They Call Him the Midnight Mover

I cannot even begin to conceive of how much poontang Wilson Pickett had at his disposal in 1968.

I'm back from the Krakow trip. Not only was it an extremely cool city, it was also an extremely cold city, and now I'm pretty sick. I'm also pretty busy, what with impending midterms and Saturday's Mustachio 21st Birthday Bashio, so a full-length Krakow recap is on the back burner until further notice.

I really hope no one loses any sleep over it.

Marty

News and The Box that Contained the Surprisingly Tasty Pizza I Just Ate

Is it just me or does that look like George Clooney manning a brick oven at a coastal, open-air Pizza restaurant?

I'm leaving for Krakow in 3 hours, with an early morning stop-off at Auschwitz, which will be sad. But sad in a good way, like Mystic River.

I've heard great things about Krakow, though.

Oh yeah, and Dear US Dollar, do some R&R this weekend and then pick it the fuck up. You're making having poor spending habits a lot harder on a fella.

Have a nice weekend, errbody.

Marty

The Inaugural Edition of "Batshit Crazy Things I Would Most Certainly Die From Doing"

"You know that mile-long gully we discovered in the Swiss alps, yeah I'm gonna glide down that in a wingsuit and you're gonna film me."

Who the fuck sells wingsuits? Like what's the market demand for these things?  Two fanatics who probably live in a thistle treehouse in the Pyrenees and think it would be really extreme to leap off a mountaintop and soar through a ravine.

You know who's crazier than the gentlemen filming/on film? The gentleman that paid for the HD camera equipment and the wingsuit. Like what if dude missed the mouth of that gully and impaled himself on a crag at 200 MPH? Great investment. At least Batman gets to put "Died While Trying to Fly the Length of An Alpine Canyon" on his epitaph.

The best Mr. Financial Backer can get out of this is "Died of Natural Causes 40 Years After Funding Other Dude's Extremely Expensive YouTube Stunt Death." I'm pretty sure I'll have a more inspiring epitaph than that, and I'm terrified of being on the roof of my house.

(Yeah, I'm jealous. This is pretty fucking cool.)

A Public Service Announcement

It's just past noon here in Prague, and my desktop gadget says its 40 degrees outside. I've never been one to dispute weather-forecasting technology, and it being October, my body has forgotten what 40 degrees feels like. So I'll vouch for 40. Bottom line, it's fucking cold outside, and we're not even halfway through October. Fall lasted for about 3 hours.

It's now officially pre-winter -- that special time of the year when the sweet smell of autumn gives way to icy air that pours down your throat like a drag of a menthol cigarette (and like menthol cigarettes, you enjoy the feeling for about 2 seconds until your throat contracts and you want to die). That time of the year when you wake up freezing your ass off and put on your thickest flannel only to spend the rest of your day in a classroom with your sleeves rolled up, sweating more profusely than an illegal immigrant in the Arizona sunshine. And, of course, that time of the year when everyone's nose starts to run. [For an extremely scientific explanation of why this happens, visit: http://kidshealth.org/kid/talk/qa/nose_run.html]

Which brings me to my point.

Today was not only the coldest day of fall/first day of pre-winter, it was also quiz day in Czech class, and the combination of the two marked the start of hands down my least favorite cold-weather phenomenon: the mid-test sniffle.

Now, I'm not gonna sit here and pretend like I've never sniffled. I've sniffled copiously. Vigorously. Prodigious sniffling, if you will. On a number of occasions, I've even abandoned the sniffle and consciously moved on to the full-bore, get-these-fucking-boogers-out-of-my-fucking-nose-because-I'm-tired-of-breathing-out-of-my-mouth snort. But I consciously refrain from doing either of these things during a test. You know why?

Because it's extremely annoying.

The mid-test sniffle is bar-none, hands-down, without-any-doubt the most distracting and aggravating noise a human can make while another human tries to concentrate. I would honestly rather spend a night in the drunk tank with Wally the macaw than sit in the same room as the asshole trying to keep the mucus from dripping onto his test by vacuuming it back into his lungs.



Alright that's a wild exaggeration, because that is one annoying bird, and birds are already my least favorite class in the animal kingdom.

