The weekend, Stockholm and Half-life

Went to Stockholm for the weekend, or rather for the Saturday. On the way there and back we played Half-life.

Just a few days before that I had a feeling of "eek, why the fuck am I going to Stockholm, I am quite overstressed already and have no time or money for it", but on Thursday I got enlightened and realized that Stockholm was exactly what I needed right now, and it was.

It was a good thing all around: good company, good game, good gamemaster, good food (I recommend Viking Line's Food Garden's appetizer and dessert buffet), good booze, good city, good weather.

A few highlights:

We played with an open door since our air conditioner did not work very well. At some point Ville says "and then a monster comes in" (I think the word he used in Finnish was "ökymönkiäinen"), and at the same moment a drunk guy comes into our cabin. He seemed to be a bit taken aback by the thunderous laugh that greeted him, and even more so by a chorus of "no!" in response to his request for a permission to come in.

Woke up at 7 am on Saturday after going to bed at 3. Went out. There were unconscious people lying around all over the boat, which is normal. One of them was lying leaning on the elevator door. Took all the spiritual power I had to abstain from pressing the button. Took some pictures of him. (pic 1, pic 2)

Finally took some good pictures (and some not-so-good ones) of the sunrise in the Stockholm archipelago. All the pictures are here.

Went to the museum of maritime history. For some reason they had a meeting of Corvette club in their parking lot. Never seen so many Corvettes in one place.

The public transportation in Stockholm has become awfully expensive, 32 kronor a ticket IIRC.

Managed to avoid buying 2 movies in SF Bokhandeln. (Meaning, obviously, that there were two movies that I wanted to buy but didn't, not that I bought all the other movies and only left them the two.) The only thing that enabled me to avoid buying them was telling to myself many times that I am gonna be in Boston Chinatown real soon now and will probably get them there for less.

They have a lot of ice cream places. Good ones. They also had coffee shakes in one of them, which probably means that we are gonna have them in Finland real soon now. Ville found some really weird-colored ice cream, ate it and survived.

This was the first time that I saw a royal palace guard squad consisting entirely of women.

In the maritime history museum one exhibit proudly informed the reader that in the Swedish Navy men and women all have the same facilities: they share rooms, showers, mess halls. It was told in a very see-how-egalitarian-and-democratic-we-are way. What made it really funny was that they said that therefore they need only two sets of facilites: one for male and female officers and one for male and female sailors. Can't have officers and sailors in the same rooms, ugh! Perish the thought! There is apparently a limit to any egalitarianism.

Men just sleep and wash their hair all the time (this is a comment on my three friends there, and not on the men in the Swedish Navy). IMO men in general wash their hair very often and sleep an awful lot. The only exception to that are the men in my family, who tend to wake up early and make an awful lot of noise upon waking up.