza guy. Apparently the drunkard had lay in a sleepy heap in the street for about ten minutes before he roused, poked his head up and produced a plastic flute from the inside pocket of his jacket and blew into it. After a little bit more blowing the crackhead began swearing and cursing at the pizza guy and took to his feet. At this moment in time, two women with bodys from Baywatch but faces from Crimewatch attempted to catch a cab from the street whilst a bunch of the Pakistani beer sellers wolf-whistled at them. The crackhead stuck his flute in the grill of the cab's bonnet and held up traffic for a few minutes. Dr Rancho perhaps unwisely chose to push the drunken dreadlocked fool out of the way - meaning solely to speed things up a little. Instead of a gentle push the shove had the black guy sprawl to the ground once again, just as two officers of the Guardia Urbana came around the corner. Dr Rancho explained his actions to the police but they didn't seem to mind so much, explaining that this guy was a fairly constant nuisance in the area and they weren't going to do much about his misdemeanour. Imagine Dr Rancho actually getting along with the Spanish police force for once. Miracles will never cease. Unfortunately though every Moroccan thief/drug dealer in the area decided they were going to lecture him about how to behave whilst working a corner and how he shouldn't have done that. Rancho's response was something like "It is my business how I behave here and if you don't want to end up in a heap on the ground like that guy I suggest you stay out of it." Rancho, if you are reading this, threatening known pushers might not be the best way to live life.
Apart from the odd dubstep night in a club here called the Stiff Kitten where he in his own words "chomped down MDMA like it was popcorn", it sounds like Rancho has been lying low since coming to Belfast. Sounds like a wise move doctor.
Well that's that for this post. I'd say expect a top 5 ways of not being a complete dick customer to your waiter but I know I don't like to give false promises. I might have the best intentions of writing a follow up post but it might be another month or two before I take the opportunity to write a blog entry.
Stay safe.
Conor
Thursday, November 17, 2011
Dr Rancho’s Completely Made Up Life in Barcelona
Unlike some of my other posts, this is an attempt at prose based partly on some of my own experiences and a mixture of many others around me. Real life in Barcelona can actually be a lot crazier than I make it out. If you haven't been there, I recommend you go. Some of the stories I have heard and events I have been involved in are almost impossible to capture in the written form. Spending a day with some of the people I have lived with and befriended would amaze a lot of people. Story telling in the written form can for me rarely compare to that of a tale delivered by a good aurator. Know though that what follows is not a direct admission of myself, in regards to emotion, illegal wrong doings. It has been a long while since I wrote something fictional and despite this I hoped to capture at least a little of the zeitgeist of Catalunya's capital. I ask you to not to read this too critically or build a picture of me based on what you read as I write through the eyes of my good friend, the famous and fictional Dr Rancho.
A question I get asked about six times a day is “What made you come over to Barcelona?”
Truth be told, I’m not quite sure. Since the end of my University life I have been intending on travelling as much as possible. Due to family circumstances, I had to shelve many of those travel plans, but as many of you may already know I have seen a good bit of Europe over the last year or so. This has largely been linked to the obsession I had with a certain geeky card game (Magic) and with me coming over to Barcelona there wasn’t much of an exception apart from particular differences. Leaving Belfast was harder than I thought it might have been. When home has a lot to offer in terms of friends, family and female companionship it’s hard to wonder why one would bother leaving. Yet, I was restless. The desire for adventure in my heart is hard to quell. I love the gradual swing from the surreal to the mundane. Not knowing a single street in a city to knowing the town like the back of your hand is challenging and rewarding. I wanted this with Barcelona. That and to play cards. When I went over a month in advance, I held the intention of finding employment, a place to live, a social circle – generally just a whole new life. I had been over for a few days with my parents three years prior to my second coming and been amazed by the city but being that it was a family holiday and I wasn’t quite as experienced in exploring new cities, I hadn’t felt the opportunity to ditch the tour bus and find some good watering holes. This time I was taking the chance to do things largely my own way, step into the bubble that is Barcelona and learn its intricacies.
So I came over at the beginning of March. For literally the first month, I partied like a lunatic. I slept on either a couch or a mattress of an apartment rented out by two girls. The two girls had a habit of collecting live-ins. On that first week that I joined the crew, there was the girl who rented the flat out from her landlord, a couch-surfing rogue who had been there for several months, Caldogs (who had been picked up after a walking tour by one of the girls and eventually became one of my best friends) and a mutual friend of the couch surfer and me. I had initially planned on staying with a friend of my parents who I hadn’t really met. I was to go stay with him and shadow him as an English teacher. Having failed to get in touch prior to my stay, I ended up contacting the mutual friend who I knew was staying in Barca and asked if it was possible to crash in the flat. After a month of good times, mad times, awkwardness, amusement and general drama between various groups within the flat, things had to change. When you end up with about ten people in the same flat, several of them sleeping with each other, it’s only a matter of time before shit hits the fan.
I got to know a bit more of the city month by month. When you first get to Barcelona it’s not hard to see why you would want to stay for a while. It is by definition the city that never sleeps. Every night there is always something going on, whether it’s a big musical festival a street party or a secret rave that you know might just be the greatest night of your life. If you’re a morning and afternoon person, you can experience the amazing feel. During the Spring and Summer you see it all – you can hit the beach, walk up a mountain or see any number of weird and wonderful cultural exhibits. The first month you’re there will almost always feel like a holiday. The freshness and exuberance that the hustle and bustle of streets will give you the sense of wonder that so many yearn for. For this reason and many others it’s easy to see why it takes everyone so long to get their national insurance documents and a real place to stay. At least that’s going to be my excuse. Or maybe the partying just took over.
Before I get too carried away in describing what other crap went on during my time here, I’ll give a few words of warning about the streets of Barcelona at night. By and large, you won’t find a fight unless you go looking for it but there’s a lot of other evils you might experience or should be prepared to deal with. Pick pocketing is rife in the city, particularly around Las Ramblas, Raval and the Gothic Quarter. That’s not to say you’re out of the woods whenever you are in another part of town but it’ll be the dimmer, smaller streets where the pick pockets can stalk the unaware outsider. Mugging does happen to unguarded women as well but from what I gather rarely to men. Most of the theft you’re likely to experience is pick pocketing and the chances for anyone spending any extended period of time being a victim of the crime are fairly high. It’s almost a rite of passage. I got caught stupidly unaware when I was near pass out drunk in my second week of being in Barcelona. I think it was late one Tuesday night when I ran around like a drunken man searching for a kebab shop in the Gothic quarter. I must have been so pissed that I believed myself to be invincible or Jesus Christ himself. When some dark skinned guy came up to me asking for a hug, I thought it was all gravy. I thought I would be winning because I thought my wallet was cunningly hidden in an inside jacket pocket and that I would get away Scot free. I would walk away laughing about the whole encounter as if I had gotten one over some street rat. Serves me right. Thankfully I only lost 20 Euros and cancelled all my bank cards, kind of stopped me from spending every penny I had like an idiot and forced me to go out and find some form of cash in hand employment. Perhaps I should have taken it as a sign to come about drunken idiocies.
The pick pockets of Barcelona do operate during the day but just don’t be an oblivious tourist and don’t dilly-dally. If you’re moving from A to B, walk quickly and you’ll be unlikely to be seen as a target. Hide your valuables too. Common sense prevails here people. This is going to sound racist but of the pick pocketing that I experienced personally or witnessed about to take place tended to be carried out by either small Morrocan gangs, Roma-Gypsy men or the big black prostitutes of Las Rambla/Raval area. The latter group aren’t even the slightest bit subtle about it. I lost count of the number of times I saw two or three big black women hanging off some poor bastard too drunk to even know his name whilst another one would rummage through his pockets take him for everything he’s got. Maybe there’s a ton of white professional pick pockets but they don’t make it as obvious. I wouldn’t think there would be many educated white middle class folk moving over to Barcelona to begin a career in theft but I could be wrong. Nor can I imagine many Catalans with all their pomp and swagger decide to take up lowly pick pocket work to fund their snobbery.
Speaking of the Catalans, I’ve generally got mixed feelings for them. Some are ok, but the desire for independence in Catalunya creates in many a massive sense of defiance and a desire to be separate from the rest of the Spanish state which economically depends on the region. I’ve encountered many who hate outsiders and will try and get one up on foreigners by speaking in Catalan even if they’re aware the other person speaks perfect Castellano (regular Spanish). They don’t tend to be fighters though. They’re the quintessential Jack Russells that bark worse than they bite. Don’t rise to it. Even if for some mad reason they do attack you, defend yourself but striking back will always end up working against you with the three police forces that patrol the streets. Spanish police aren’t like UK police. They rarely have any qualms about using violence, sometimes eschewing the regular police procedures and dishing out a beating instead. Fuck paper work when a quick flick with a truncheon gets the message across quicker. A friend and I were out tagging around Raval once when what appeared to be a Raval rudeboy got out of his black Seat Ibiza, demanded to have the graffiti pen were using from my friend and dished out an open palm pimp slap right across the side of his face. His head bounced right across the bonnet of the car and thank God too. If it had been a pussy slap, Cal dogs would probably have pissed himself laughing and we would have ended up in a whole lot more shit than we would have cared for. On another occasion I inadvertently advised an officer of the Mossos at El Prat airport to “fuck off”. That’s a story for another time that involves drunkenness, missing flights, sleeping in a ditch and wandering around farms trying to walk eleven miles back to Barcelona.
Any way, when the shit hit the fan in terms of living arrangements, I got looking for a real place to live, at least for a while. At the beginning of April after a few nights in and out of various hostels, I found a room in another flat and the girls who rented out the flat found a new place to rent having been evicted for constant noise complaints due to the amount of partying going on.
A flat overpopulated with young people on couches, floors, nooks and crannies is a far from unusual thing in Barcelona. The squat culture here is massive, landlords often renting out borderline derelict apartments revamped to be just about liveable. On top of that, it’s typical to see a lot of people having their friends sleep on their couch or floor for extended amounts of time, often rent free or a sublet unauthorized by their landlord. When I moved into my new room, I paid E175 in deposit plus E350 a month for the room. A double room for E350 in a major European city is a pretty good deal, one could pay the same in London and get a single bed in a dive apartment. What you get in Barca for the money is usually pretty decent. Life in my first flat was fairly decent, despite a steady stream of new flatmates in every month and having to deal with a mad-hatter old English man who claimed (amongst other things) to have trained with Bruce Lee for five months and to have snorted cocaine with Jerry Garcia for a year in Amsterdam. I got evicted after about five months of living in that apartment. I had two friends from England came over and we went a little bit too mental for our own good. When you put your converse in your mouth and wear your pants on your head in the middle of your own street, you should probably take care not to wake up every neighbour.
Getting into the party lifestyle is all too easy in Barca… drink is cheap, drugs are everywhere, women are beautiful. I might have drank more than I should have before I moved here but I wouldn’t have necessarily described myself as an alcoholic. Within a month of coming here, well meaning intentions of getting a good job, earning some money and seeing more of Spain and mainland Europe had largely evaporated. The dream was still there, but it had devolved into the status of a whisper. What replaced it was a beer gut, head hurting hangovers and an awful daily routine. I would wake up and spend hours on the internet, blowing savings playing card games online badly. After scrubbing out several times a day and ending up poorer for it I would head out to grab some over priced fast food then go back to the flat to continue living a sedentary lifestyle. The only job I had at the time was that of pub crawl leader.
Pub crawl leader? Alcoholic babysitter more like. Pub crawls in Barcelona started roughly five years ago, since then more and more have popped up each year, only a few living to survive the tale. Most of the pub crawl companies have their promoters taking to Las Ramblas so that they can approach young tourists on holiday to deliver their pitches. The premise is pretty simple, those tourists wanting to go on the crawl pay something like 12 euros and our taken to three bars where they receive a shot in each and afterwards the night is concluded in a nightclub where entrance is free. With the company I worked for, I had it easy. Instead of potentially wasting our time and energy on Las Ramblas, we headed straight to a series of hostels the company had an agreement with. It’s a helluva lot easier to recruit young travellers for a party in Barcelona when they’re relaxed in a hostel bar than picking them up off the streets. I can’t exactly say it’s a hard job, work started at 10 PM and the drop off at the club was between 2 and 2.30. At that point I could either choose to go home and sleep, or get drunk in the club, dance and try and pick up whatever American/Canadian/Australian slut was either naive or horny enough to be taken back to my apartment for a quick fuck. I had my way with a few and I’m sure I could have had a few more if I didn’t end up carrying such a superiority complex with me, one that had to be quelled with gratuitous amounts of free alcohol for me to want to listen to some horrible accent on those kind of women. “Ron y pina, por favour!” was a catchphrase I would utter almost eight times in three hours. Ever seen how they pour a spirit measure in Barcelona? Put a stopper on a bottle then start pouring it into a glass, begin counting. Stop when you get to ten. Yeah, that’s about a quadruple measure. I don’t want to even consider what percentage I’ve increased the likelihood of having a stroke in my fifties.
For some this might sound ideal, apart from the fact it rarely pays the bills. On a good night you get about E40 for four hours work but on average I was coming home with E25 a night. Hardly to be sneezed at whenever life can be lived so cheaply in Barcelona but I wasn’t living life cheaply. Eating out and drinking out all the time adds up really quickly. If I spent only E30 on food a week here I would have been laughing but laziness when it comes to cooking doesn’t cure itself. Alternatively, I could have started taking walking tours. Walking tours are actually pretty lucrative in Barcelona. My company’s walking tour was all tip based, with commission based on number of heads given to the company. If I had gotten myself out of bed for an eleven am start every morning I likely could have earned a bare minimum of forty euros for two hours work and on some days as much as E140. Regretfully rather than getting myself into gear, I accepted hand outs from my mother and maintained the sedentary lifestyle. Another two months would pass before I had to do something to alter my employment status.
A lot of the basic running of the pub crawl had come into conflict with me. The doormen of one of the pub crawl’s clubs had been pretty much blatantly racist to a number of customers on my crawl one night. The fact this happened to take place on the one year anniversary of the death of my father meant I pretty much boycotted the nightclub, only ever returning to it twice afterwards. This meant I was only prepared to work half of the nights the pub crawl operated. If I had been working the walking tour as well, I would have been afforded some leniency but due to this and the fact I arguably took a few too many holidays to see my mother back in Belfast meant that I wasn’t in much of a position to keep hold of my job when I missed a flight back to Barca from Prague. Totally worth it mind.
Without even this meagre source of pocket money I was forced to pavement pound. It didn’t take too long before I found some legitimate employment. By mid-June I was working forty to sixty hour weeks in the probably the most overly touristic Irish bar – “Molly’s Fair City”, you’ll ever find yourself swilling pints of Nigerian-brewed Guinness in. Put it this way, the level of an authentic Irish bar experience might be a bit lacking when it’s run by a camp bald Austrian in his early forties already on to his forth trophy wife – though admittedly she was a truly stunning German brunette. It became a turning point in my Barcelona life. I had to get myself to work on time and dressed smartly for long shifts, learning new skills. When I first started the job I worked stupid hard to become a half way decent bar tender. Both my Spanish and French improved drastically and within a few months of working there my self esteem was at all time high. The next few months have me witness a few ups and downs though. Most of my nights off would begin in me characteristically going to a few different Anglo-phone filled pubs and consuming pint after pint of rum and fruit juice based concoction. I picked up the odd girl that made for an easy lay along the way and but generally I was largely unattached. Apart from the odd lonely night making me long for what I had back home, I was actually fairly content with the way things were going. No worries except my old fear of not using my time effectively in terms of advancing myself academically, artistically, intellectually, spiritually and setting myself up for the future.
At this moment in time, I think it would be wise to take a step out of Barcelona. My plan for months was to complete my six month contract at Molly’s, walk away with a nice tax rebate, massive tips for working so close to Christmas and a fat pay cheque. Unfortunately for my bank balance, things were never going to last too long.
Despite never missing a shift, my last month working for the Irish pub was rife with minor offences that the company saw as treason. I probably should have tried to keep on top of these things better but this was when I was going through the transitional period I experienced when I was evicted and forced to move to a new apartment. Not having access to a decent washing machine or iron meant that I was walking into work with slightly creased shirts. Due to my Y chromosome proving a lack of enthusiasm to go shoe shopping for new shoes I was tramping around the work place in a once pristine graduation shoes were now scuffed and bouncing off my steps like flip flops. In addition, there were some minor late offences. I had I met another girl, who when we initially met did little more than smoke weed and have sex. Having had a little more than mediocre sexual encounters since picking up a French girl in mid-August, I was now feasting to make up for the famine. Part of that meant that I was prepared to be late ten-fifteen minutes just to get one last shag in before I had to go open the bar. To be honest, this was very rarely an issue but to an angry Austrian man, small failures in tardiness add up, big ones are gas chamber worthy offences. However the thing that finally killed my stint with that job was carelessness with alcohol consumption.