But you get the point, and you know who I'm talking about. Chances are, you've been that asshole. I know I have. But having had a nose for almost 21 winters, and having spent at least 8 of those winters taking tests in confined spaces, I've learned to do something:

Blow my fucking nose.

I don't know why and I don't know how, but I would much prefer to listen to someone nose-trumpet a small Tibetan village out of his face for 2 hours than have to endure that same someone reverse-sneezing into his esophagus at random intervals every 20 to 40 seconds.

I hope you would too.

Therefore, my congested brethren, I beseech you, this winter, give everyone else around your nasaly ass the courtesy, and bring a pouch of Kleenex's with you on test days. And use them.

It'll make everyone's winter suck a little less, which means a lot, especially when it's 8 degrees north of freezing in mid-October.

Forever yours,

Martin

Hradec Karlove in Review

Just popped in a couple overdue loads of laundry. Can’t wait to for them to be dry next Monday. Until then I’ll be wearing my Looney Tunes pullover, the same pair of jeans, no underwear, and for shiggles, crocs. Should be a good week.

The past week has been good as well. This weekend I made it to my very first mandatory CIEE excursion, which makes me 1 for 4 on mandatory CIEE excursions. Earlier in the week one of the CIEE officials had possibly jokingly hinted that I would be sent home if I missed this past weekend’s trip, which, even as a joke, was as good a threat as any, because there is NO WAY I’m trading gallivanting around Europe for sitting in my basement alternating between ESPN News and being called a failure by my parents. So I made it on-time, the thrill of which was easily most exciting thing that happened to me all weekend.

Our destination was a city named Hradec Karlove, which is about 2 hours southeast of Prague. The theme of the trip was linked to a CIEE class named “Art and Architecture,” which I am definitely not enrolled in. I don’t get art, and I appreciate architecture to the extent that it keeps me out of the cold. Otherwise, not my bag of tea. But the economics overnight trip got cancelled for some reason, so I had free rein on my trip choice. And so did most of my dude-friends, so we all chose Hradec Karlove.

Poor choice. Mostly because I had people who do not speak very good English in my ear about art and architecture the entire time, but I made sure to locate a few more things to complain about. First and absolutely foremost, our “dinner” on Friday night.

After an exhilarating day of castle or villa or whatever touring, we arrived at our hotel in Hradec Karlove and got introduced to our “buddies,” who were all medical students at the nearby university and who were supposed to take us out to dinner (CIEE gave each person 250kc to cover dinner). It makes sense now that medical students didn’t have a good grasp on the preferred social or culinary establishments in their area, and instead decided to take us to a musky, dirty, awful Czech version of Medieval Times. Like all historical-period-themed restaurants, this place was cool for about 7 minutes (except Johnny Rocket’s, which is and always will be cool). And then my eyes adjusted to the light and I noticed that the ceilings were 6 feet high and the white stucco was dark brown in most places.

And on top of all that, they didn’t serve beer. They served grog. I don’t think I even need to say it, but grog sucks. There’s a reason it was phased out in the 12^th century, and that reason is it tastes like honey-flavored Twisted Tea that someone left out in the sun all afternoon. And on top of the grog, our medieval waitress got my order wrong, so instead of meatloaf (I love meatloaf) and sauerkraut, I was served sautéed chicken strips over a bed of creamed spinach. Fuck creamed spinach. I would have rather purchased a canister of cheese whizz and took the rest of the 250kc to the roulette table. The only upside to not being served what I ordered was that I didn’t have to hold in sauerkraut farts for the rest of the night.

So after we got the figgity fuck out of that abomination of a restaurant, I went back to the hotel for a 30 minute sit, and then we took it upon ourselves (i.e. left our medieval Czech buddies behind) to explore the town.

Our first stop was a sports bar that at first I thought was a really nice bonfire because of all the cigarette smoke in the air. But it didn’t take my lungs long to get accustomed and let the secondhand smoke knock a few years off the ol’ life. And then we all watched one of our friends, Joe, have a nice hour-long run on the automated roulette table (first time I’ve seen an automated roulette table. Pretty fucking cool. It was a good thing I forgot my debit card at home) only to lose to it all in the end. Weird, right?

