The Archive

Saturday night fever

A short snooze later it was once again time to head out onto the Stockholm party scene.

Tonight we decided that we had unfinished business with a club we'd considered going into the previous evening - the splendidly titled 'Debaser'.

But first, that annual Holiday Club ritual - the cocktail party.

It is a requirement on all holidays that at least one of the evenings out start with everyone getting together for 'light refreshments' (heavy drinking) in one of the rooms.

It's quite fun, because we don't have to interact with Other People. Perfect.

Now this cocktail party had a special twist.

Try telling people that you're going to Sweden for a holiday.

I bet the first thing everyone says is 'ooh, it's very expensive there'.

Go on, try it.

And if you're talking to any of my friends, the first thing they'll say is 'The booze there is really expensive'.

So, in preparation, the mighty Pellet rather cleverly packed two litres of vodka into his luggage.

But not just any vodka. This was cheap vodka.

Thus, for this year's cocktail party, we supped on very cheap, self imported vodka. Stitch that Absolut!

It was at the party that I discovered the room that Adam and Wig were staying in was directly opposite a tall block of flats, such that about ten households could look directly into their room (ours had a better view, but a scary, nightmarish monkey on the wallpaper, so it was swings and roundabouts really).

I also discovered that, by some quirk of chance, 3 of the 4 of us had elected to wear black shirts that evening.

As a consequenced, we suddenly realised when, at one point, we were all pointing at something (I forget what, but it was a little over head height) that anyone looking in from the other flats would see what looked distinctly like a Nazi rally.

Oops, sorry folks.

Anyway, we drank our way through most of the vodka and headed off for dinner.

In the end, it was a very civilised meal. Not that we'd planned that of course. Pellet wanted to watch the rugby but the Irish bar we went too was packed with tossers (ie people like us) so we went to the place over the road.

It was very nice. Of course, that's the problem with 'nice' things, they just don't make for interesting blogs.

Anyway, dinner over we jumped in a taxi which plunged into the labyrinth of road tunnels that snakes underneath Stockholm to take us over to Sodermalm.

The taxi dropped us off and we stopped off at a pub to have a drink and get directions to the club.

The pub was pretty empty. Just us and a couple of, er, larger ladies at the other end of the bar.

We may have made a comment or two about the size of the pair. But hey, no harm done right?

As those two girls were leaving, I overheard that they were American.

"Where are you from?" I asked.
"Atlanta," they replied. "You're English right?"
"Indeed, how could you tell,"
"You were very loud."

Oh. Very loud. Loud enough, for example, for you to hear us talking about your big arse? Or just generically noisy? I didn't dare ask the question and let them go without another word.

Oh well, off to the club to forget all about it.

We decided to pay another visit to the old Lesbian club on the grounds that it couldn't be gay night two nights on the trot.

It wasn't. It was Reggae Dub night. So a bit worse than gay night, for our purposes.

So, plan b - wander the streets until you find something good.

It didn't take long, we soon found a place with people going in and music blaring out. We went in.

We were in a shopping centre. Really, a shopping centre.

You know that big in the middle of shopping centres where the benches are and people wander around aimlessly? Those canny Swedes had basically set up a bar in that area and created an instant bar/club.

Genius.

But what night was it tonight? Indie? Dance? Hip Hop?

The first song came on, a nice bit of R&B. Nice. The next song was by Queen. Then there was a bit of Abba, then some heavy metal.

It was entirely random, as if they'd opened up HMV and put their entire music selection on 'shuffle'.

Pellet and I loved it. Adam and Wig, not so much. They headed off to the original goal - Debaser - to see if it was good.

As it happened, the shopping centre club closed down just as Pellet got a text saying that Debaser was great - so we headed off.

And once again, in the queue, we met up with a lovely group of slim blondes who seemed to like us, although probably not just because they were really, really pissed.

So we got in, we danced, we drank, we enjoyed.

We even asked the DJ to play the Young Knives. He laughed at us.

And so, when the club closed down, it was off to bed...

Nah, just kidding, we went to Spy Bar first, of course.

They didn't let us in.

posted by Peter The Great @ 6:21 PM