Appearing to be “under the effects of alcohol” in any way in Molly’s was an absolute no-no. I know I’m not the only one who would say this but I think to anyone who isn’t Austrian and obviously trying to hide his blatant homosexuality with trophy wives, looking hung over isn’t a bad quality in a bar tender. As its said in one film “Never trust a bartender that doesn’t drink.”. It’s almost the norm in Barcelona bars for the staff to drink behind the bar. In America when you order a shot, it’s almost expected for the bartender to do one with you. I almost never drank behind the bar in Molly’s, mostly because that was the rule and I stuck to it. If I was ever guilty of being drunk behind the bar, it was down to one of two things – one too many the night before or one too many on the break of a split shift. I’d seen supervisors looking far more fucked than I had ever been, even committing that cardinal no drinking behind the bar sin, just they managed to not get caught by boss baldy.
I on the other hand made the mistake twice (the getting caught bit, not the drinking on a school night). Any bartender that can stay in on a Friday night that they have off and not drink should be made a saint. If after three thousand words of this crap you still believe I’m a saint, get your head examined. I got on it one Friday night when work finished for me at eleven. I had work the next morning but I felt as long as I got a good six hours sleep, I would have been fine. Unfortunately though I chose to listen to the little MDMA devil on my shoulder that evening and raved my little titties off until about seven in the morning, leaving me about two hours to sleep off effects of both drugs and alcohol. Surprise, surprise if your boss is in the bar the next day, he’s going to catch you looking like a bag of dead dicks. This however wasn’t the final nail in the coffin. On another occasion, I started drinking at about four one Saturday morning after my Friday night shift, with the intention of staying up to watch the 7 AM Ireland v Wales rugby match. This would have been fine if I didn’t go home at 9 AM to a flat full of partiers. Having two drinks stuffed in my hand meant that I wasn’t hitting the hay until noon. If I had set my alarm for a reasonable time, I wouldn’t have had much of a problem. It would have meant I would have gone to work looking dishevelled but a hangover rarely stops a half decent bar tender from doing a half decent job. The alarm though was never set and I woke up twenty minutes into my shift. I was almost forty minutes late by the time I got into work. Not a problem for my co-worker but a serious problem for aforementioned bald cunt.
I don’t know why I expected any leniency. I knew the place was stupidly strict for an Irish bar but due to the fact I had been pulling 54 working weeks on a 25 hour contract to fill in for my co-workers I thought I would get the odd by-ball. No such luck. It’s not like I can only be angry with the owner of Molly’s, there’s a lot I could have done to handle the situation better. Being knee deep in complacency is never a place you should feel comfortable. I made that mistake all too readily. Ever work a job and think “This is ok, but it’s beneath me. I should be making X doing Y”, yet the whole time you stick to the original job? You think you can make X, go out and make X just be prepared to look for Y. There’s always an excuse why you don’t and it doesn’t get you anywhere. Either be comfortable at what you do and work at least hard enough to get you by, or go bust your ass trying to find your dream job or at least a job you want to do for a comfortable period of time. Somewhere along the line I decided Homer Simpson was some kind of guru “If you don’t like your job, you don’t quit. You just go in every day and do it really half assed. That’s the way! That’s the American way!” That doesn’t work for long. You take that advice and you risk never being truly happy. Same applies to almost everything else. Relationships, lifestyles, you name it, it probably still stands.
If I’m to take my own advice, I need to decide where I want to be for the next while. I wouldn’t say I’m done with Barcelona but I would say I’ve run myself into a rut. I live in a flat with two drug dealers and a 19 year old vagabond with his gigantic Alsation. I make pocket money handing out flyers for another Irish pub and I might have a job working behind the bar coming up there, but do I really want this? If I’m to settle in Barcelona for the next few years, I realistically need to be doing something constructive that will develop me in different ways for a long term career plan. I want to live in a nice apartment where I have a big room and my own feel to that room. I want to be living with people that I will not just be having fun with but will advance my way of thinking, spur me on to better myself in as many ways as possible. I want positive influences around me at the same time as the devilish ones that tell me to get wrecked when I need to. The problem is this, whilst I know my life motivations should come from inside, I make every excuse to not go out and change things. You can have a great idea for an invention for dragon’s den but having the balls to go out and implement the production of said idea is another story altogether.
My thoughts often drift to travelling then returning to Barcelona with more skills, experience and money under my belt. I could go teach English in Asia, work in some mining town in Australia or pick fruit in New Zealand. Every time I hear of someone doing something I haven’t done, I want to go do it. Motor bike through South America Che Guevarra style sounds amazing. Maybe more of the same through Cambodia, Laos and Thailand would be great too. Of course, that would require me to learn to motorbike first and get to Asia but maybe it could be done.I want to go out and learn things intensively somewhere it’s cheap to learn and different to the rest of the world. Six weeks Thai boxing training in some camp near Phuket is something I think about every day. Maybe I could even learn professional masseur skills or Thai cooking when I’m out there. Imagine ladies, a tall handsome Irish man that could kick just about anyone’s ass then feed you noodles as he cracked your back into place. Would be hard to beat, no?
Seriously though, it’s about time I got my act together. I’m going to head back to Belfast next month. Whether this ends up for a meagre four days or a month or two, it’s got to be done. Sometimes you miss the comfort of what you know best too much not to go back to it. Sometimes what you know best has its own surprises you don’t expect.
Anyway, if you have read all of this complete rant then you’re probably dumber than me for writing it. Remember though, Dr Rancho lives only in your mind.
*If you’re conservative enough that if you read the words “drug dealers” and thought “scum bags” then you probably shouldn’t live in Barcelona. They’re just normal dudes who happen to make their living selling drugs to people that want to buy them. Even if I don’t take a lot of drugs, I don’t decree anything unethical in the simple buy and sell transaction of them, aside from the number of deaths it takes you to bring you your gram of cocaine which largely could be avoided with the correct legalisation and control model.
Unlike some of my other posts, this is an attempt at prose based partly on some of my own experiences and a mixture of many others around me. Real life in Barcelona can actually be a lot crazier than I make it out. If you haven't been there, I recommend you go. Some of the stories I have heard and events I have been involved in are almost impossible to capture in the written form. Spending a day with some of the people I have lived with and befriended would amaze a lot of people. Story telling in the written form can for me rarely compare to that of a tale delivered by a good aurator. Know though that what follows is not a direct admission of myself, in regards to emotion, illegal wrong doings. It has been a long while since I wrote something fictional and despite this I hoped to capture at least a little of the zeitgeist of Catalunya's capital. I ask you to not to read this too critically or build a picture of me based on what you read as I write through the eyes of my good friend, the famous and fictional Dr Rancho.
A question I get asked about six times a day is “What made you come over to Barcelona?”
Truth be told, I’m not quite sure. Since the end of my University life I have been intending on travelling as much as possible. Due to family circumstances, I had to shelve many of those travel plans, but as many of you may already know I have seen a good bit of Europe over the last year or so. This has largely been linked to the obsession I had with a certain geeky card game (Magic) and with me coming over to Barcelona there wasn’t much of an exception apart from particular differences. Leaving Belfast was harder than I thought it might have been. When home has a lot to offer in terms of friends, family and female companionship it’s hard to wonder why one would bother leaving. Yet, I was restless. The desire for adventure in my heart is hard to quell. I love the gradual swing from the surreal to the mundane. Not knowing a single street in a city to knowing the town like the back of your hand is challenging and rewarding. I wanted this with Barcelona. That and to play cards. When I went over a month in advance, I held the intention of finding employment, a place to live, a social circle – generally just a whole new life. I had been over for a few days with my parents three years prior to my second coming and been amazed by the city but being that it was a family holiday and I wasn’t quite as experienced in exploring new cities, I hadn’t felt the opportunity to ditch the tour bus and find some good watering holes. This time I was taking the chance to do things largely my own way, step into the bubble that is Barcelona and learn its intricacies.
So I came over at the beginning of March. For literally the first month, I partied like a lunatic. I slept on either a couch or a mattress of an apartment rented out by two girls. The two girls had a habit of collecting live-ins. On that first week that I joined the crew, there was the girl who rented the flat out from her landlord, a couch-surfing rogue who had been there for several months, Caldogs (who had been picked up after a walking tour by one of the girls and eventually became one of my best friends) and a mutual friend of the couch surfer and me. I had initially planned on staying with a friend of my parents who I hadn’t really met. I was to go stay with him and shadow him as an English teacher. Having failed to get in touch prior to my stay, I ended up contacting the mutual friend who I knew was staying in Barca and asked if it was possible to crash in the flat. After a month of good times, mad times, awkwardness, amusement and general drama between various groups within the flat, things had to change. When you end up with about ten people in the same flat, several of them sleeping with each other, it’s only a matter of time before shit hits the fan.
I got to know a bit more of the city month by month. When you first get to Barcelona it’s not hard to see why you would want to stay for a while. It is by definition the city that never sleeps. Every night there is always something going on, whether it’s a big musical festival a street party or a secret rave that you know might just be the greatest night of your life. If you’re a morning and afternoon person, you can experience the amazing feel. During the Spring and Summer you see it all – you can hit the beach, walk up a mountain or see any number of weird and wonderful cultural exhibits. The first month you’re there will almost always feel like a holiday. The freshness and exuberance that the hustle and bustle of streets will give you the sense of wonder that so many yearn for. For this reason and many others it’s easy to see why it takes everyone so long to get their national insurance documents and a real place to stay. At least that’s going to be my excuse. Or maybe the partying just took over.
Before I get too carried away in describing what other crap went on during my time here, I’ll give a few words of warning about the streets of Barcelona at night. By and large, you won’t find a fight unless you go looking for it but there’s a lot of other evils you might experience or should be prepared to deal with. Pick pocketing is rife in the city, particularly around Las Ramblas, Raval and the Gothic Quarter. That’s not to say you’re out of the woods whenever you are in another part of town but it’ll be the dimmer, smaller streets where the pick pockets can stalk the unaware outsider. Mugging does happen to unguarded women as well but from what I gather rarely to men. Most of the theft you’re likely to experience is pick pocketing and the chances for anyone spending any extended period of time being a victim of the crime are fairly high. It’s almost a rite of passage. I got caught stupidly unaware when I was near pass out drunk in my second week of being in Barcelona. I think it was late one Tuesday night when I ran around like a drunken man searching for a kebab shop in the Gothic quarter. I must have been so pissed that I believed myself to be invincible or Jesus Christ himself. When some dark skinned guy came up to me asking for a hug, I thought it was all gravy. I thought I would be winning because I thought my wallet was cunningly hidden in an inside jacket pocket and that I would get away Scot free. I would walk away laughing about the whole encounter as if I had gotten one over some street rat. Serves me right. Thankfully I only lost 20 Euros and cancelled all my bank cards, kind of stopped me from spending every penny I had like an idiot and forced me to go out and find some form of cash in hand employment. Perhaps I should have taken it as a sign to come about drunken idiocies.
The pick pockets of Barcelona do operate during the day but just don’t be an oblivious tourist and don’t dilly-dally. If you’re moving from A to B, walk quickly and you’ll be unlikely to be seen as a target. Hide your valuables too. Common sense prevails here people. This is going to sound racist but of the pick pocketing that I experienced personally or witnessed about to take place tended to be carried out by either small Morrocan gangs, Roma-Gypsy men or the big black prostitutes of Las Rambla/Raval area. The latter group aren’t even the slightest bit subtle about it. I lost count of the number of times I saw two or three big black women hanging off some poor bastard too drunk to even know his name whilst another one would rummage through his pockets take him for everything he’s got. Maybe there’s a ton of white professional pick pockets but they don’t make it as obvious. I wouldn’t think there would be many educated white middle class folk moving over to Barcelona to begin a career in theft but I could be wrong. Nor can I imagine many Catalans with all their pomp and swagger decide to take up lowly pick pocket work to fund their snobbery.
Speaking of the Catalans, I’ve generally got mixed feelings for them. Some are ok, but the desire for independence in Catalunya creates in many a massive sense of defiance and a desire to be separate from the rest of the Spanish state which economically depends on the region. I’ve encountered many who hate outsiders and will try and get one up on foreigners by speaking in Catalan even if they’re aware the other person speaks perfect Castellano (regular Spanish). They don’t tend to be fighters though. They’re the quintessential Jack Russells that bark worse than they bite. Don’t rise to it. Even if for some mad reason they do attack you, defend yourself but striking back will always end up working against you with the three police forces that patrol the streets. Spanish police aren’t like UK police. They rarely have any qualms about using violence, sometimes eschewing the regular police procedures and dishing out a beating instead. Fuck paper work when a quick flick with a truncheon gets the message across quicker. A friend and I were out tagging around Raval once when what appeared to be a Raval rudeboy got out of his black Seat Ibiza, demanded to have the graffiti pen were using from my friend and dished out an open palm pimp slap right across the side of his face. His head bounced right across the bonnet of the car and thank God too. If it had been a pussy slap, Cal dogs would probably have pissed himself laughing and we would have ended up in a whole lot more shit than we would have cared for. On another occasion I inadvertently advised an officer of the Mossos at El Prat airport to “fuck off”. That’s a story for another time that involves drunkenness, missing flights, sleeping in a ditch and wandering around farms trying to walk eleven miles back to Barcelona.
Any way, when the shit hit the fan in terms of living arrangements, I got looking for a real place to live, at least for a while. At the beginning of April after a few nights in and out of various hostels, I found a room in another flat and the girls who rented out the flat found a new place to rent having been evicted for constant noise complaints due to the amount of partying going on.
A flat overpopulated with young people on couches, floors, nooks and crannies is a far from unusual thing in Barcelona. The squat culture here is massive, landlords often renting out borderline derelict apartments revamped to be just about liveable. On top of that, it’s typical to see a lot of people having their friends sleep on their couch or floor for extended amounts of time, often rent free or a sublet unauthorized by their landlord. When I moved into my new room, I paid E175 in deposit plus E350 a month for the room. A double room for E350 in a major European city is a pretty good deal, one could pay the same in London and get a single bed in a dive apartment. What you get in Barca for the money is usually pretty decent. Life in my first flat was fairly decent, despite a steady stream of new flatmates in every month and having to deal with a mad-hatter old English man who claimed (amongst other things) to have trained with Bruce Lee for five months and to have snorted cocaine with Jerry Garcia for a year in Amsterdam. I got evicted after about five months of living in that apartment. I had two friends from England came over and we went a little bit too mental for our own good. When you put your converse in your mouth and wear your pants on your head in the middle of your own street, you should probably take care not to wake up every neighbour.
Getting into the party lifestyle is all too easy in Barca… drink is cheap, drugs are everywhere, women are beautiful. I might have drank more than I should have before I moved here but I wouldn’t have necessarily described myself as an alcoholic. Within a month of coming here, well meaning intentions of getting a good job, earning some money and seeing more of Spain and mainland Europe had largely evaporated. The dream was still there, but it had devolved into the status of a whisper. What replaced it was a beer gut, head hurting hangovers and an awful daily routine. I would wake up and spend hours on the internet, blowing savings playing card games online badly. After scrubbing out several times a day and ending up poorer for it I would head out to grab some over priced fast food then go back to the flat to continue living a sedentary lifestyle. The only job I had at the time was that of pub crawl leader.
Pub crawl leader? Alcoholic babysitter more like. Pub crawls in Barcelona started roughly five years ago, since then more and more have popped up each year, only a few living to survive the tale. Most of the pub crawl companies have their promoters taking to Las Ramblas so that they can approach young tourists on holiday to deliver their pitches. The premise is pretty simple, those tourists wanting to go on the crawl pay something like 12 euros and our taken to three bars where they receive a shot in each and afterwards the night is concluded in a nightclub where entrance is free. With the company I worked for, I had it easy. Instead of potentially wasting our time and energy on Las Ramblas, we headed straight to a series of hostels the company had an agreement with. It’s a helluva lot easier to recruit young travellers for a party in Barcelona when they’re relaxed in a hostel bar than picking them up off the streets. I can’t exactly say it’s a hard job, work started at 10 PM and the drop off at the club was between 2 and 2.30. At that point I could either choose to go home and sleep, or get drunk in the club, dance and try and pick up whatever American/Canadian/Australian slut was either naive or horny enough to be taken back to my apartment for a quick fuck. I had my way with a few and I’m sure I could have had a few more if I didn’t end up carrying such a superiority complex with me, one that had to be quelled with gratuitous amounts of free alcohol for me to want to listen to some horrible accent on those kind of women. “Ron y pina, por favour!” was a catchphrase I would utter almost eight times in three hours. Ever seen how they pour a spirit measure in Barcelona? Put a stopper on a bottle then start pouring it into a glass, begin counting. Stop when you get to ten. Yeah, that’s about a quadruple measure. I don’t want to even consider what percentage I’ve increased the likelihood of having a stroke in my fifties.
