It All Changed: 1

3 July 2012

It all changed gear when the bouncy black guy from New York showed up.

“I’m just so tired. I haven’t slept in so long… Copenhagen got me from all the drugs with friends”

Apparently I’m the only person here who will talk to him in the hostel, so he brings out two bottles of rum, tells me to even them out, then takes a loot at my sign and tells me it won’t work and Gothenburg sucks anyway.

A few minutes later he comes back from I don’t know where. We go outside and meet a couple of Danes who speak better English than the American. They’re drinkin what we’ve called the Finnish man’s urine as a random Finn gave it to them ata petrol station in the middle of nowhere in Finland. And so the joking goes on and on. Until we don’t get let in anywhere because we’re all such a mismatched bunch.

Cory struts around with his gold watch and Ralph Lauren shirtl ike he deserves some kind of attention. Christian’s neck beard almost touches his Red Fang (I assume some metal band) t-shirt. Simon is short and has a look in his eyes of someone who’s spent too long in hte arctic - which makes sense because he’s prone to tell the same ridiculous story of the eskimos and his favourite ever so slightly fat one, when he was in the Danish navy. Me; well I’m the baby-faced 9-year-old.

We do sneak into one place and pay 70 kroner for the privilege fo a beer - almost 8 euros. The sky is still blue at midnight.

A confusing thing with backpackers is that some will hopelessly chase the diea of going out as a local, despite packing no nice shoes and just moments earlier saying “fun is what you make of it”. It’s exemplified here in the hopless wondering into nice bars where bouncers don gold bladgers and blazers and patrons act as if they were wearing the same. We aren’t “city, buy cocktails for 20 girls people”; otherwise we’d be at home spending time and all our money on a tiny window of time on the weekend.

The other problem is that I forgot all this as I have been drinking rum and Carlsberg all day and night.

The sky is still blue as we head back to the hostel at 4AM on a Wednesday morning. The sky is still blue as a German tubmles to the ground of the courtyeard and it still doesn’t wake Cory up or spill our newly poured, warm rum & cola. The sky is still blue through the window of the dorm past 5AM.