Well, this has been a fairly unreconstructed weekend — a Friday night out and a Saturday afternoon in the pub, too. The results in the Championship are nothing to speak of at the moment, however. But that does not mean that going out is unenjoyable.
Having been convinced, over the three years I have been coming here regularly, that Norway actually doesn’t have any decent bars or pubs, I have over the last couple of visits ended up in three spectacularly good examples, one in Stavanger, one in Oslo and tonight, this one in Bergen — Kafé Spesial — each of which has literally hundreds of different beers. Am I complaining? Not at all. As you may have gathered from following this blog, I quite like beer. The choice and quality of the stuff available in each almost makes the outrageous alcohol tax in this country tolerable. Well, almost.
The title of the post says it all. It’s sunny, warm, Friday evening… this is where your friends are… what would you do?
The weather isn’t exactly bad at the moment but the light is consistently flat and grey, hence the prevalence of interior shots at the moment. Little to add except to explain that I don’t normally frequent baby showers, but this one was held in a pub, so that drew me in.
Went to Newcastle today for a training course. Spent 90% of my time there (including lunch) sat in a computer cluster on said course, 7% of it getting myself to and from Newcastle station through the drizzle, 2% of it in this bar at the station and 1% on the toilet. I think this was the best subject matter. The guy bending down gives it some interest I think.
Let’s hope he still is, and stays so as long as possible.
By the way, I have 199 followers. Would you like to be number 200? A nice milestone to hit.
What have I missed while I’ve been away? Little things, the family, my DVD collection, pubs. Whitelock’s has in the past won ‘Best City Pub in Britain’ awards and is this great little oasis in the middle of Leeds’ shopping district. Plenty of reference is made within to its foundation date of 1715 AD: fifty-five years before any Europeans properly set foot in the country I have just left.
What have I not missed while I’ve been away? The weather…
I have seen a few real koalas: most in captivity, including at the Lone Pine zoo here in Brisbane (where I also saw the cassowary); the only one I have seen in the wild was spotted on Kangaroo Island. This toy looks far more awake and alert than most of the real ones do, they are such dozy beasts. Maybe it’s the beer, or the frigid pipe on which he’s sat.
Taija (pronounce it to more-or-less rhyme with ‘higher’) is from Oakland, California, and has been staying at the Kookaburra Inn these last few days. I took this while we hung out this morning, with her on her way to the airport and eventually somewhere else in this, the sixth-largest country in the world. Like a lot of people I have met on this trip, we were only acquainted a short time, but I think this shot captures her quite well – or more accurately, my image of her.
I was working (teaching online) until nearly 10.45pm today so it was rather late once I got to the pub, and with it being St Patrick’s Day, it was like, come into the party late but sober, or just go home and ignore it all. I went in for a drink. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. I started talking to someone only to later have her friends basically tell me to piss off, for no reason other than they were wankers. So much for the legendary hospitality of denizens of the Emerald Isle. But Brighton beat Crystal Palace 3-0, which restored my faith in the rightness of the universe.
Why this shot? Because it’s green, because it amuses me that the cardboard leprechaun behind the customer has collapsed in a state of drunkenness, because I worked for 13 hours today (on a Sunday!) and didn’t get much chance to take much else, and because this now takes the record for the latest shot yet in any given day.
Being 42 