For some this might sound ideal, apart from the fact it rarely pays the bills. On a good night you get about E40 for four hours work but on average I was coming home with E25 a night. Hardly to be sneezed at whenever life can be lived so cheaply in Barcelona but I wasn’t living life cheaply. Eating out and drinking out all the time adds up really quickly. If I spent only E30 on food a week here I would have been laughing but laziness when it comes to cooking doesn’t cure itself. Alternatively, I could have started taking walking tours. Walking tours are actually pretty lucrative in Barcelona. My company’s walking tour was all tip based, with commission based on number of heads given to the company. If I had gotten myself out of bed for an eleven am start every morning I likely could have earned a bare minimum of forty euros for two hours work and on some days as much as E140. Regretfully rather than getting myself into gear, I accepted hand outs from my mother and maintained the sedentary lifestyle. Another two months would pass before I had to do something to alter my employment status.
A lot of the basic running of the pub crawl had come into conflict with me. The doormen of one of the pub crawl’s clubs had been pretty much blatantly racist to a number of customers on my crawl one night. The fact this happened to take place on the one year anniversary of the death of my father meant I pretty much boycotted the nightclub, only ever returning to it twice afterwards. This meant I was only prepared to work half of the nights the pub crawl operated. If I had been working the walking tour as well, I would have been afforded some leniency but due to this and the fact I arguably took a few too many holidays to see my mother back in Belfast meant that I wasn’t in much of a position to keep hold of my job when I missed a flight back to Barca from Prague. Totally worth it mind.
Without even this meagre source of pocket money I was forced to pavement pound. It didn’t take too long before I found some legitimate employment. By mid-June I was working forty to sixty hour weeks in the probably the most overly touristic Irish bar – “Molly’s Fair City”, you’ll ever find yourself swilling pints of Nigerian-brewed Guinness in. Put it this way, the level of an authentic Irish bar experience might be a bit lacking when it’s run by a camp bald Austrian in his early forties already on to his forth trophy wife – though admittedly she was a truly stunning German brunette. It became a turning point in my Barcelona life. I had to get myself to work on time and dressed smartly for long shifts, learning new skills. When I first started the job I worked stupid hard to become a half way decent bar tender. Both my Spanish and French improved drastically and within a few months of working there my self esteem was at all time high. The next few months have me witness a few ups and downs though. Most of my nights off would begin in me characteristically going to a few different Anglo-phone filled pubs and consuming pint after pint of rum and fruit juice based concoction. I picked up the odd girl that made for an easy lay along the way and but generally I was largely unattached. Apart from the odd lonely night making me long for what I had back home, I was actually fairly content with the way things were going. No worries except my old fear of not using my time effectively in terms of advancing myself academically, artistically, intellectually, spiritually and setting myself up for the future.
At this moment in time, I think it would be wise to take a step out of Barcelona. My plan for months was to complete my six month contract at Molly’s, walk away with a nice tax rebate, massive tips for working so close to Christmas and a fat pay cheque. Unfortunately for my bank balance, things were never going to last too long.
Despite never missing a shift, my last month working for the Irish pub was rife with minor offences that the company saw as treason. I probably should have tried to keep on top of these things better but this was when I was going through the transitional period I experienced when I was evicted and forced to move to a new apartment. Not having access to a decent washing machine or iron meant that I was walking into work with slightly creased shirts. Due to my Y chromosome proving a lack of enthusiasm to go shoe shopping for new shoes I was tramping around the work place in a once pristine graduation shoes were now scuffed and bouncing off my steps like flip flops. In addition, there were some minor late offences. I had I met another girl, who when we initially met did little more than smoke weed and have sex. Having had a little more than mediocre sexual encounters since picking up a French girl in mid-August, I was now feasting to make up for the famine. Part of that meant that I was prepared to be late ten-fifteen minutes just to get one last shag in before I had to go open the bar. To be honest, this was very rarely an issue but to an angry Austrian man, small failures in tardiness add up, big ones are gas chamber worthy offences. However the thing that finally killed my stint with that job was carelessness with alcohol consumption.
Appearing to be “under the effects of alcohol” in any way in Molly’s was an absolute no-no. I know I’m not the only one who would say this but I think to anyone who isn’t Austrian and obviously trying to hide his blatant homosexuality with trophy wives, looking hung over isn’t a bad quality in a bar tender. As its said in one film “Never trust a bartender that doesn’t drink.”. It’s almost the norm in Barcelona bars for the staff to drink behind the bar. In America when you order a shot, it’s almost expected for the bartender to do one with you. I almost never drank behind the bar in Molly’s, mostly because that was the rule and I stuck to it. If I was ever guilty of being drunk behind the bar, it was down to one of two things – one too many the night before or one too many on the break of a split shift. I’d seen supervisors looking far more fucked than I had ever been, even committing that cardinal no drinking behind the bar sin, just they managed to not get caught by boss baldy.
I on the other hand made the mistake twice (the getting caught bit, not the drinking on a school night). Any bartender that can stay in on a Friday night that they have off and not drink should be made a saint. If after three thousand words of this crap you still believe I’m a saint, get your head examined. I got on it one Friday night when work finished for me at eleven. I had work the next morning but I felt as long as I got a good six hours sleep, I would have been fine. Unfortunately though I chose to listen to the little MDMA devil on my shoulder that evening and raved my little titties off until about seven in the morning, leaving me about two hours to sleep off effects of both drugs and alcohol. Surprise, surprise if your boss is in the bar the next day, he’s going to catch you looking like a bag of dead dicks. This however wasn’t the final nail in the coffin. On another occasion, I started drinking at about four one Saturday morning after my Friday night shift, with the intention of staying up to watch the 7 AM Ireland v Wales rugby match. This would have been fine if I didn’t go home at 9 AM to a flat full of partiers. Having two drinks stuffed in my hand meant that I wasn’t hitting the hay until noon. If I had set my alarm for a reasonable time, I wouldn’t have had much of a problem. It would have meant I would have gone to work looking dishevelled but a hangover rarely stops a half decent bar tender from doing a half decent job. The alarm though was never set and I woke up twenty minutes into my shift. I was almost forty minutes late by the time I got into work. Not a problem for my co-worker but a serious problem for aforementioned bald cunt.
I don’t know why I expected any leniency. I knew the place was stupidly strict for an Irish bar but due to the fact I had been pulling 54 working weeks on a 25 hour contract to fill in for my co-workers I thought I would get the odd by-ball. No such luck. It’s not like I can only be angry with the owner of Molly’s, there’s a lot I could have done to handle the situation better. Being knee deep in complacency is never a place you should feel comfortable. I made that mistake all too readily. Ever work a job and think “This is ok, but it’s beneath me. I should be making X doing Y”, yet the whole time you stick to the original job? You think you can make X, go out and make X just be prepared to look for Y. There’s always an excuse why you don’t and it doesn’t get you anywhere. Either be comfortable at what you do and work at least hard enough to get you by, or go bust your ass trying to find your dream job or at least a job you want to do for a comfortable period of time. Somewhere along the line I decided Homer Simpson was some kind of guru “If you don’t like your job, you don’t quit. You just go in every day and do it really half assed. That’s the way! That’s the American way!” That doesn’t work for long. You take that advice and you risk never being truly happy. Same applies to almost everything else. Relationships, lifestyles, you name it, it probably still stands.
If I’m to take my own advice, I need to decide where I want to be for the next while. I wouldn’t say I’m done with Barcelona but I would say I’ve run myself into a rut. I live in a flat with two drug dealers and a 19 year old vagabond with his gigantic Alsation. I make pocket money handing out flyers for another Irish pub and I might have a job working behind the bar coming up there, but do I really want this? If I’m to settle in Barcelona for the next few years, I realistically need to be doing something constructive that will develop me in different ways for a long term career plan. I want to live in a nice apartment where I have a big room and my own feel to that room. I want to be living with people that I will not just be having fun with but will advance my way of thinking, spur me on to better myself in as many ways as possible. I want positive influences around me at the same time as the devilish ones that tell me to get wrecked when I need to. The problem is this, whilst I know my life motivations should come from inside, I make every excuse to not go out and change things. You can have a great idea for an invention for dragon’s den but having the balls to go out and implement the production of said idea is another story altogether.
My thoughts often drift to travelling then returning to Barcelona with more skills, experience and money under my belt. I could go teach English in Asia, work in some mining town in Australia or pick fruit in New Zealand. Every time I hear of someone doing something I haven’t done, I want to go do it. Motor bike through South America Che Guevarra style sounds amazing. Maybe more of the same through Cambodia, Laos and Thailand would be great too. Of course, that would require me to learn to motorbike first and get to Asia but maybe it could be done.I want to go out and learn things intensively somewhere it’s cheap to learn and different to the rest of the world. Six weeks Thai boxing training in some camp near Phuket is something I think about every day. Maybe I could even learn professional masseur skills or Thai cooking when I’m out there. Imagine ladies, a tall handsome Irish man that could kick just about anyone’s ass then feed you noodles as he cracked your back into place. Would be hard to beat, no?
Seriously though, it’s about time I got my act together. I’m going to head back to Belfast next month. Whether this ends up for a meagre four days or a month or two, it’s got to be done. Sometimes you miss the comfort of what you know best too much not to go back to it. Sometimes what you know best has its own surprises you don’t expect.
Anyway, if you have read all of this complete rant then you’re probably dumber than me for writing it. Remember though, Dr Rancho lives only in your mind.
*If you’re conservative enough that if you read the words “drug dealers” and thought “scum bags” then you probably shouldn’t live in Barcelona. They’re just normal dudes who happen to make their living selling drugs to people that want to buy them. Even if I don’t take a lot of drugs, I don’t decree anything unethical in the simple buy and sell transaction of them, aside from the number of deaths it takes you to bring you your gram of cocaine which largely could be avoided with the correct legalisation and control model.
Monday, December 13, 2010
Life at Number 12
Somewhere around 4:00 am, June, Lancaster 2009
"Don't you eyeball me sunshine!" Sean asserted, sternly pointing his finger at the thirty something Pakistani-Birmingham neighbour, leering at him over the three foot brick wall whilst his elderly mother and father huddled around. Through the front door of number twelve, Jon appeared out of no-where, revealing the open wound on his elbow.
"There's blood everywhere!" he croaked like some sort of demented hag out of a horror movie. The glassiness in his eyes brought about by the vast amounts of alcohol he'd consumed over the course of the evening. Acting as an emissary of neighbourly behaviour, Dan followed soon after his seemingly insane friend, chuckling to himself over the hilarity of the situation like an absolute loon.
"I'm sorry about this guys," the orange skinned DJ said to the fuming neighbours. "Come on you two.. get inside" he said to his other house mates. I'd been trying to usher his message without stepping out the front door. Beside me Jewface stood laughing and shaking his head in complete disbelief at the ridiculous nature of the situation.
Moments earlier, Jon had taken the decision that a crack in the window of the kitchen door should warrant him to smash the window with the point of his elbow. Desperately trying to hold onto my sensibility in the face of adversity, I had attempted to discourage him from this blatantly stupid act. Attempting to act as an angel whenever a silver tongued devil in the form of Sean was on the other shoulder was a futile endeavour. In his dismay at the fact the window hadn't broken in a clean smash, Jon wanted revenge upon the door itself. I once again attempted to incite some sense into my vandal friends but seeing Sean's foot puncture wood couldn't have made it any more clear that this attempt was as futile as the last. Realizing that the door had reached the point of no return, I opted to seek a piece of the action for myself. I hurried into the cellar and returned with a brick to hurl through the remaining failed window like I was rioting on the 12th of July. I was quite the little fallen angel.
It was not the first time that we had decided to trash an element of the house. After the first month there wasn't a bannister remained standing intact. The kitchen door was also the second door to have been eradicated, the living room had fallen casualty merely days before. It shall come as no surprise when I say that we regularly incensed the neighbours. I wasn't proud of it but by in the space of a year they had put their house on the market, sold and left. We weren't the first student household to have caused distress to the Patel's. It's much more likely that we were merely one of a long line of noise making, substance ingesting nut-jobs. When we were asked on the first nigh we moved in to keep the noise down, we tried to develop a healthy relationship with our Muslim neighbours. Initially this had a degree of success but this was not to last. On top of two pounding parties we had a multitude of minor gatherings, pot smoking happy hours, jam sessions and post clubbing house destruction that had created so much noise that we had received letters from the council threatening further action. Those aforementioned parties that we had thrown in the house had proven very difficult to keep under control. Both times had uninvited appearances from our neighbour demanding that we turn the volume down. Although we had did our best as residents of the house to turn it down at his request, our moves were usually undone by party attendees enjoying the face-meltingly good tunes within our music libraries. One could argue that this all this is a case against alcohol and drugs consumption but really they were more exacerbating what was already there. Remove substances from the situation and you still had four semi-professional musicians desperate to hone their instrument playing skills and a geek that yelled at the TV whenever he lost at an xbox game. It would be easier to argue a case that the walls between houses were too thin. After all, when I asked our neighbours on the other side about the noise they had heard nothing.
Those of you who know where I live will probably understand the irony within of the fact I lived in such chaos. In Belfast I live in a nice house that's right in the middle of student territory. My parents regularly attended resident meetings that would highlight the difficulties trying to carry out a normal life with drunken youths chanting songs at the top of their voice during the early hours of the morning. Had I not grown up aware of the stress that noisy students cause, I might have been a lot worse. I'm also well aware of the fact that looking back over it in later years, I might be filled with a sense of shame that I was part of such madness. No doubt that if and when I come to raise a family I'll have to march into a neighbour's house in order to turn the music down. Until then I know I'll have moments where I look back and miss the life I lived as a long haired stoner in number twelve. We may have had the ups, the downs and everything in between but that was our house.
Viva the legends of Blade Street
Somewhere around 4:00 am, June, Lancaster 2009
"Don't you eyeball me sunshine!" Sean asserted, sternly pointing his finger at the thirty something Pakistani-Birmingham neighbour, leering at him over the three foot brick wall whilst his elderly mother and father huddled around. Through the front door of number twelve, Jon appeared out of no-where, revealing the open wound on his elbow.
"There's blood everywhere!" he croaked like some sort of demented hag out of a horror movie. The glassiness in his eyes brought about by the vast amounts of alcohol he'd consumed over the course of the evening. Acting as an emissary of neighbourly behaviour, Dan followed soon after his seemingly insane friend, chuckling to himself over the hilarity of the situation like an absolute loon.
"I'm sorry about this guys," the orange skinned DJ said to the fuming neighbours. "Come on you two.. get inside" he said to his other house mates. I'd been trying to usher his message without stepping out the front door. Beside me Jewface stood laughing and shaking his head in complete disbelief at the ridiculous nature of the situation.
Moments earlier, Jon had taken the decision that a crack in the window of the kitchen door should warrant him to smash the window with the point of his elbow. Desperately trying to hold onto my sensibility in the face of adversity, I had attempted to discourage him from this blatantly stupid act. Attempting to act as an angel whenever a silver tongued devil in the form of Sean was on the other shoulder was a futile endeavour. In his dismay at the fact the window hadn't broken in a clean smash, Jon wanted revenge upon the door itself. I once again attempted to incite some sense into my vandal friends but seeing Sean's foot puncture wood couldn't have made it any more clear that this attempt was as futile as the last. Realizing that the door had reached the point of no return, I opted to seek a piece of the action for myself. I hurried into the cellar and returned with a brick to hurl through the remaining failed window like I was rioting on the 12th of July. I was quite the little fallen angel.
It was not the first time that we had decided to trash an element of the house. After the first month there wasn't a bannister remained standing intact. The kitchen door was also the second door to have been eradicated, the living room had fallen casualty merely days before. It shall come as no surprise when I say that we regularly incensed the neighbours. I wasn't proud of it but by in the space of a year they had put their house on the market, sold and left. We weren't the first student household to have caused distress to the Patel's. It's much more likely that we were merely one of a long line of noise making, substance ingesting nut-jobs. When we were asked on the first nigh we moved in to keep the noise down, we tried to develop a healthy relationship with our Muslim neighbours. Initially this had a degree of success but this was not to last. On top of two pounding parties we had a multitude of minor gatherings, pot smoking happy hours, jam sessions and post clubbing house destruction that had created so much noise that we had received letters from the council threatening further action. Those aforementioned parties that we had thrown in the house had proven very difficult to keep under control. Both times had uninvited appearances from our neighbour demanding that we turn the volume down. Although we had did our best as residents of the house to turn it down at his request, our moves were usually undone by party attendees enjoying the face-meltingly good tunes within our music libraries. One could argue that this all this is a case against alcohol and drugs consumption but really they were more exacerbating what was already there. Remove substances from the situation and you still had four semi-professional musicians desperate to hone their instrument playing skills and a geek that yelled at the TV whenever he lost at an xbox game. It would be easier to argue a case that the walls between houses were too thin. After all, when I asked our neighbours on the other side about the noise they had heard nothing.
