Life: work, parties and beer

The stressful thing at work is over. Back to the regular stuff. Thank god.

The good thing about it was that I really brushed up on my French.

I guess it was getting to me. I started seeing nightmares every night.

Apart from the stressful, cruel and unusual stuff at work I've had a rather intensive but mostly unstressful social life lately. Between the work and the social life, I almost forgot about that thing called sleep, and am considering exploring it again.

One of the highlights of the social life was a scary but fun party in Jakomäki where I knew only a few people and where people were opening sparkling wine with sabers. It was fun but not really convenient: after having enjoyed most of the contents of the bottle, one tends to forget that grabbing it by the neck is a bad idea, and by the end of the evening, or even of the first bottle, your hands really bleed.

A much scarier discovery of that evening was that Jakomäki does not have late evening buses (the ones that run from 22.30 to 1:30). I did not know Helsinki had a neighborhood like that. I think Jakomäki had late evening buses in the late nineties, when I used to visit there. What happened to them?

Also had a Christmas beer tasting event with a few friends. The event itself was great, but the beers left me rather unimpresssed. Gouden Carolus Christmas was downright unpleasant, very licoricey. Didn't like Aecht Schlenkerla Rauchbier Urbock either, but at least I did not expect to like it. Jenlain Bière de Noël was quite nice but not special, and Warm Welcome Brown Ale was much better than I expected.

That's the problem with tasting beer for me: unlike with wine, I almost never find anything that's better than the stuff I have already tasted. I still like tasting new stuff just for the novelty value, but it rarely comes anywhere close to matching Rochefort and Kasteel.