Second stop was a random pub. We settled into a back room and polished off a number of beverages, during which a very exuberant, probably friendless, Czech guy sat at our table and talked about how he liked American football and how he’s a bouncer somewhere and an MMA fighter and Batman and lots of other things that I’m sure were not true. I wasn’t really listening to him because he kinda looked like Lurch from the Addam’s family. But then he offered to take us “to disco,” and we accepted his kind offer. This is where things got interesting.

Earlier in the day, when we arrived in Hradec Karlove, one of the CIEE teachers said that the city was recently named the best place to live in the Czech Republic. I didn’t quite get it then. It was a perfectly fine town, but nothing about it screamed move here. Well I soon found out the screaming was suppressed because all the women were indoors.

Lurch very eagerly walked us somewhere for about 10 minutes, and after we waited in line for another 10 minutes (at which point my expectations were very low because of the pigpen assembled outside), we were in. I’m not exaggerating when I say that all but maybe 10 women in this club were bona fide dime pieces. I was in shock. Excluding the very minimal presence of fat grenades or the odd gaggle of older women desperately trying to be young again, this club looked like what I think radical fundamentalist Muslims dream of for their afterlife.

And it’s kinda what I’ve started dreaming about for my afterlife too: beautiful Czech women, not completely outnumbered by Czech dudes, boogying to Swedish House Mafia and Ya No Speak Americano and some awesome Twist and Shout electro remix and just a general club-euphoria that even after an aggressive six weeks in Prague I had not encountered until last Friday. But there was one problem: they all wanted NOTHING to do with Americans. And I mean nothing. I made maybe 3 attempts to shimmy up to girls and each time I wound up dancing with my American friends who had been just as unsuccessful. At the time, I was focusing my frustration on the fact that not a single one of them spoke a single word of English, but I now realize that easily could have been a ploy to get all of us to stop dancing near them. Whether it was or it wasn’t, it worked. I left the club in a language-barrier-hussy about an hour after I entered.

Stop number four was a hole in the way place that made gyro-burritos. And they were fucking delicious. Easily the best late night meal I’ve had in Europe. I think it might have been the sauce, but it also could have been the electric shaver they were using to strip the “leg” of genetically modified “lamb.” I was so impressed by this shaver that I had to take a video.

Didn’t feel the urge to surreptitiously snap a few pics of the Czech smokeshow population, but I was sure to document a fast-food appliance I’d never seen before. That says more about me than I'd like to think.

Time to make some more Czech notecards.

I Shant Have Taunted the Homework Gods

I've spent the last 14 hours making notecards for my Czech quiz tomorrow.

Yours in pain,

Marty

While Everyone In America has been Preparing for Midterms...

...I've been sitting on my bed watching television on the internet.

And I'm keeping up with my schoolwork. If you can call it that.

I cannot believe how little work I have had to do. You know what my homework for Economics of the European Union was over the weekend? Make a mental map of Europe. Aka play geography games on a website for 25 minutes and then email my teacher saying I know where Moldova is. I'm honestly starting to believe that I've been reenrolled in fifth grade. I'm playing color-in-the-map games on a website that has smiling animal icons next to each link, and the only adequate notebook I've been able to find has a picture of a neon green racing motorcycle on the front cover.

I mean it's all well and good that I have enough free time to burn through the first season of the Sopranos, every episode of Modern Family twice (because it's the funniest sitcom since Seinfeld), and succeed at finding working Megavideo links for Boardwalk Empire and Eastbound & Down (no easy feat), but I am royally fucked when I have to come back to Fordham and actually do work for a semester. But I live in the now.

And the now is not so bad. I think I've finally immersed myself into psuedo-Czech culture, because the thing I look most forward to each day is waking up and having a salami-laughing cow-red pepper strips sandwich on dry, toasted brown bread (the operative word being "toasted") for breakfast. I'm not sure if I would call that immersion or erosion of standards, but either way, that twice-weekly sandwich is the Folger's-in-my-cup.

What is not the Folger's-in-my-cup is the ass-stale, too-tangy coffee + constantly almost sour Czech milk combination that accompanies the sandwich. I'm no coffee snob -- I always go pre-ground store-brand and I think I washed my Crotona coffee pot twice this summer -- but this coffee is abysmal. I would not be surprised to find out it was brewed with dirt granules.