Those of you who know where I live will probably understand the irony within of the fact I lived in such chaos. In Belfast I live in a nice house that's right in the middle of student territory. My parents regularly attended resident meetings that would highlight the difficulties trying to carry out a normal life with drunken youths chanting songs at the top of their voice during the early hours of the morning. Had I not grown up aware of the stress that noisy students cause, I might have been a lot worse. I'm also well aware of the fact that looking back over it in later years, I might be filled with a sense of shame that I was part of such madness. No doubt that if and when I come to raise a family I'll have to march into a neighbour's house in order to turn the music down. Until then I know I'll have moments where I look back and miss the life I lived as a long haired stoner in number twelve. We may have had the ups, the downs and everything in between but that was our house.
Viva the legends of Blade Street
Friday, October 22, 2010
What is wrong with my subconscious?
So last night I had this dream - I was walking this girl I had a crush on in Lancaster home on a bright sunny afternoon. I turned to kiss her good bye This kiss turns into a full on "make out session" and her clothes come off in seconds. She has this ridiculously hot body.. curvy but not fat. Beautiful milky skin, wide hips and incredible round, full breasts.
I get to it and I'm eating her out, I look up to see if she's enjoying it and her head has turned into that of a stone eagle's. Odd I think, so I call her name
and her head goes back to that normal dark eyed, dark haired look, so I go back to munching whilst doing my patented fingering technique. Out of no where, this little puppy goes berserk jumps over the hedge and bites on my wrist and I'm wrestling him off kind of throw him over the hedge.
I turn round and she's gotten dressed again and says:
"Hey I really enjoyed that, I've kind of lost the mood though. Don't worry, I'm going to kill that fox if I see him again"
God damn imaginary puppies.
So last night I had this dream - I was walking this girl I had a crush on in Lancaster home on a bright sunny afternoon. I turned to kiss her good bye This kiss turns into a full on "make out session" and her clothes come off in seconds. She has this ridiculously hot body.. curvy but not fat. Beautiful milky skin, wide hips and incredible round, full breasts.
I get to it and I'm eating her out, I look up to see if she's enjoying it and her head has turned into that of a stone eagle's. Odd I think, so I call her name
and her head goes back to that normal dark eyed, dark haired look, so I go back to munching whilst doing my patented fingering technique. Out of no where, this little puppy goes berserk jumps over the hedge and bites on my wrist and I'm wrestling him off kind of throw him over the hedge.
I turn round and she's gotten dressed again and says:
"Hey I really enjoyed that, I've kind of lost the mood though. Don't worry, I'm going to kill that fox if I see him again"
God damn imaginary puppies.
Sunday, October 03, 2010
Random Thoughts from When I've been Wasted, Pt. 1 (week ending 03 October 2010)
Welcome to my (hopefully) weekly report of random bollocks that I have quipped upon or have joined in the random bollocks talking session.
After playing cards and having a drink with the Magic players I caught up with Kenny, Gav, Lemon, George, Lyndsey, Steven for a smoking sesh. A few things were brought up.
1) Sexy Sundays.
Where the phrase sexy Sundays came from will not be known however it soon evolved into a series of Club Nights in a bar. If you work in Club Promotion, consider naming days of the week in an erotic or rude fashion.
Sexy Sundays
Mating Mondays
Tasty Tuesdays
Wankered Wedensdays
Thrusting Thursdays
Fucking Fridays
Shagging Saturdays
It could go on with months but I shall leave you to your own devices about how to figure that one out.
2) The Crystal Meth Maze
Mix the glitz and glamour of the terrific 1990s Adventure Quiz Show with the grittiness of some low down dirty meth addicts. Tweeking team mates must complete challenges with the hope of winning crystal meth rocks. Before the end challenge involving the crystal dome, the team must smoke as much of the meth as possible before going into collect the gold and silver tickets. If they get more gold than silver then they will win their own meth lab.
3) Basil the Great Mouse Detective
Whilst Lindsey was talking of her real life I was bringing up Disney mystery solving classic Basil the Great Mouse Detective and asking her to explain why the two are relevant with each other. It became a joke that if anything said anything they would soon be silenced with the immortal line "What has this got to do with Basil the Great Mouse Detective."
Those were the gems of the week, sadly none of the other getting wasted sessions had too many statements that could be remembered. Saturday we reviewed Steven 1911's brilliant lines that he dished out a few months ago:
"You look like Chris Barrie on Es on Scrapheap challenge at 6 pm on a Sunday evening... You know the pilot episode actually consisted of Chris Barrie and a bunch of crackheads trying to build a plane out of a washing machine"
"I think there should be a reality TV show called "Face Melters" where they get a family of four to stick thei...r head into a microwave and turn it on to 800 degrees and film them living the rest of their life with a melted head."
After that, CJ, Joel and I caught up for a free styling session. Whilst the rap lines were terrific very little can be maintained in dome.
Welcome to my (hopefully) weekly report of random bollocks that I have quipped upon or have joined in the random bollocks talking session.
After playing cards and having a drink with the Magic players I caught up with Kenny, Gav, Lemon, George, Lyndsey, Steven for a smoking sesh. A few things were brought up.
1) Sexy Sundays.
Where the phrase sexy Sundays came from will not be known however it soon evolved into a series of Club Nights in a bar. If you work in Club Promotion, consider naming days of the week in an erotic or rude fashion.
Sexy Sundays
Mating Mondays
Tasty Tuesdays
Wankered Wedensdays
Thrusting Thursdays
Fucking Fridays
Shagging Saturdays
It could go on with months but I shall leave you to your own devices about how to figure that one out.
2) The Crystal Meth Maze
Mix the glitz and glamour of the terrific 1990s Adventure Quiz Show with the grittiness of some low down dirty meth addicts. Tweeking team mates must complete challenges with the hope of winning crystal meth rocks. Before the end challenge involving the crystal dome, the team must smoke as much of the meth as possible before going into collect the gold and silver tickets. If they get more gold than silver then they will win their own meth lab.
3) Basil the Great Mouse Detective
Whilst Lindsey was talking of her real life I was bringing up Disney mystery solving classic Basil the Great Mouse Detective and asking her to explain why the two are relevant with each other. It became a joke that if anything said anything they would soon be silenced with the immortal line "What has this got to do with Basil the Great Mouse Detective."
Those were the gems of the week, sadly none of the other getting wasted sessions had too many statements that could be remembered. Saturday we reviewed Steven 1911's brilliant lines that he dished out a few months ago:
"You look like Chris Barrie on Es on Scrapheap challenge at 6 pm on a Sunday evening... You know the pilot episode actually consisted of Chris Barrie and a bunch of crackheads trying to build a plane out of a washing machine"
"I think there should be a reality TV show called "Face Melters" where they get a family of four to stick thei...r head into a microwave and turn it on to 800 degrees and film them living the rest of their life with a melted head."
After that, CJ, Joel and I caught up for a free styling session. Whilst the rap lines were terrific very little can be maintained in dome.
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
Scars of Mirrodin Pre-Release (A Fuck off non-Magic player Entry)
God damn I love pre-releases. There's something so nice about coming to a completely un-tested format. It's like opening a brand new computer game at the exact same time as your friends and having a race to figure out how to play it first. In fact, it's just like playing a whole new game. When I rocked up to Serenity games on Saturday I could feel everyone was thinking the same thing. The infrequent players who might have travelled from as far as Portadown just to play Magic were excited to play new cards whilst those who regularly atteneded the shop were eager to get to grips with something other than the slightly wearisome bomb heavy M11 limited.
I got into the shop at just the right time too. Whilst registration was due to close at 12, there's only so much space the shop can hold and with me walking in, it had hit max capacity. Niall Graham, the legendary shop manager had to drop out of the event just to fit me in. I have to say I really appreciated this.
Having only glimpsed at a few of the spoilers, I was looking forward to a few surprises, hopefully landing a few bombs along the way. Thankfully, my boosters were far from disappointing.
First booster: Elspeth Tirel
Second booster: Sunblast Angel
Me: Well I think I'm playing white then!
As for the second colour, a Hoard-Smelter Dragon made the decision for me. With a Myr Battlesphere and a Ratchet Bomb to add to the mix, this five rare packing deck was a monstrosity beyond words. A trained monkey could have taken this deck to top 8. Thankfully I like to think of myself just a tad better than a damn dirty ape.
Anyway, without further ado, here's the deck list:
9x Plains
8x Mountain
1x Iron Myr
1x Auriok Edgewright
2x Vulshok Replica
2x Blade-Tribe Berserkers
1x Glimmerpoint Stag
1x Razor Hippogriff
1x Darksteel Sentinel
1x Sunblast Angel
1x Hoardsmelter Dragon
1x Myr Battlesphere
3x Revoke Existence
1x Dispense Justice
2x Turn to Slag
1x Arrest
1x Elspeth Tirel
1x Contagion Clasp
1x Ratchet Bomb
1x Trigon of Rage
Whilst it may appear a bit slow, sealed is generally supposed to be a little show. Especially with this format. I had enough seven removal cards that dealt with either creatures or artifacts (some did both) whilst both the Ratchet Bomb and the Sunblast Angel punished opponents for over extending. On my sideboard I had another Trigon of Rage in the unlikely event my opponent was artifact or enchantment light enough to make a third Revoke Existence seem like overkill. Also I had a few mediocre equipment pieces and two Sunspear Shikaris if I was getting overrun by a weenie rush deck. Thankfully I never had to resort to this option because of said Ratchet Bomb and the trade forcing Vulshok Replica.
Match 1: Daniel
Youngling Daniel said he hadn't played in two years and to be frank, it showed. Whilst his deck wasn't too bad, he the wrong block on multiple occasions, regardless of what my mana situation or what else was on the table. I overrun him quickly in game one with my early drop creatures outclassing his. When he let a Double striking Auriok Edgewright through with my Trigon of Rage open in game 2, he declared "Oh snap!" as I did him exactly lethal.
Match 2: Greg McCausland
It goes without saying Greg is a better player than me. Except that is whenever he's drank his way through a bottle of Black Bush the night prior. Whilst he beat me in a tight game one, game two he drew dead with mana myrs popping up late game. In the early game this meant wasting a Contagion Clasp on one, whilst utilizing Glimmerpoint Stag's come into play ability to pop another. Towards the end of the game, I was wasting five mana removal spells on Myrs just because I could. In game three whilst I thought I was going to be put in a pretty nasty position due to Moltentail Masticore, blasting my critters to shreds and getting some swings in. However Greg would be kicking himself for tapping out on his sixth turn and failing to play around the Sunblast Angel which he knew I had. With no regeneration mana open, the Masticore would be saying hello to the KO pile. Since there are very few answers to a 5 toughness creature in the format, the Angel pretty much ended the game by itself.
Match 3: Chris Dodds
Chris didn't have a perfect pool, but he couldn't complain too much. His Green Black deck focused on piling on the poison counters and fast. With bombs such as Contagion Engine and Nim Deathmantle, he did quite a good job of that in game one. I'd offered him an ID prior to game one which he declined, feeling that it was much too early to risk not getting the needed four wins and a draw to top 8. In a heated second game, I returned a Vulshok Beserker to my hand using Razor Hippogriff's come into play ability, this was despite the fact that Doddsy had the black spell bomb with the mana open. He had forgotten to use it, I had forgotten he had it, thankfully this mistake on both sides paid off in my favour and I was able to recast it to finish him off after some swings with the Hippogriff and a Hoard Smelter Dragon. This was particularly close as he had me on eight poison counters and had shrunk the dragon down to a 2/2 with -1/-1 counters. He felt that he was going to win the game uhad I activated the dragon's ability targetting the contagion engine rather than spend my mana on recast the Vulshok that I shouldn't have had. However, I pointed out that he would not have been able to double proliferate the following turn if I had used the ability, meaning that he would still have to get rid of the Hippogriff that was coming right for him. Between the end of this game and the start of the third, then man with the expression filled face re-offered me the ID. I declined and went on to win Game 3, taking a gamble with a 5 land opening hand on the draw. Even holding the Sunblast Angel in my hand at the end of the game. I have to say though Chris impressed me somewhere in this match by proliferating the counters on my Ratchet Bomb to ensure it was out of range from destroying any of his permanents.
Match 4: Steve Tombs
Steve is a pretty casual player and as a result doesn't get enough play time in to ensure he's free from making bad mistakes. Despite this, I've been beaten by him before, he seems to have a similar ability to myself opening the best sealed pools possible. If he was sitting on three wins after three matches, I knew there was something up. When I heard he had Sunblast Angel and Elspeth Tirel, I told him I would ID with him if we were going 1-1 by the end of two games. This is something that might have even be a little bit risk for me as I suffered a loss in the first game, generally due to mana screw. He walked into a 3 for 1 with my Ratchet Bomb going off in game two and what I like to call "Predator Golem" (Darksteel Sentinel - Come on, look at the artwork.. it's a giant Steel Predator, it even has dreads), I was forcing Steve to scream "Get to the choppa!" in a bloody mess before I Myr Battlesphered him out of the game.
Game 3 was as I predicted. It came down to whoever drew Elspeth first won. Thankfully for Steve we had ID-d as I overrun him quickly with soldier tokens.
Match 4: Some Portugese guy
This guy had come down from Portadown and whilst he's not the worst player ever, he failed to realize that Carnifex Demon is a limited bomb and wasn't playing him in a deck that could have. His deck seemed to be one full of Green Fat and some other jank but it just couldn't compete with my own, in both games I was left with a mountain of cards still in my hand unplahttp://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=6367786yed. Nice.
Match 6: Conor McVarnock
With four wins and an ID, I was automatically through for top 8. Here I could have lost and still got through but I ID out of courtesy and we play through the match anyway. I went 2-1, getting beaten by a poison counter beatdown, winning one game off the back of Elspeth and the third being a pretty close one that saw us both use our Myr Battlespheres, me killing him with the direct damage that the ability on the attack provides.
Top 8
With no problems making top 8, my abilities as a player begin to get tested. I draft a relatively mediocre U/W deck that's bomb free unless you can count Legendary Cat Cleric Kemba, Kha Regent. I don't because well.. she's crap unless you get an equipment n her and since Darksteel Axe just doesn't come around that often, you're left putting thing like the poor man's lightning greaves or Barbed Battlegear (which is good but quite expensive and shrinks the toughness. Glinthawk Warden, Razor Hippogriff and Ghalma's Warden were my MVPs.
Match 1: Daniel
Well Daniel San had somehow been scooped into top 8 by players that might have had grievances about beating a pre-adolescent. Thankfully I'm a cold heartless bastard and only took a slight pang of guilt as I beat him into the ground for a second time. He did win the first game as I failed to play around a Sunblast Angel, which I then destroyed only to be put in dire stress by the 4/4 mythic angel which gave all his guys shroud. Game 2 and 3, I played as if he had Sunblast Angel in his hand at all times - stalling out, building board position and trying to draw cards wherever possible off Trigon of Thought.
Match 2: Greg
Second rematch of the day. First game I beat Greg down pretty quickly because he's mana screwed for a particular colour (I think he lacks the swamps to make it a fair game), meanwhile I'm beating with a metalcraft affected 2/4 and everything is getting hastened up by said poor man's Lightning Greaves. Game 2 is an epicly long one, where I make a bit of a mistake. Instead of recurring a Necropede with the Hippogriff, I chose to bring back the white spellbomb, intent on drawing some other gas. If I had chosen the Necropede I could have dealt with the 2/1 unblockable blue guy a lot sooner. If Greg had let the attack go through continuously then I think the poison would have got to him. Either way, I did have a dispense justice that I kept holding back, thinking that any time Greg would attack with his 2 Sky-Eel Schools which I would have had no answer to deal with, other than block and trade with one using the Hippogriff and get crushed by the other. Greg however is a very patient player and puts me into the range of the drain life spell. It was quite a close one however. At one point, Greg Volition Reignsed the Hippogriff only for me to play Glimmerpoint Stag to put it back into my control and recurr the white spell bomb again. I also have to Remove from Existence his Contagion Engine before he wrecks my board. At another point, Greg is put into a position where he has to draw two removal spells to get rid of Scrapdiver Serpent.
Amusingly, halfway through this game I rang work to let them know I would be an hour and a half late as I was "helping my mum with something important". Well helping my mum I wasn't, but I felt it was much more important to play magic than to collect glasses in a pub.
In the third game, I get pounded into the dirt with style. Greg has a better board position going into turn six and seals my fate with the Contagion Engine. To work.
Pre-release 2
So, I went to work between the hours of 9.30 PM and 2 Am, then I went out drinking to a friend's gaff, guzzling beer, vodka and jaagermeister until 7 am. Not to mention I took more than a few drags on a certain kind of cigarette. Again my deck was bonkers. This time I played R/B and had Carnifex Demon, Hoard-Smelter Dragon, Nim's Deathmantle, Myr Propogator and the R/B dual land. On top of this I had 3x Shatters, Darksteel Axe and 2x Plague Stingers. This deck "ripped it hardcore like pornoflick bitches". Unfortuantely, whilst my memories of Saturday's pre-release are quite murky, I remember even less of Sunday's due to the four hours sleep I had the night prior and the liver abuse I dished out on Saturday night.
