Sleep overs. Because you're never too old for one.

So it's probably been almost a decade since i've last attended a real sleep over. Drunkenly passing out on a friend's couch with a bunch of equally hammered partygoers in the wee hours of the morning does not count. A real sleep over is about pajamas, sleeping bags, late night gossip, good friends and crap movies. 
Yuck. If this sounds like something vomit-inducing out of a Sweet Valley High novel, i'll tell you it don't have to be that way. The list of sleep over activities is not restricted to playing with ponies and brushing each other's hair. Four girls had a sleep over last Friday, featuring gluttony, excrement and intoxicants. Here's how it came to happen:

• We made some seriously good food. Couldn't decide between sushi and tapas, so we had both. Works out nicely when everyone brings something, and we ended up having way more than we could manage to eat. Finger food, aside from being seriously moreish, is also ideal for snacking on through the night. All night. And in the morning. Nothing like garlic chili mushrooms and a stiff hit of wasabi for breakfast.
• We watched a crap scary movie. Yeah...getting freaked out by a cam corder view of things that go bump in the night in a suburban bedroom only works for the first fifteen minutes. Yours truly fell asleep halfway through Paranormal Activity. Not so good.
• Had mint chocolate chip brownies, Ben&Jerry's cookie dough ice cream, and marshmallow-topped hot chocolate (with a generous splash of minttuviina) for dessert. I feel like the sugar high was always the highlight of parties when you were a kid. And hey, it's good to know it still does the trick a decade later.
• Brought along a boston terrier puppy with an acute case of flatulence. At first it was inappropriately entertaining, then it got practically unbearable (what the hell do these puppies eat - that smell is lethal!), after which the desperate nocturnal swoops to rescue the white carpet from being soiled by liquid feces became just a little too funny and surreal to deal with. 

After all aforementioned pastimes, we were happy to call it a night at around five in the morning, when half of us were snoring and the other two were half-heartedly watching the SATC movie with little success.

When we finally woke up in the afternoon, bleary-eyed after varying amounts of sleep and dog turds, we were all in agreement that we should make a habit of this. There's something special about over indulgence, sleeping on an air mattress and sharing a sleeping bag with a friend and their dog (who, i was told, attempted to attack me while i was sleeping). Something that makes you wonder why people don't do this more often.

i heart in November.

1. Glögi. It’s officially the season.
2. Browsing books at the bookstore and dividing them into wish lists for myself and gift lists for others (with items on my wish list far outnumbering those on the list for others).
3. Weekends, which are rapidly filling up with various pikkujoulu shindigs.
4. Wearing dresses with biker boots. Boots are so much warmer than converse all stars, which are my footwear of choice 99.9% of the time.
5. Messer Chups. Wicked Russian psychobilly band. Great horror sound to counter all the x-mas carols they play obnoxiously loud 24/7 at most establishments from November to January .
6. Fairylights. My apartment is all a-twinkle. And kinda looks like one of those dodgy thai massage establishments in Kallio…
7. Being inside when it’s hideous weather outside. Preferably with woolly socks, a good book and a stiff drink.
8. Zombieland. Cinematic pleasure with zombies, weapons and Woody Harrelson.
9. Hats and scarves. The bigger and woollier the better.
10.  Kung Po Tofu at New Bamboo Center. Nothing like picking up super spicy take away on the way home through the rain/sleet/whatever else the sky chucks at you. Nom nom. 

Derailed and on the road.

I’m writing this on a train. Currently, I’m speeding from Copenhagen towards Hamburg. This morning I was in Stockholm. Last night I was in Turku. This evening I’ll be in Berlin, and tomorrow I’ll be in Prague. From Prague I’ll only be a hop and a skip from my final destination, Chotilsko, 50km south of Prague. Now what is so special about Chotilsko, you may wonder. Well, aside from being the potential setting of a new b-horror movie starring yours truly*, Chotilsko will play host to Friends of the Earth’s annual get together, The Big Happening. So in actual fact, I’ll be far from alone and hopefully equally far from meeting a miserable end at the maw of the wolfman/zombie/other fiend possibly residing in a small Czech village by a dam.

What I will be doing, more importantly, is meeting FOE-folk from all over Europe and strategizing on climate action, talking about Copenhagen, and working towards saving the world. Extracurricular activities might involve beer drinking, for the simple reasons of it being both good and cheap at our destination. I’m really looking forward to all of the above, in equal amounts.

But Chotilsko is still a couple of countries away, and I’m still in transit for a good many hours: Scenery changes, schedule checks, a cacophony of languages, train after train. There’s something great about getting on the rails, though. You can track the gradual changing of the view outside your window, and actually see how Sweden is different to Denmark, for example. You get to do cool things like have breakfast in Stockholm, lunch in Copenhagen and dinner in Hamburg. You have time to get through an entire book in one go. Or listen to all 168 songs currently on your iPod (I’m on 24 right now). The only thing that sucks is the lack of internet. Which is why I’m not sure if I’ll be able to post this tonight. Or if I’ll have this update online tomorrow. Or ever.

If the person reading this found my laptop somewhere with the rest of my dismembered limbs, a word of warning: run from the man with the hairy face.

* My friends seem to think that taking a train to the middle of nowhere and spending the week leading up to Halloween in the remnants of a village destroyed by the building of a huge dam, with no outsiders, no internet and limited phone network coverage, can only result in a gruesome end in which my various body parts are eventually sent home in separate packages, despite fierce garlic-wielding, ninja-chopping, silver bullet-firing attempts to save myself.

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Note from the Author: the above entry was written yesterday, and since finding an internet connection was impossible then, i'm posting it now from our hostel in Berlin. So my apologies for it coming online later than expected, but a cheer of joy to the fact that i'm still in possession of all my limbs. 

On another note, after getting a lucky six hours of sleep last night, we got up incredibly early to make it to breakfast this morning. Turns out clocks were pushed back last night, breakfast isn't served for another hour. Fail.