Such is life in the Czech Republic.

To supplement my lunch and dinner woes, I've started purchasing two-packs of smazeny syr, or fried cheese, which I heat up on the dorm-kitchen stove-top and stick between two pieces of the Czech equivalent of Wonder Bread, which of course tastes no where near as good as Wonder Bread.

In the taste department, at a net cost of about $3 (USD) for two of these delicacies, you just can't beat it.

But in the health department, my arteries are getting beat. Might only cost me $3, but after I eat a double order of smazeny syr, I feel like a double order of smazeny turd. You heard of the beef sweats? Here, I'm workin' with the cheese sweats. Two sandwiches down and I get an uncomfortable tingling sensation running up and down my extremities foreshadowing the heart attack I'll have at 28 if I keep eating two of these for dinner every night.

And the quart of Nesquick milk I drank last night certainly isn't helping anything.

After breakfast meats and an english speaking majority, I think I miss chocolate milk the most. And that's why I was so excited to find this on a bottom shelf of the Tesco instant coffee aisle.

My God is an Awesome God.

Halle-fuckin'-lujah. Never before have I been so happy to see a powdered drink mix. And frankly, I don't really like Nesquick. It never totally amalgamates, so you always have those unpleasant pockets of dryness lurking at the bottom of the glass like chocolately snakes-in-the-grass. Hershey's syrup (my choco-fying additive of choice), on the other hand, blends seamlessly with milks of all ilks to create a tall, cool glass of heaven. Nesquick is more like chocolate-milk-purgatory, but I'd rather be in purgatory than in hell, which, of course, is completely devoid of chocolate milk (Deuteronomy 8:3-4).

So last night, in my chocolate-milk-like-substance-discovery-induced euphoria, I washed my two fried cheese sandwiches down with a full quart of Nesquick'd milk. Go ahead, crucify me.

When I've not been wasting away in front of Sidereel or iTunes, I've been booking my trips for the remainder of the semester. Here's what it's shapin' up to be:

Oct. 15-17 - Krakow, Poland with CIEE. I know we're going to Auschwitz, but I don't really know anything else. The beauty of these CIEE trips is that they plan everything for you, which, after this week's blitz of planning and comparing prices and doing tedious research I wish I had the money to pay someone else to do for me, I really appreciate.

Oct. 22-24 - The big birthday weekend. Father is visiting Prague, and I think (hope) we're renting out a small club near the dorms to celebrate. I also hope the NYPD makes an appearance and steals all my money.

Oct. 27-Nov. 1 - Rome and Chianti with Emily. Halloween in Rome? Need I say it? When in...

Nov. 5-7 - I play host.

Nov. 12-14 - Copenhagen. And Sensation mafuckin' White. Chuckie, Eric Prydz, Fedde Le Grand. And there's a rumor that the Swedish House Mafia will make an appearance. I fuckin' hope so. I can't begin to quantify my excitement with words so I'll just stop here.

Nov. 23-Nov.28 - The Homeland. 2 nights in Dublin -- one of which is Matthew's 21st -- 2 nights in Clifden visiting my Irish cousins, and one night in Galway. I cannot wait to go back to Ireland. It's the only place besides DC/NY that I've been where I genuinely feel at home. Even if I am getting charged 7e for a Guiness and the person charging me knows damn well that I am not from Ireland, I can talk in a phony Irish accent and dream, can't I?

What does NOT feel like home is the stick-way-up-my-ass known as Irish car rental companies. I'm currently in the process of comparing every little god damn detail and cent, and it's driving me crazy. First of all, I really regret not learning how to drive stick because every stick rental is about 100e cheaper than the automatic variety. Second of all, what the fuck is the difference between a 21-year-old American male who's never driven on the left side of the road and a 23-year-old American male who's never driven on the left side of the road? On the off-chance that I convince one of these rental companies to accept the already exhorbitant amount of money I have to give them, I'll have to give them more because I'm 2 years shy of their arbitrary rental requirements.

Taking a deep breath,

Marty

PS. Locate "2Nite" - Felguk feat. Sporty-O -- ba-jangin