Match 1: DJ Carson
I'm pretty sure I wrecked DJ in the first game by 3-for-1-ing him with Carnifex Demon's infest ability. Game 2, he was in a much better position than I was but his poison counter count was pretty high and swung with a Plague Stinger. In response to the attack, DJ popped the blue spell bomb to give a 4/2 Golem flight. Unfortunately I had top decked a shatter and I apologized for being such a jammy son of a gun and salvaging victory from the jaws of defeat.
Match 2: Matt Tweedy
I'm pretty sure it was Matt I play in this match. I think I win the first game by dishing out poison counters ridiculously fast - Plague Stinger turn 2, followed by Painsmith and Darksteel Axe on turn 3. Better lucky than good. Game 2 ends up being one of those games where half the field seems to disappear due to removal and trades. Matt ends up in what seems like a particularly strong position with a creature equipped to Argentum Armour. Unfortunately whilst he is able to attack with it once, I flash in Darksteel Sentinel as a blocker and Matt has decided to target my R/B dual land rather than a seemingly irrelevant Contagion Clasp. On the turn following, I swing back and put him from 7 to 4 then play Bleak Coven Vampires in the post combat mainphase, the Contagion Clasp, not seeming so irrelevant now ensures that Metalcraft is online and the life suck finishes him.
Match 3: Simon Carmichael
Simon is always a pleasure to play, whether you win, lose or draw. After a good battle destroy him with Hoard-Smelter Dragon and using its ability multiple times targetting my own Darksteel Axe to give it +4 attack. If it weren't for my excessive mana though, Simon had me dead the following turn. I'm largely mana screwed for Game 2, whilst Simon hits a great draw and I'm forced to mulligan down to 5 in Game 3, sealing my fate.
Match 4: Dean Convery
I can't remember this one other than the fact I won. I think it was probably the Darksteel Axe that did it in one game, whilst Nim's Deathmantle that did it in another. Mmm good equipment.
Match 5: Steve Madden
We ID as we both have made top 8 and I can't remember what happens after that. I think we play two games and I win them both, with the back of Nim's Deathmantle, the other by generating umpteen Myr Propogator tokens.
Top 8
Another mediocre draft deck, I try to go for a blue heavy, red light artifact deck that has a few metal craft guys along with a load of bounce and big toughness guys.
Game 1: Drew Carmichael
I know Drew held a big grudge for me for a while because I was an ass in a draft game a few months ago and did a big takeback. I tell him I owe him a big takeback, pretty much suggesting he can have one big dirty cheat. He tells me not to worry about it as it hasn't bothered him and truth be told, he doesn't need it. Despite rare drafting, his R/G deck savages me. I almost win Game one with mediocre artifact creatures and holding off the 4/4 phoenix by bouncing it but Drew plays Cerebral Eruption and hopes for the luck shot. If I reveal a land or any card with cost less than 3, I have the game. Unfortunately I reveal Scrapdiver Serpent, a 7 mana creature whilst I'm on 7. I lose the game due to an incredible spell of bad luck, but don't mind, I kind of felt Simon's Brother deserved to win this one in spectacular fashion as my come uppance for being an ass. What I did mind was how stupid I was in the second game. I was put on 8 poison counters by an Untamed Might targetting his 2/2 infect artifact creature but managed to stabilize by building board position with artifact creatures and the Manic Vandal Ox. I even Bonds of Quicksilvered the Corpse Cur. Unfortunately, I walked into Tel-Jilad Fallen twice. Once by attacking into it with artifact creatures and secondly by tapping out, when I should have held the ox back, thinking I could tap it with the Tumble Magnet.
AWFUL AWFUL PLAY!!!!
Now don't get me wrong, had this been M11 draft and his creature have been a Black Knight and the Tumble Magnet been a Blinding Mage I would not have made the same mistake, I just didn't play the original Mirrodin to even take into account what Protection from Artifacts actually entailed. Terrible excuse for a random act of stupidity I know but I'd been playing pretty much perfectly up until this point all day, despite being hammered before I went to bed.
What annoyed me even more though was that Drew wouldn't give me a third game. For that I will hold a grudge for as I deem it to be cowardly and unsportsmanlike.
I forget to bring my pre-release pile of cards with me and head off to the pub to join Trent, Chris and Kerr bear who are mid session due to the Empire selling pints of Coors for £2 during the football match. With Sunday being Trent's last night, it's only fair that we give him a good send off. After the Empire we head to the Pavillion to watch Niall's band, "Sweet Taste" rock everyone's socks off. This is probably the best band in Belfast as all four band members are extremely talented, produce catchy but great tunes that don't faff about with some guitar fret fappage like some supposed technical mastery that you'd hear from some teenage metal group.
Even with my two highly notable mistakes, I really enjoyed the whole weekend.
Trent, I hope you realize how much you will be missed and I hope you don't mind that we got you absolutely steamboats by making you drink the most evil looking concoctions ever to be poured into shot glasses. Haha, USA! USA! USA! I think we all might owe Niall a pint for getting you to the airport the next day, or maybe we shouldn't as it could have been part of the plan to get Trent to get on the plane!
Now this should be my last FONMP section for a while, my regular fans will be screaming out for some stories of comedy, drinking and schmoozing.
- Big Nasty
God damn I love pre-releases. There's something so nice about coming to a completely un-tested format. It's like opening a brand new computer game at the exact same time as your friends and having a race to figure out how to play it first. In fact, it's just like playing a whole new game. When I rocked up to Serenity games on Saturday I could feel everyone was thinking the same thing. The infrequent players who might have travelled from as far as Portadown just to play Magic were excited to play new cards whilst those who regularly atteneded the shop were eager to get to grips with something other than the slightly wearisome bomb heavy M11 limited.
I got into the shop at just the right time too. Whilst registration was due to close at 12, there's only so much space the shop can hold and with me walking in, it had hit max capacity. Niall Graham, the legendary shop manager had to drop out of the event just to fit me in. I have to say I really appreciated this.
Having only glimpsed at a few of the spoilers, I was looking forward to a few surprises, hopefully landing a few bombs along the way. Thankfully, my boosters were far from disappointing.
First booster: Elspeth Tirel
Second booster: Sunblast Angel
Me: Well I think I'm playing white then!
As for the second colour, a Hoard-Smelter Dragon made the decision for me. With a Myr Battlesphere and a Ratchet Bomb to add to the mix, this five rare packing deck was a monstrosity beyond words. A trained monkey could have taken this deck to top 8. Thankfully I like to think of myself just a tad better than a damn dirty ape.
Anyway, without further ado, here's the deck list:
9x Plains
8x Mountain
1x Iron Myr
1x Auriok Edgewright
2x Vulshok Replica
2x Blade-Tribe Berserkers
1x Glimmerpoint Stag
1x Razor Hippogriff
1x Darksteel Sentinel
1x Sunblast Angel
1x Hoardsmelter Dragon
1x Myr Battlesphere
3x Revoke Existence
1x Dispense Justice
2x Turn to Slag
1x Arrest
1x Elspeth Tirel
1x Contagion Clasp
1x Ratchet Bomb
1x Trigon of Rage
Whilst it may appear a bit slow, sealed is generally supposed to be a little show. Especially with this format. I had enough seven removal cards that dealt with either creatures or artifacts (some did both) whilst both the Ratchet Bomb and the Sunblast Angel punished opponents for over extending. On my sideboard I had another Trigon of Rage in the unlikely event my opponent was artifact or enchantment light enough to make a third Revoke Existence seem like overkill. Also I had a few mediocre equipment pieces and two Sunspear Shikaris if I was getting overrun by a weenie rush deck. Thankfully I never had to resort to this option because of said Ratchet Bomb and the trade forcing Vulshok Replica.
Match 1: Daniel
Youngling Daniel said he hadn't played in two years and to be frank, it showed. Whilst his deck wasn't too bad, he the wrong block on multiple occasions, regardless of what my mana situation or what else was on the table. I overrun him quickly in game one with my early drop creatures outclassing his. When he let a Double striking Auriok Edgewright through with my Trigon of Rage open in game 2, he declared "Oh snap!" as I did him exactly lethal.
Match 2: Greg McCausland
It goes without saying Greg is a better player than me. Except that is whenever he's drank his way through a bottle of Black Bush the night prior. Whilst he beat me in a tight game one, game two he drew dead with mana myrs popping up late game. In the early game this meant wasting a Contagion Clasp on one, whilst utilizing Glimmerpoint Stag's come into play ability to pop another. Towards the end of the game, I was wasting five mana removal spells on Myrs just because I could. In game three whilst I thought I was going to be put in a pretty nasty position due to Moltentail Masticore, blasting my critters to shreds and getting some swings in. However Greg would be kicking himself for tapping out on his sixth turn and failing to play around the Sunblast Angel which he knew I had. With no regeneration mana open, the Masticore would be saying hello to the KO pile. Since there are very few answers to a 5 toughness creature in the format, the Angel pretty much ended the game by itself.
Match 3: Chris Dodds
Chris didn't have a perfect pool, but he couldn't complain too much. His Green Black deck focused on piling on the poison counters and fast. With bombs such as Contagion Engine and Nim Deathmantle, he did quite a good job of that in game one. I'd offered him an ID prior to game one which he declined, feeling that it was much too early to risk not getting the needed four wins and a draw to top 8. In a heated second game, I returned a Vulshok Beserker to my hand using Razor Hippogriff's come into play ability, this was despite the fact that Doddsy had the black spell bomb with the mana open. He had forgotten to use it, I had forgotten he had it, thankfully this mistake on both sides paid off in my favour and I was able to recast it to finish him off after some swings with the Hippogriff and a Hoard Smelter Dragon. This was particularly close as he had me on eight poison counters and had shrunk the dragon down to a 2/2 with -1/-1 counters. He felt that he was going to win the game uhad I activated the dragon's ability targetting the contagion engine rather than spend my mana on recast the Vulshok that I shouldn't have had. However, I pointed out that he would not have been able to double proliferate the following turn if I had used the ability, meaning that he would still have to get rid of the Hippogriff that was coming right for him. Between the end of this game and the start of the third, then man with the expression filled face re-offered me the ID. I declined and went on to win Game 3, taking a gamble with a 5 land opening hand on the draw. Even holding the Sunblast Angel in my hand at the end of the game. I have to say though Chris impressed me somewhere in this match by proliferating the counters on my Ratchet Bomb to ensure it was out of range from destroying any of his permanents.
Match 4: Steve Tombs
Steve is a pretty casual player and as a result doesn't get enough play time in to ensure he's free from making bad mistakes. Despite this, I've been beaten by him before, he seems to have a similar ability to myself opening the best sealed pools possible. If he was sitting on three wins after three matches, I knew there was something up. When I heard he had Sunblast Angel and Elspeth Tirel, I told him I would ID with him if we were going 1-1 by the end of two games. This is something that might have even be a little bit risk for me as I suffered a loss in the first game, generally due to mana screw. He walked into a 3 for 1 with my Ratchet Bomb going off in game two and what I like to call "Predator Golem" (Darksteel Sentinel - Come on, look at the artwork.. it's a giant Steel Predator, it even has dreads), I was forcing Steve to scream "Get to the choppa!" in a bloody mess before I Myr Battlesphered him out of the game.
Game 3 was as I predicted. It came down to whoever drew Elspeth first won. Thankfully for Steve we had ID-d as I overrun him quickly with soldier tokens.
Match 4: Some Portugese guy
This guy had come down from Portadown and whilst he's not the worst player ever, he failed to realize that Carnifex Demon is a limited bomb and wasn't playing him in a deck that could have. His deck seemed to be one full of Green Fat and some other jank but it just couldn't compete with my own, in both games I was left with a mountain of cards still in my hand unplahttp://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=6367786yed. Nice.
Match 6: Conor McVarnock
With four wins and an ID, I was automatically through for top 8. Here I could have lost and still got through but I ID out of courtesy and we play through the match anyway. I went 2-1, getting beaten by a poison counter beatdown, winning one game off the back of Elspeth and the third being a pretty close one that saw us both use our Myr Battlespheres, me killing him with the direct damage that the ability on the attack provides.
Top 8
With no problems making top 8, my abilities as a player begin to get tested. I draft a relatively mediocre U/W deck that's bomb free unless you can count Legendary Cat Cleric Kemba, Kha Regent. I don't because well.. she's crap unless you get an equipment n her and since Darksteel Axe just doesn't come around that often, you're left putting thing like the poor man's lightning greaves or Barbed Battlegear (which is good but quite expensive and shrinks the toughness. Glinthawk Warden, Razor Hippogriff and Ghalma's Warden were my MVPs.
Match 1: Daniel
Well Daniel San had somehow been scooped into top 8 by players that might have had grievances about beating a pre-adolescent. Thankfully I'm a cold heartless bastard and only took a slight pang of guilt as I beat him into the ground for a second time. He did win the first game as I failed to play around a Sunblast Angel, which I then destroyed only to be put in dire stress by the 4/4 mythic angel which gave all his guys shroud. Game 2 and 3, I played as if he had Sunblast Angel in his hand at all times - stalling out, building board position and trying to draw cards wherever possible off Trigon of Thought.
Match 2: Greg
Second rematch of the day. First game I beat Greg down pretty quickly because he's mana screwed for a particular colour (I think he lacks the swamps to make it a fair game), meanwhile I'm beating with a metalcraft affected 2/4 and everything is getting hastened up by said poor man's Lightning Greaves. Game 2 is an epicly long one, where I make a bit of a mistake. Instead of recurring a Necropede with the Hippogriff, I chose to bring back the white spellbomb, intent on drawing some other gas. If I had chosen the Necropede I could have dealt with the 2/1 unblockable blue guy a lot sooner. If Greg had let the attack go through continuously then I think the poison would have got to him. Either way, I did have a dispense justice that I kept holding back, thinking that any time Greg would attack with his 2 Sky-Eel Schools which I would have had no answer to deal with, other than block and trade with one using the Hippogriff and get crushed by the other. Greg however is a very patient player and puts me into the range of the drain life spell. It was quite a close one however. At one point, Greg Volition Reignsed the Hippogriff only for me to play Glimmerpoint Stag to put it back into my control and recurr the white spell bomb again. I also have to Remove from Existence his Contagion Engine before he wrecks my board. At another point, Greg is put into a position where he has to draw two removal spells to get rid of Scrapdiver Serpent.
Amusingly, halfway through this game I rang work to let them know I would be an hour and a half late as I was "helping my mum with something important". Well helping my mum I wasn't, but I felt it was much more important to play magic than to collect glasses in a pub.
In the third game, I get pounded into the dirt with style. Greg has a better board position going into turn six and seals my fate with the Contagion Engine. To work.
Pre-release 2
So, I went to work between the hours of 9.30 PM and 2 Am, then I went out drinking to a friend's gaff, guzzling beer, vodka and jaagermeister until 7 am. Not to mention I took more than a few drags on a certain kind of cigarette. Again my deck was bonkers. This time I played R/B and had Carnifex Demon, Hoard-Smelter Dragon, Nim's Deathmantle, Myr Propogator and the R/B dual land. On top of this I had 3x Shatters, Darksteel Axe and 2x Plague Stingers. This deck "ripped it hardcore like pornoflick bitches". Unfortuantely, whilst my memories of Saturday's pre-release are quite murky, I remember even less of Sunday's due to the four hours sleep I had the night prior and the liver abuse I dished out on Saturday night.
Match 1: DJ Carson
I'm pretty sure I wrecked DJ in the first game by 3-for-1-ing him with Carnifex Demon's infest ability. Game 2, he was in a much better position than I was but his poison counter count was pretty high and swung with a Plague Stinger. In response to the attack, DJ popped the blue spell bomb to give a 4/2 Golem flight. Unfortunately I had top decked a shatter and I apologized for being such a jammy son of a gun and salvaging victory from the jaws of defeat.
Match 2: Matt Tweedy
I'm pretty sure it was Matt I play in this match. I think I win the first game by dishing out poison counters ridiculously fast - Plague Stinger turn 2, followed by Painsmith and Darksteel Axe on turn 3. Better lucky than good. Game 2 ends up being one of those games where half the field seems to disappear due to removal and trades. Matt ends up in what seems like a particularly strong position with a creature equipped to Argentum Armour. Unfortunately whilst he is able to attack with it once, I flash in Darksteel Sentinel as a blocker and Matt has decided to target my R/B dual land rather than a seemingly irrelevant Contagion Clasp. On the turn following, I swing back and put him from 7 to 4 then play Bleak Coven Vampires in the post combat mainphase, the Contagion Clasp, not seeming so irrelevant now ensures that Metalcraft is online and the life suck finishes him.
Match 3: Simon Carmichael
Simon is always a pleasure to play, whether you win, lose or draw. After a good battle destroy him with Hoard-Smelter Dragon and using its ability multiple times targetting my own Darksteel Axe to give it +4 attack. If it weren't for my excessive mana though, Simon had me dead the following turn. I'm largely mana screwed for Game 2, whilst Simon hits a great draw and I'm forced to mulligan down to 5 in Game 3, sealing my fate.
Match 4: Dean Convery
I can't remember this one other than the fact I won. I think it was probably the Darksteel Axe that did it in one game, whilst Nim's Deathmantle that did it in another. Mmm good equipment.
Match 5: Steve Madden
We ID as we both have made top 8 and I can't remember what happens after that. I think we play two games and I win them both, with the back of Nim's Deathmantle, the other by generating umpteen Myr Propogator tokens.
Top 8
Another mediocre draft deck, I try to go for a blue heavy, red light artifact deck that has a few metal craft guys along with a load of bounce and big toughness guys.
Game 1: Drew Carmichael
I know Drew held a big grudge for me for a while because I was an ass in a draft game a few months ago and did a big takeback. I tell him I owe him a big takeback, pretty much suggesting he can have one big dirty cheat. He tells me not to worry about it as it hasn't bothered him and truth be told, he doesn't need it. Despite rare drafting, his R/G deck savages me. I almost win Game one with mediocre artifact creatures and holding off the 4/4 phoenix by bouncing it but Drew plays Cerebral Eruption and hopes for the luck shot. If I reveal a land or any card with cost less than 3, I have the game. Unfortunately I reveal Scrapdiver Serpent, a 7 mana creature whilst I'm on 7. I lose the game due to an incredible spell of bad luck, but don't mind, I kind of felt Simon's Brother deserved to win this one in spectacular fashion as my come uppance for being an ass. What I did mind was how stupid I was in the second game. I was put on 8 poison counters by an Untamed Might targetting his 2/2 infect artifact creature but managed to stabilize by building board position with artifact creatures and the Manic Vandal Ox. I even Bonds of Quicksilvered the Corpse Cur. Unfortunately, I walked into Tel-Jilad Fallen twice. Once by attacking into it with artifact creatures and secondly by tapping out, when I should have held the ox back, thinking I could tap it with the Tumble Magnet.
AWFUL AWFUL PLAY!!!!
Now don't get me wrong, had this been M11 draft and his creature have been a Black Knight and the Tumble Magnet been a Blinding Mage I would not have made the same mistake, I just didn't play the original Mirrodin to even take into account what Protection from Artifacts actually entailed. Terrible excuse for a random act of stupidity I know but I'd been playing pretty much perfectly up until this point all day, despite being hammered before I went to bed.
What annoyed me even more though was that Drew wouldn't give me a third game. For that I will hold a grudge for as I deem it to be cowardly and unsportsmanlike.
I forget to bring my pre-release pile of cards with me and head off to the pub to join Trent, Chris and Kerr bear who are mid session due to the Empire selling pints of Coors for £2 during the football match. With Sunday being Trent's last night, it's only fair that we give him a good send off. After the Empire we head to the Pavillion to watch Niall's band, "Sweet Taste" rock everyone's socks off. This is probably the best band in Belfast as all four band members are extremely talented, produce catchy but great tunes that don't faff about with some guitar fret fappage like some supposed technical mastery that you'd hear from some teenage metal group.
Even with my two highly notable mistakes, I really enjoyed the whole weekend.
Trent, I hope you realize how much you will be missed and I hope you don't mind that we got you absolutely steamboats by making you drink the most evil looking concoctions ever to be poured into shot glasses. Haha, USA! USA! USA! I think we all might owe Niall a pint for getting you to the airport the next day, or maybe we shouldn't as it could have been part of the plan to get Trent to get on the plane!
Now this should be my last FONMP section for a while, my regular fans will be screaming out for some stories of comedy, drinking and schmoozing.
- Big Nasty
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
FONMP - GP Gothenburg, PT Amsterdam
So if you read the last post, you'll know I had a bit of a messy ten days in mainland Europe. Good times, bad times, I had them all. I didn't go into depth about my latest scrub outs though which a lot of you Magic players might want to read about. Kind of an extended why I suck at Magic. I dropped a hundred DCI points in one month.
Day One, GP
Opening the sealed pool at the start of the day was the most disheartening thing. Inferno Titan, 3x Chandra's Outrages, 1x Sun Titan and considerable red and white cards to back the big guys up. Sadly, I was going to have to pass all of this to someone else. Someone who didn't utilize all this goodness to the full effect.
The pool that I was passed wasn't all that bad though. I build a U/G/b deck with two Mind Controls, Garruk Wildspeaker, Garruk's Packleader, Cultivate, Doom Blade, Assasinate and a few other pieces of fat. I can't really complain except for the fact it's a little slow. There's only two two drops and at the three slot there's a couple of cloud elementals and an aether adept. Whilst this is often not an issue in many sealed matches, it meant in a couple I took a harsh early beating.
Starting the day with three byes meant that I was going to have a lot of time on my hands. With most GPs there is a considerable amount of time doing nothing, waiting in between rounds for the next one to start. When you start a day with three byes, you're pretty much doubling the waiting time. Thankfully though it was annonced over the intercom that there would be a drafting happy hour - half price draft, 75SWK (about £7) for a draft, not bad. I build a fairly good U/W rush deck with two scroll thieves, stormfront pegasi and a couple of inspired charges. Win the first two rounds pretty quickly but draw dead in the third round, getting beaten down with a turn four conundrum sphynx both games. I was happy enough coming second, if I could go a ratio of two wins for every loss during the day, I'd make day two.
First match: Sami Valkamaa
So what beats double mind control.dec? Double acidic slime. This guy was running a vicious G/B build that was able to recurr the two acidic slimes he was running. In the match this just wrecked me. I got two-for-one-d all over the show. Not so good. We played a couple of games after and I was able to win, making me a question a few of my plays during the games. At one point in time, I was on 8 life and chose to block his Acidic Slime with my Azure Drake. Never a great trade but one I thought I was going to have to make to stabilize a particularly bad one whenever he is able to Nature's Spiral the Slime back to his hand. Knocking out one of my few sources of black mana. Doom Blade and Assasinate were virtually dead draws.
Second Match: Peter Floderus
At the begining of this match, my deck seemed to be 39 cards. Rather than risk getting DQed, I brought this to a judge's attention and got rewarded with a game loss for tardiness. As it turned out, two of the cards were stuck together. Stupid crap sleeves. If my deck list was ever checked I was bound to get a gameloss anyway for failing to write down that I had a Doom Blade in the deck. I go on to win game one against his aggressive U/R deck that looks to pair Goblin Tunneler with Fiery Hellhound. On top of that Chandra's Spitfires, Triskillion, Prodigal Pyromancers meant he was inflicting a lot of damage quickly. I was able to win the first game by dropping a mainboard harbour serpent and putting the island walk creature to its full potential. I lose the second getting beat down by a whispersilked fiery hellhound, during this game I make a major play mistake - mind controlling a prodigal pyromancer. 5 mana doom blade. Great. We play the third game that would have been and I lose anyway. Dead draw vs solid draw. Ah well. The guy goes on to beat Saito and makes day two.
Third Match: David Stenberg
I can't remember the exact nature of this match except that I won it, finally playing OK for a change. I apologize for knocking out of contention and he wishes me the best of luck for the rest of the tournament.
Fourth match: Fredrik Anesten
This guy was a nice guy but he was a little bit rusty, being a year out of the game he opts to play G/R as he thought it'd be easier to play. His deck isn't too bad being quite aggressive and good enough to give him three wins. He can't deal with the two mind controls and my deck just seems to wreck him. I look at his pool and see that he has bonkers U/W cards, advising him his deck could have taken him a lot further. We play a few games with the proposed deck and he beats me. Not bad.
Fifth match: Jan H. Ruess
I get a text from DJ telling me that I better have won this match or he'll kick my ass. The reason why? Ruess is a Dutch pro and it would have been a great victory. Unfortunately Ruess is packing double Blinding Mage, multiple Assassinates and a Royal Assassin. My flaws of my deck building appear - if I had put in two Yavimaya Wurms rather than two Harbour Serpents I could have won this. I drop a Harbour Serpent and whispersilk cloak it, if I can draw an island, he's on a clock. Unfortunately for me, Jan scrys into Solemn Offering using his Crystal Ball. At this point there's nothing I can do to take it. At this point I'm on slight tilt, I keep a slow hand and get punished for it. A turn one Elite Vanguard gets in for twelve damage and he gets his blinding mage royal assassin combo once again. My day two dreams are over but I decide to play the last match anyway for rating, experience and prizes.
Final Match: Paul Hodgson
Paul is an English guy that I have a laugh with as soon as I start playing. His deck is the nuts though, despite the fact he's playing the colours of mana screw (W/B), he wrecks me with Baneslayer Angel, with Visera Seer tech to make my mind controls useless. Double Mind Rot is harsh too. No prizes for me.
Paul and I go drinking in a mediocre bar and here is where I decide to play the PTQ the next day.
PTQ
My sealed pool does the exact same thing as it did for the GP. Double titan. This time though it's Frost Titan and Grave Titan with the blue/black stuff to back it up. I end up having to pass it and get back an intreguing pool. I build U/W/B. It's not the best deck ever, I'm running six two drops - 2x Ajani's Pridemate, 2x Augury Owl, 2x White Knight. I try to get further value from the Pridemates by running Tireless Missionaries and Ajani's Mantra. Whilst this is pretty good in the odd match, it's kind of a case of one mediocre card plus one mediocre card = two mediocre cards. I raise questions about the way I've built this deck later on. There's a Chandra Nalaar and a Magma Phoenix in my red cards with some mediocre stuff to back it up.
Match one: Robert J. van Medevoort
This is a solid Dutch player, he's build a good G/W aggro deck and nails me with a Baneslayer Angel. Ah well, I'll take the loss and win out from there, I hope. Later on in the week I see Robert playing in the Pro Tour. I don't mind getting beat by a pro.
Match two: Laertis Vaso
Ok, I probably shouldn't say this but there's something I don't like about this Italian guy. It doesn't help the fact that he beats me by a narrow margin. I have him on two life and he top decks mind control to steal my Vengeful Archon. I even clone the Archon but he packs the removal to deal with it. Crap. Game two I play like a dick. With a Serra Angel out, I decide not to Clone it, with the intention of saving it for the Vengeful Archon I have in hand. During one attack I'm pretty sure he's had a Diminish in hand for about four turns yet I push the Angel forward anyway and he 2 for 1s himself by blocking with an Augury Owl. Worth it, I'd say. If I'd cloned the Angel I'm sure I would have won this game and he packs two mana leaks to wreck my day, the second one shutting down my chance of a Vengeful Archon win.
I win Match three and four but I can't remember for the life of me how I did. I can't remember who I played or what they played. I'd say the euphoria from actually winning a few games wrecked my short term memory.
Match five: Santi Pettersson
I really shouldn't have lost this one but due to bad plays I do. After taking a vicious pounding from an Awakener Druid'd forest and some other green/red/white aggro cards, I manage to stabilize with a Vengeful Archon and Ajani's Mantra. After some nice combat trades and this guy failing to read Archon properly I'm in a decent position. If I'd cloned the archon, then attacked I would have won without doubt. Unfortunately he Condems the Archon. I scoop without playing the game out, half by accident, half because I'm on tilt. I get beat down Game two as well, probably due to my own damn mistakes.
Match six: Jake Guld
No chance of making top 8, I'm playing to get some prizes. Jake is an American fellow with a very odd U/R deck odd because he uses Reverberate in an odd way, copying his own Ingenuity. Triskillion + Chandra's Spitfire wreck me in one game, I have no idea how he wins in the other.
Match seven: Jan Von Ortloff
The guy gets mana screwed both games. I don't. 'Nuff said.
Match eight: Oliver Biessmann
This is a really well fought match and the guy holds me off for several turns in the second game by bluffing me into thinking he's got removal in his hand when the one card turns out to be a White Knight. This U/W match up contains a lot of Aerial Battles but is settled quite firmly by my Air Servant.
Match nine: Pontus Johansson
This is a very odd match. I wreck him with Vengeant Archon in game one and he returns the favour with Overwhelming Stampede game two. Judges get called on our third game several times, as he naturalizes my Ajani's Mantra during my upkeep and questions why I still get to gain life, failing to understand the begining of up keep trigger. Then the way clone works was called into question, I go to clone my serra angel and he doom blades it, I clone greater basilisk instead. I should have cast clone and declared the target on resolution but I didn't because I'm a dick. He thinks the clone should have fizzled. The judges learn. We also have a question about number of cards drawn so judges have to piece it together. I'm pretty sure I was still right and hadn't drawn for one turn but manage to win anyway. By the time the judge thing is settled, Pontus and I aren't too happy, it took them far too long to make their decisions and didn't act in a very professional manner. No real point complaining.
With a record of 5-4 I scrape into prizes and pick up three boosters. After almost twelve hours work it's kind of stupid but I established my "warrior's spirit". Rather than bitching and moaning, feeling sorry for myself like I did at national's qualifiers, I force myself to learn from every experience and keep on playing even if the payout is small.
I play an unsanctioned "chicken draft" with my Swedish friend, a kooky old English guy and six Serbian guys. The Serbian guys are great fun and I end up drafting the nuts. Red/white with Gladiator Cyclops, Brittle Effigy, Chandra Nalaar, Vengeful Archon. The commons/uncommons were great too, Assault Griffins, Infantry Veterans, Elite Vanguard, mmm aggressive.
I play a Generic GPT in Amsterdam and scrub, popping and passing another ridiculous sealed pool. With an aggressive R/W deck I play like an absolute hero in Match One, get beat by a fast and good U/W deck and something else. I got a bye then I got beat by a girl. I had her on two life but she top decks Inferno Titan, wrecks my board and prevents me from ever winning. Game two I side in celestial purge to take out the Inferno Titan. She follows up the Inferno Titan with a Sun Titan. That's just.. great. That was it for my big tournaments in Europe. I didn't want to pop a sealed pool for quite some time. I didn't want to get beat by the sealed pool that I should have been allowed to play ever again.
So I play one last draft on the Sunday and take my small victories. Drafting U/B, I somehow manage to rare draft two dual lands and a Primeval Titan, instantly making my money back. My slightly creature shy but still fairly impressive deck makes it to second place.
Overall I was happy enough playing the game over the ten days. I'm not happy with my performance but I think I was a little drained on the day of the GP by lack of sleep and a slight nervousness. I'll be back though and I'll drag my rating up whether it has to go up kicking and screaming.
So if you read the last post, you'll know I had a bit of a messy ten days in mainland Europe. Good times, bad times, I had them all. I didn't go into depth about my latest scrub outs though which a lot of you Magic players might want to read about. Kind of an extended why I suck at Magic. I dropped a hundred DCI points in one month.
Day One, GP
Opening the sealed pool at the start of the day was the most disheartening thing. Inferno Titan, 3x Chandra's Outrages, 1x Sun Titan and considerable red and white cards to back the big guys up. Sadly, I was going to have to pass all of this to someone else. Someone who didn't utilize all this goodness to the full effect.
The pool that I was passed wasn't all that bad though. I build a U/G/b deck with two Mind Controls, Garruk Wildspeaker, Garruk's Packleader, Cultivate, Doom Blade, Assasinate and a few other pieces of fat. I can't really complain except for the fact it's a little slow. There's only two two drops and at the three slot there's a couple of cloud elementals and an aether adept. Whilst this is often not an issue in many sealed matches, it meant in a couple I took a harsh early beating.
Starting the day with three byes meant that I was going to have a lot of time on my hands. With most GPs there is a considerable amount of time doing nothing, waiting in between rounds for the next one to start. When you start a day with three byes, you're pretty much doubling the waiting time. Thankfully though it was annonced over the intercom that there would be a drafting happy hour - half price draft, 75SWK (about £7) for a draft, not bad. I build a fairly good U/W rush deck with two scroll thieves, stormfront pegasi and a couple of inspired charges. Win the first two rounds pretty quickly but draw dead in the third round, getting beaten down with a turn four conundrum sphynx both games. I was happy enough coming second, if I could go a ratio of two wins for every loss during the day, I'd make day two.
First match: Sami Valkamaa
So what beats double mind control.dec? Double acidic slime. This guy was running a vicious G/B build that was able to recurr the two acidic slimes he was running. In the match this just wrecked me. I got two-for-one-d all over the show. Not so good. We played a couple of games after and I was able to win, making me a question a few of my plays during the games. At one point in time, I was on 8 life and chose to block his Acidic Slime with my Azure Drake. Never a great trade but one I thought I was going to have to make to stabilize a particularly bad one whenever he is able to Nature's Spiral the Slime back to his hand. Knocking out one of my few sources of black mana. Doom Blade and Assasinate were virtually dead draws.
Second Match: Peter Floderus
At the begining of this match, my deck seemed to be 39 cards. Rather than risk getting DQed, I brought this to a judge's attention and got rewarded with a game loss for tardiness. As it turned out, two of the cards were stuck together. Stupid crap sleeves. If my deck list was ever checked I was bound to get a gameloss anyway for failing to write down that I had a Doom Blade in the deck. I go on to win game one against his aggressive U/R deck that looks to pair Goblin Tunneler with Fiery Hellhound. On top of that Chandra's Spitfires, Triskillion, Prodigal Pyromancers meant he was inflicting a lot of damage quickly. I was able to win the first game by dropping a mainboard harbour serpent and putting the island walk creature to its full potential. I lose the second getting beat down by a whispersilked fiery hellhound, during this game I make a major play mistake - mind controlling a prodigal pyromancer. 5 mana doom blade. Great. We play the third game that would have been and I lose anyway. Dead draw vs solid draw. Ah well. The guy goes on to beat Saito and makes day two.
Third Match: David Stenberg
I can't remember the exact nature of this match except that I won it, finally playing OK for a change. I apologize for knocking out of contention and he wishes me the best of luck for the rest of the tournament.
Fourth match: Fredrik Anesten
This guy was a nice guy but he was a little bit rusty, being a year out of the game he opts to play G/R as he thought it'd be easier to play. His deck isn't too bad being quite aggressive and good enough to give him three wins. He can't deal with the two mind controls and my deck just seems to wreck him. I look at his pool and see that he has bonkers U/W cards, advising him his deck could have taken him a lot further. We play a few games with the proposed deck and he beats me. Not bad.
Fifth match: Jan H. Ruess
I get a text from DJ telling me that I better have won this match or he'll kick my ass. The reason why? Ruess is a Dutch pro and it would have been a great victory. Unfortunately Ruess is packing double Blinding Mage, multiple Assassinates and a Royal Assassin. My flaws of my deck building appear - if I had put in two Yavimaya Wurms rather than two Harbour Serpents I could have won this. I drop a Harbour Serpent and whispersilk cloak it, if I can draw an island, he's on a clock. Unfortunately for me, Jan scrys into Solemn Offering using his Crystal Ball. At this point there's nothing I can do to take it. At this point I'm on slight tilt, I keep a slow hand and get punished for it. A turn one Elite Vanguard gets in for twelve damage and he gets his blinding mage royal assassin combo once again. My day two dreams are over but I decide to play the last match anyway for rating, experience and prizes.
Final Match: Paul Hodgson
Paul is an English guy that I have a laugh with as soon as I start playing. His deck is the nuts though, despite the fact he's playing the colours of mana screw (W/B), he wrecks me with Baneslayer Angel, with Visera Seer tech to make my mind controls useless. Double Mind Rot is harsh too. No prizes for me.
Paul and I go drinking in a mediocre bar and here is where I decide to play the PTQ the next day.
PTQ
My sealed pool does the exact same thing as it did for the GP. Double titan. This time though it's Frost Titan and Grave Titan with the blue/black stuff to back it up. I end up having to pass it and get back an intreguing pool. I build U/W/B. It's not the best deck ever, I'm running six two drops - 2x Ajani's Pridemate, 2x Augury Owl, 2x White Knight. I try to get further value from the Pridemates by running Tireless Missionaries and Ajani's Mantra. Whilst this is pretty good in the odd match, it's kind of a case of one mediocre card plus one mediocre card = two mediocre cards. I raise questions about the way I've built this deck later on. There's a Chandra Nalaar and a Magma Phoenix in my red cards with some mediocre stuff to back it up.
Match one: Robert J. van Medevoort
This is a solid Dutch player, he's build a good G/W aggro deck and nails me with a Baneslayer Angel. Ah well, I'll take the loss and win out from there, I hope. Later on in the week I see Robert playing in the Pro Tour. I don't mind getting beat by a pro.
Match two: Laertis Vaso
Ok, I probably shouldn't say this but there's something I don't like about this Italian guy. It doesn't help the fact that he beats me by a narrow margin. I have him on two life and he top decks mind control to steal my Vengeful Archon. I even clone the Archon but he packs the removal to deal with it. Crap. Game two I play like a dick. With a Serra Angel out, I decide not to Clone it, with the intention of saving it for the Vengeful Archon I have in hand. During one attack I'm pretty sure he's had a Diminish in hand for about four turns yet I push the Angel forward anyway and he 2 for 1s himself by blocking with an Augury Owl. Worth it, I'd say. If I'd cloned the Angel I'm sure I would have won this game and he packs two mana leaks to wreck my day, the second one shutting down my chance of a Vengeful Archon win.
I win Match three and four but I can't remember for the life of me how I did. I can't remember who I played or what they played. I'd say the euphoria from actually winning a few games wrecked my short term memory.
Match five: Santi Pettersson
I really shouldn't have lost this one but due to bad plays I do. After taking a vicious pounding from an Awakener Druid'd forest and some other green/red/white aggro cards, I manage to stabilize with a Vengeful Archon and Ajani's Mantra. After some nice combat trades and this guy failing to read Archon properly I'm in a decent position. If I'd cloned the archon, then attacked I would have won without doubt. Unfortunately he Condems the Archon. I scoop without playing the game out, half by accident, half because I'm on tilt. I get beat down Game two as well, probably due to my own damn mistakes.
Match six: Jake Guld
No chance of making top 8, I'm playing to get some prizes. Jake is an American fellow with a very odd U/R deck odd because he uses Reverberate in an odd way, copying his own Ingenuity. Triskillion + Chandra's Spitfire wreck me in one game, I have no idea how he wins in the other.
Match seven: Jan Von Ortloff
The guy gets mana screwed both games. I don't. 'Nuff said.
Match eight: Oliver Biessmann
This is a really well fought match and the guy holds me off for several turns in the second game by bluffing me into thinking he's got removal in his hand when the one card turns out to be a White Knight. This U/W match up contains a lot of Aerial Battles but is settled quite firmly by my Air Servant.
Match nine: Pontus Johansson
This is a very odd match. I wreck him with Vengeant Archon in game one and he returns the favour with Overwhelming Stampede game two. Judges get called on our third game several times, as he naturalizes my Ajani's Mantra during my upkeep and questions why I still get to gain life, failing to understand the begining of up keep trigger. Then the way clone works was called into question, I go to clone my serra angel and he doom blades it, I clone greater basilisk instead. I should have cast clone and declared the target on resolution but I didn't because I'm a dick. He thinks the clone should have fizzled. The judges learn. We also have a question about number of cards drawn so judges have to piece it together. I'm pretty sure I was still right and hadn't drawn for one turn but manage to win anyway. By the time the judge thing is settled, Pontus and I aren't too happy, it took them far too long to make their decisions and didn't act in a very professional manner. No real point complaining.
With a record of 5-4 I scrape into prizes and pick up three boosters. After almost twelve hours work it's kind of stupid but I established my "warrior's spirit". Rather than bitching and moaning, feeling sorry for myself like I did at national's qualifiers, I force myself to learn from every experience and keep on playing even if the payout is small.
I play an unsanctioned "chicken draft" with my Swedish friend, a kooky old English guy and six Serbian guys. The Serbian guys are great fun and I end up drafting the nuts. Red/white with Gladiator Cyclops, Brittle Effigy, Chandra Nalaar, Vengeful Archon. The commons/uncommons were great too, Assault Griffins, Infantry Veterans, Elite Vanguard, mmm aggressive.
I play a Generic GPT in Amsterdam and scrub, popping and passing another ridiculous sealed pool. With an aggressive R/W deck I play like an absolute hero in Match One, get beat by a fast and good U/W deck and something else. I got a bye then I got beat by a girl. I had her on two life but she top decks Inferno Titan, wrecks my board and prevents me from ever winning. Game two I side in celestial purge to take out the Inferno Titan. She follows up the Inferno Titan with a Sun Titan. That's just.. great. That was it for my big tournaments in Europe. I didn't want to pop a sealed pool for quite some time. I didn't want to get beat by the sealed pool that I should have been allowed to play ever again.
So I play one last draft on the Sunday and take my small victories. Drafting U/B, I somehow manage to rare draft two dual lands and a Primeval Titan, instantly making my money back. My slightly creature shy but still fairly impressive deck makes it to second place.
Overall I was happy enough playing the game over the ten days. I'm not happy with my performance but I think I was a little drained on the day of the GP by lack of sleep and a slight nervousness. I'll be back though and I'll drag my rating up whether it has to go up kicking and screaming.
Wednesday, September 08, 2010
A "Magic" Adventure - Legal Disclaimer: This is a fictional account of what happened. I never broke any law.
As some of you may know I just spent the last ten days in mainland Europe. I originally intended to spend much of my time playing Magic the Gathering but there were more than a few distractions in the end. This post is going to chronicle some of the finer elements of my journey and is in no way a "Fuck off non-magic player" section, that will come at later date.
Over the last few weeks I've had very few days off boozing like an alcoholic. It would appear that I'm not very good at going for "just one drink". "Just a couple" often ends up turning into a binge. Two Thursdays ago I decided to catch up with a friend for a couple of drinks before she went off to 2manyDJs, then I went to play some cards, intending to get some practice in. Then I went to catch up with a few more friends for a few more drinks, then a few more friends for a few more drinks then another friend for another few drinks. Basically it ended up like a one man pub crawl but knowing that I'd have buddies at each venue. It was no surprise then that I spent much of Friday with a hangover. Now hangovers as I'm sure you may be aware don't help too much when one has to do some flying. Especially if you have the breed of hangover that I have - one of those ones that start out fine then develop into a metric ball ache of badness. It meant I could sleep awkwardly on the plane between Belfast and London, then sit in a gelatinous like state in Stanstead before graduating on to the London to Gothenburg plane. The problem with that hangover was that I was carrying something on me that I really shouldn't have.
During the queue for security in Belfast city airport, I discovered a tiny bag of grass in my inside jean pocket. Just enough for a joint, nothing that I haven't been able to get through international airport security before and I figured, it was too late to turn out of the queue without looking deeply suspicious. I put all my belongings in the box, dumped my bag on the scanner belt and walked through the detector. *BEEP*
It's cool. I cracked a joke about swallowing a large lump of metal when I was a kid to the middle aged security guard. He laughed and explained that it was a random stop and search but my Transformers T-shirt was very cool and that he is a big fan of the movies. I agreed with this and put my arms out for the pat down. Nothing found. With one airport down, I figured the other two would be grand. Stanstead largely was. The last time that I had been through it my former friend set off a minor alert by forgetting that his "oregano" grinder was still in his luggage. It was only when I got to Gothenburg that it became a problem. The first thing that I saw soon when I got past the passport check was a sniffer dog Labrador. That was one smart looking labrador too, waiting for me with it's healthy golden fur and its bored looking trainers. I panic slightly, with the hangover in full swing, I'm just a tad paranoid. Nah fuck that, I'm sweating like a bitch in heat. I dive into the queue for the toilets which happen to be one cubicle unisex units, which is a long wait and a long time to look on edge and shifty right in front of the labradors and the Custom Agents. I finally get into the toilet, whip my dick out and start pissing, meanwhile unravelling the crap in my pocket to get the weed out and put it in the sanitary towel dispensary bin. Except I completely failed to do this, instead I dropped the weed in the toilet whilst I'm mid flow and have to reach in to swipe the baggie from the piss chamber before I can dispose of it. I washed my hands with a little extra soap and left to leave the airport.
"Excuse me sir, can you come with us?"
Hearing those words almost made me shit a brick. Nay, a high rise Singapore appartment complex. Where they allowed to put security cameras in toilets? I know it was an airport and all but surely we should be allowed some privacy.
I take a long drawn out but silent inhale through my nostrils to keep my composure and agree to the custom agent's demand. I'm asked about my reason for being in Sweden and they search my bag to verify whether or not I'm telling the truth. The cards confirm my reasons so they ask me for my passport. I check a few pockets and my mind begins to boggle. I'm now searching my entire inventory just for my passport. I run back into the toilet and grab it off the hand dryer.
"It was a good thing we stopped you sir, wasn't it?"
I nod and agree with a beaming smile and they let me go on my way.
I leave the airport, narrowly missing the bus into city centre. After that narrow escape I'm a little unphased, produce my book and wait for the next one.
"I think you have missed the last bus. Where are you going?"
I look up and it's the same two female custom agents that stopped me.
"City centre."
"Oh, that's where we are going, we can give you a lift into town"
I smile and hurry over to the car. They put the dog in the boot and I hop into the back seat. Minus one joint = plus one free taxi ride. Small fucking victories my friend.
When I get into town I have a little bit of difficulty navigating the way to my friend's house. Adam, who I've got to say is a fairly brave individual for putting up a random magic player who he'd only ever spoke to a couple of times on the phone after playing him at Magic over the internet gives me a perfectly good set of directions and I end up going the wrong direction. Eventually I rectify this issue and get there just in time to watch some channelfireball, play some proxied vintage magic (this is where the cards in the deck are worth hundreds, if not thousands of dollars so you print off copies of the cards and stick the picture to already existing, not as expensive cards), drink some Lipton ice tea and go to sleep. We head to the venue and have a long day of magic to get through.
Long story cut short with Magic (I'll explain what I got up to in a later post for the die hard followers of my Magic articles), I end up scrubbing out but making a few friends in the process. I gain a Serbian fan club over the two days and end up going drinking with a new found English friend. This generally just meant about four pints in a rather crap Gothenburg bar. I'm not really sure what proper Gothenburg night life is like but this place was a mediocre bar in terms of venue, speed of service and music played. On top of that we were supposed to pay 40 Swedish kroner (about £3.50) to get in but the guy at the door didn't have the change for a 50 kroner note so let me in anyway. I knock it on the head early as I don't really want to keep on spending money in a venue with a ratio of about 8 guys to 1 girl. Honestly we were both positive the place wasn't a Gay bar even with it's dumb name: Charlie's Anglars. So I knock it on the head and go to bed early so I can get up and play magic the next day. Sunday night I'm treated to a traditional Swedish meal by Adam's father of succulent roast pork and a vegetable mix that seems to comprise of carrot and turnip.
At this point in time, I'm reluctant to head home. Whilst I had a flight booked to return home on Monday, I wouldn't actually get home until about eight o'clock in the evening. Why bother flying back to Belfast only to have to fly out to Amsterdam on Thursday. It wasn't like I had anything important to do on Tuesday or Wednesday. I sit until about three o'clock in the morning on Adam's computer researching the alternatives to going home whilst leaving him in his room to sex talk his girlfriend over the phone in both Swedish and Spanish. After trying in vain to find alternatives to going home that don’t cost £140 I hit the hay. Despite setting an alarm, I do one of those half asleep “wake up and acknowledge I have to get up for something but chose to sleep in anyway” moments. When I’m finally up for real it’s 09:30 AM and I have half an hour to get from Adam’s house to the airport before check in closes. The hell I’m risking £30 for a taxi that might not even make it on time.
Adam and I book my next flight. Copenhagen to Amsterdam. We head into town and grab some sushi before I take the train from Sweden to Denmark and Adam heads to college.
The train between Goteborg and Copenhagen takes about four hours but it has to be done on a sunny day. Whilst admittedly I missed hours of sunshine on that journey and ended up getting into Denmark when it was pissing with rain, I got to see the beautiful Swedish countryside as it was coated in rays of gold.
When I got there, I got to catch up with Daniel, Josephine and Martin, smoke a joint and head off to make dinner. I spent the next two days with Martin, Jackob and Sigurd schmoking and drinking, getting my liver prepared for what was to be a tame by comparison Amsterdam.
This was genuinely an awesome experience, Freetown Christiania is the hippy commune I’ve spoke about in previous blogs that is as phenomenal the umpteenth time you visit it as it is the first time you visit it. Danish pilsner is as great as ever.
After a quick flight that I spent trying to chat up some average looking Dutch girl beside me whilst being fucked off my face on beer and weed, I rocked into Amsterdam, grabbed a slice of pizza and took the train into city centre. This bit all went pretty smoothly. I bought some blueberry in some average looking coffee shop, hit a bong then traversed the streets to the Italian restaurant where the Magic players resided. We topped up our beer levels then head off to see a sex show. This is one of those things that you know in your heart you will only ever do once.
I mean it’s 30 euros for two crap drinks and a chance to watch grown men go up on stage and eat banana’s out of a fat girl’s flange. Except it’s hilarious when its your friends that are those eating the banana out of that girl’s flange. Better still is whenever your mate has his shirt off and he’s lying on the stage with the girl writing ‘Bad boy’ using a pen protruding from her flaps. That is something that you have to see to believe.
Arguably the best thing about that sex show was that it gave me the opportunity for the most perfect one-liner. Right in the “live sex” portion of the show, the woman lay on her back with her legs around his head so he could have tongue to twat reach. Queue UFC reference
“And she catches him with a triangle choke hold! IT IS AAAAAAAAAAAAAALLLLLLLL OVVVVVVVVVVVEEEEEEEEEERRRRRR!”
After this we walked home, drinking tuborg and smoking joints along the way.
Thursday was largely spent being hung over, chomping on the breakfast buffet and having a nap. What followed was a spot of magic and a trip into town, drinking in a few bars. These were generally pretty sweet, I had a good eye for ones we could just chill out and grab a few pints of Bavaria. We even hit up a shisha bar with the fittest Scottish barmaid I’ve seen in quite some time. Whilst this was all cool and all, we kind of hit a little bit of a hurdle: most of the bars seemed to close at 1 and without knowledge of where the night clubs are, it’s quite easy to get distracted and put off partying for another night. You kind of end up just going back and guzzling the remainder of the beers purchased from the local supermarket. That’s kind of what happened for the remainder of our trip, we spent a lot of time getting pie-eyed in hotel rooms and seeing some bars. If not it was getting absolutely wankered at our hostel’s happy hour. 2 for 1 on pints of lager whilst we’re playing the best drunken foosball or mental magic we’ve ever engaged in.
A couple of the other guys had just that idea, taking a free tour of the zottay brewery, an 8% beer that tasted like it was about four. Not much to my liking, it kind of had a musty taste to it and when you’re filled with a hangover and ribs, you’re not going to be able to handle much in the way of musty beer.
We also went on the “Heiniken experience”, which wasn’t actually a tour of the brewery but a mueseum of Heiniken/a building of advertisement for the company. Whilst the people working here were pretty cool, I’d recommend hoofing a big bong before you even step foot in this building as fifteen Euros will only get you two free pints of Heiniken and that’s provided you answer the questions of the fit bar maids correctly. Hint: the head on Heiniken is designed to stop oxygen from getting and CO2 from getting out.
After the Heiniken trip, we had one little Sweedish problem. Outside the hostel, four of us were playing a card game called "9 Card Brag", basically a quick and easy to gamble on card game, that doesn't require any major skill. About half way through the game, a Swedish guy came and asked us about what we were playing. He seemed friendly enough but then he started into a rant about a Swedish card game that we should have been playing.
"Yes, it is called nigger and president"
Now I'd find this awkward at the best of times but there was a crowd of African students gathered by the picnic tables around us. Niall quite rightly suggested he didn't use that word and the guy dropped it. About three minutes later, he brings it up again.
"Yes, card game Nigger and President"
"Dude.."
"Yes, I know but I did not give the name to the game, it is a very popular game in Sweden, it is funny because the nigger can be the president at the same time.."
At this point we froze him out of our conversation. I'm inclined to give the guy the benefit of the doubt and say that the guy wasn't racist but I wasn't prepared to deal with his stupidity. You don't loudly say a word that is discriminatory around the group it is likely to offend.
My tolerance to stupidity can be pretty low.
To soothe the munchies, I would recommend all you can eat ribs for twelve euro, where you can get a plate “ribbed for your pleasure”. I can’t remember the name of the place in town that did this deal but it was an Argentinan restraunt. The service could have been a little better but I wasn’t going to kick up too much of a fuss when I was stuffing myself with their ribs. Pretty good I have to say.
Sunday though was the God of all days. After playing Magic semi-successfully I joined the other eleven Northern Irish magic players for the best activity known to man: boating on Amsterdam canals. For three hours we bombed around on motor boats barbequing, drinking beer and smoking thick pre-rolled joints. I think even the people in Amsterdam were slightly confused to see us gnashing huge chunks of chicken clean off the bone that was fresh cooked on foil instant barbeques. There were some hilarious moments on that boating expedition too. Take for instance the “Zattay drop” a competition where contestants have to set a bottle of zattay perfectly upright on an Amsterdam houseboat for maximum points or trying to schmooze attractive women who were in boats along side us. The boat rental guys didn’t look too happy with us when we returned the boats with a live and smoking barbeque still going.
Sadly whilst we were all finally in the mood for going out and sleazing on some Dutch girls, the old “no where is open past 1” conundrum really applies on a Sunday. We made up for the problem by chomping our way through some seriously good kebabs and I collapsed in my half assed made hostel bed covered in beer sweat.
I want to thank everyone who made this trip what it was, in particular, Adam for letting me stay in his beautiful family home, Martin for letting me stay in his gaff. Dog and Gar get a shout out for organizing the boat trip.
Ratings (out of 5)
Swedish hospitality: *****
Danish Hospitality: *****
Scrubbing out at magic: *** (At least I learned a few things and made a few friends)
Christiania: ****
Heiniken Experience: **
Eating ribs: ***
Beer: *****
Renting boats: ***********************************************************
Some idiot outside a hostel:
As some of you may know I just spent the last ten days in mainland Europe. I originally intended to spend much of my time playing Magic the Gathering but there were more than a few distractions in the end. This post is going to chronicle some of the finer elements of my journey and is in no way a "Fuck off non-magic player" section, that will come at later date.
Over the last few weeks I've had very few days off boozing like an alcoholic. It would appear that I'm not very good at going for "just one drink". "Just a couple" often ends up turning into a binge. Two Thursdays ago I decided to catch up with a friend for a couple of drinks before she went off to 2manyDJs, then I went to play some cards, intending to get some practice in. Then I went to catch up with a few more friends for a few more drinks, then a few more friends for a few more drinks then another friend for another few drinks. Basically it ended up like a one man pub crawl but knowing that I'd have buddies at each venue. It was no surprise then that I spent much of Friday with a hangover. Now hangovers as I'm sure you may be aware don't help too much when one has to do some flying. Especially if you have the breed of hangover that I have - one of those ones that start out fine then develop into a metric ball ache of badness. It meant I could sleep awkwardly on the plane between Belfast and London, then sit in a gelatinous like state in Stanstead before graduating on to the London to Gothenburg plane. The problem with that hangover was that I was carrying something on me that I really shouldn't have.
During the queue for security in Belfast city airport, I discovered a tiny bag of grass in my inside jean pocket. Just enough for a joint, nothing that I haven't been able to get through international airport security before and I figured, it was too late to turn out of the queue without looking deeply suspicious. I put all my belongings in the box, dumped my bag on the scanner belt and walked through the detector. *BEEP*
It's cool. I cracked a joke about swallowing a large lump of metal when I was a kid to the middle aged security guard. He laughed and explained that it was a random stop and search but my Transformers T-shirt was very cool and that he is a big fan of the movies. I agreed with this and put my arms out for the pat down. Nothing found. With one airport down, I figured the other two would be grand. Stanstead largely was. The last time that I had been through it my former friend set off a minor alert by forgetting that his "oregano" grinder was still in his luggage. It was only when I got to Gothenburg that it became a problem. The first thing that I saw soon when I got past the passport check was a sniffer dog Labrador. That was one smart looking labrador too, waiting for me with it's healthy golden fur and its bored looking trainers. I panic slightly, with the hangover in full swing, I'm just a tad paranoid. Nah fuck that, I'm sweating like a bitch in heat. I dive into the queue for the toilets which happen to be one cubicle unisex units, which is a long wait and a long time to look on edge and shifty right in front of the labradors and the Custom Agents. I finally get into the toilet, whip my dick out and start pissing, meanwhile unravelling the crap in my pocket to get the weed out and put it in the sanitary towel dispensary bin. Except I completely failed to do this, instead I dropped the weed in the toilet whilst I'm mid flow and have to reach in to swipe the baggie from the piss chamber before I can dispose of it. I washed my hands with a little extra soap and left to leave the airport.
"Excuse me sir, can you come with us?"
Hearing those words almost made me shit a brick. Nay, a high rise Singapore appartment complex. Where they allowed to put security cameras in toilets? I know it was an airport and all but surely we should be allowed some privacy.
I take a long drawn out but silent inhale through my nostrils to keep my composure and agree to the custom agent's demand. I'm asked about my reason for being in Sweden and they search my bag to verify whether or not I'm telling the truth. The cards confirm my reasons so they ask me for my passport. I check a few pockets and my mind begins to boggle. I'm now searching my entire inventory just for my passport. I run back into the toilet and grab it off the hand dryer.
"It was a good thing we stopped you sir, wasn't it?"
I nod and agree with a beaming smile and they let me go on my way.
I leave the airport, narrowly missing the bus into city centre. After that narrow escape I'm a little unphased, produce my book and wait for the next one.
"I think you have missed the last bus. Where are you going?"
I look up and it's the same two female custom agents that stopped me.
"City centre."
"Oh, that's where we are going, we can give you a lift into town"
I smile and hurry over to the car. They put the dog in the boot and I hop into the back seat. Minus one joint = plus one free taxi ride. Small fucking victories my friend.
When I get into town I have a little bit of difficulty navigating the way to my friend's house. Adam, who I've got to say is a fairly brave individual for putting up a random magic player who he'd only ever spoke to a couple of times on the phone after playing him at Magic over the internet gives me a perfectly good set of directions and I end up going the wrong direction. Eventually I rectify this issue and get there just in time to watch some channelfireball, play some proxied vintage magic (this is where the cards in the deck are worth hundreds, if not thousands of dollars so you print off copies of the cards and stick the picture to already existing, not as expensive cards), drink some Lipton ice tea and go to sleep. We head to the venue and have a long day of magic to get through.
Long story cut short with Magic (I'll explain what I got up to in a later post for the die hard followers of my Magic articles), I end up scrubbing out but making a few friends in the process. I gain a Serbian fan club over the two days and end up going drinking with a new found English friend. This generally just meant about four pints in a rather crap Gothenburg bar. I'm not really sure what proper Gothenburg night life is like but this place was a mediocre bar in terms of venue, speed of service and music played. On top of that we were supposed to pay 40 Swedish kroner (about £3.50) to get in but the guy at the door didn't have the change for a 50 kroner note so let me in anyway. I knock it on the head early as I don't really want to keep on spending money in a venue with a ratio of about 8 guys to 1 girl. Honestly we were both positive the place wasn't a Gay bar even with it's dumb name: Charlie's Anglars. So I knock it on the head and go to bed early so I can get up and play magic the next day. Sunday night I'm treated to a traditional Swedish meal by Adam's father of succulent roast pork and a vegetable mix that seems to comprise of carrot and turnip.
At this point in time, I'm reluctant to head home. Whilst I had a flight booked to return home on Monday, I wouldn't actually get home until about eight o'clock in the evening. Why bother flying back to Belfast only to have to fly out to Amsterdam on Thursday. It wasn't like I had anything important to do on Tuesday or Wednesday. I sit until about three o'clock in the morning on Adam's computer researching the alternatives to going home whilst leaving him in his room to sex talk his girlfriend over the phone in both Swedish and Spanish. After trying in vain to find alternatives to going home that don’t cost £140 I hit the hay. Despite setting an alarm, I do one of those half asleep “wake up and acknowledge I have to get up for something but chose to sleep in anyway” moments. When I’m finally up for real it’s 09:30 AM and I have half an hour to get from Adam’s house to the airport before check in closes. The hell I’m risking £30 for a taxi that might not even make it on time.
Adam and I book my next flight. Copenhagen to Amsterdam. We head into town and grab some sushi before I take the train from Sweden to Denmark and Adam heads to college.
The train between Goteborg and Copenhagen takes about four hours but it has to be done on a sunny day. Whilst admittedly I missed hours of sunshine on that journey and ended up getting into Denmark when it was pissing with rain, I got to see the beautiful Swedish countryside as it was coated in rays of gold.
When I got there, I got to catch up with Daniel, Josephine and Martin, smoke a joint and head off to make dinner. I spent the next two days with Martin, Jackob and Sigurd schmoking and drinking, getting my liver prepared for what was to be a tame by comparison Amsterdam.
This was genuinely an awesome experience, Freetown Christiania is the hippy commune I’ve spoke about in previous blogs that is as phenomenal the umpteenth time you visit it as it is the first time you visit it. Danish pilsner is as great as ever.
After a quick flight that I spent trying to chat up some average looking Dutch girl beside me whilst being fucked off my face on beer and weed, I rocked into Amsterdam, grabbed a slice of pizza and took the train into city centre. This bit all went pretty smoothly. I bought some blueberry in some average looking coffee shop, hit a bong then traversed the streets to the Italian restaurant where the Magic players resided. We topped up our beer levels then head off to see a sex show. This is one of those things that you know in your heart you will only ever do once.
I mean it’s 30 euros for two crap drinks and a chance to watch grown men go up on stage and eat banana’s out of a fat girl’s flange. Except it’s hilarious when its your friends that are those eating the banana out of that girl’s flange. Better still is whenever your mate has his shirt off and he’s lying on the stage with the girl writing ‘Bad boy’ using a pen protruding from her flaps. That is something that you have to see to believe.
Arguably the best thing about that sex show was that it gave me the opportunity for the most perfect one-liner. Right in the “live sex” portion of the show, the woman lay on her back with her legs around his head so he could have tongue to twat reach. Queue UFC reference
“And she catches him with a triangle choke hold! IT IS AAAAAAAAAAAAAALLLLLLLL OVVVVVVVVVVVEEEEEEEEEERRRRRR!”
After this we walked home, drinking tuborg and smoking joints along the way.
Thursday was largely spent being hung over, chomping on the breakfast buffet and having a nap. What followed was a spot of magic and a trip into town, drinking in a few bars. These were generally pretty sweet, I had a good eye for ones we could just chill out and grab a few pints of Bavaria. We even hit up a shisha bar with the fittest Scottish barmaid I’ve seen in quite some time. Whilst this was all cool and all, we kind of hit a little bit of a hurdle: most of the bars seemed to close at 1 and without knowledge of where the night clubs are, it’s quite easy to get distracted and put off partying for another night. You kind of end up just going back and guzzling the remainder of the beers purchased from the local supermarket. That’s kind of what happened for the remainder of our trip, we spent a lot of time getting pie-eyed in hotel rooms and seeing some bars. If not it was getting absolutely wankered at our hostel’s happy hour. 2 for 1 on pints of lager whilst we’re playing the best drunken foosball or mental magic we’ve ever engaged in.
A couple of the other guys had just that idea, taking a free tour of the zottay brewery, an 8% beer that tasted like it was about four. Not much to my liking, it kind of had a musty taste to it and when you’re filled with a hangover and ribs, you’re not going to be able to handle much in the way of musty beer.
We also went on the “Heiniken experience”, which wasn’t actually a tour of the brewery but a mueseum of Heiniken/a building of advertisement for the company. Whilst the people working here were pretty cool, I’d recommend hoofing a big bong before you even step foot in this building as fifteen Euros will only get you two free pints of Heiniken and that’s provided you answer the questions of the fit bar maids correctly. Hint: the head on Heiniken is designed to stop oxygen from getting and CO2 from getting out.
After the Heiniken trip, we had one little Sweedish problem. Outside the hostel, four of us were playing a card game called "9 Card Brag", basically a quick and easy to gamble on card game, that doesn't require any major skill. About half way through the game, a Swedish guy came and asked us about what we were playing. He seemed friendly enough but then he started into a rant about a Swedish card game that we should have been playing.
"Yes, it is called nigger and president"
Now I'd find this awkward at the best of times but there was a crowd of African students gathered by the picnic tables around us. Niall quite rightly suggested he didn't use that word and the guy dropped it. About three minutes later, he brings it up again.
"Yes, card game Nigger and President"
"Dude.."
"Yes, I know but I did not give the name to the game, it is a very popular game in Sweden, it is funny because the nigger can be the president at the same time.."
At this point we froze him out of our conversation. I'm inclined to give the guy the benefit of the doubt and say that the guy wasn't racist but I wasn't prepared to deal with his stupidity. You don't loudly say a word that is discriminatory around the group it is likely to offend.
My tolerance to stupidity can be pretty low.
To soothe the munchies, I would recommend all you can eat ribs for twelve euro, where you can get a plate “ribbed for your pleasure”. I can’t remember the name of the place in town that did this deal but it was an Argentinan restraunt. The service could have been a little better but I wasn’t going to kick up too much of a fuss when I was stuffing myself with their ribs. Pretty good I have to say.
Sunday though was the God of all days. After playing Magic semi-successfully I joined the other eleven Northern Irish magic players for the best activity known to man: boating on Amsterdam canals. For three hours we bombed around on motor boats barbequing, drinking beer and smoking thick pre-rolled joints. I think even the people in Amsterdam were slightly confused to see us gnashing huge chunks of chicken clean off the bone that was fresh cooked on foil instant barbeques. There were some hilarious moments on that boating expedition too. Take for instance the “Zattay drop” a competition where contestants have to set a bottle of zattay perfectly upright on an Amsterdam houseboat for maximum points or trying to schmooze attractive women who were in boats along side us. The boat rental guys didn’t look too happy with us when we returned the boats with a live and smoking barbeque still going.
Sadly whilst we were all finally in the mood for going out and sleazing on some Dutch girls, the old “no where is open past 1” conundrum really applies on a Sunday. We made up for the problem by chomping our way through some seriously good kebabs and I collapsed in my half assed made hostel bed covered in beer sweat.
I want to thank everyone who made this trip what it was, in particular, Adam for letting me stay in his beautiful family home, Martin for letting me stay in his gaff. Dog and Gar get a shout out for organizing the boat trip.
Ratings (out of 5)
Swedish hospitality: *****
Danish Hospitality: *****
Scrubbing out at magic: *** (At least I learned a few things and made a few friends)
Christiania: ****
Heiniken Experience: **
Eating ribs: ***
Beer: *****
Renting boats: ***********************************************************
Some idiot outside a hostel: