Day Off in Reykjavik/Oslo

I never made it to the party last night. I went to the club on one of the last van runs, but ran into Josh's vocal coach David at the door – I was heading in, he was heading out – and he said the smoke inside was pretty bad, as was the music. That was all I needed to hear. Went back to the hotel to drink with Abby and Dennis and a bunch of the crew guys. Called it a night around 2 am and crashed.

Got up this morning around 9, the only reason being to take advantage (for the 4th day in a row) of the awesome breakfast spread the hotel has. The price is included in our rooms, which is sweet.

Because it was raining and cold and nasty outside, I never left the hotel until it was time to go to the airport, around 2pm. We had plenty of time to waste once we got there (around 3), because our flight wasn't until 5:50. With the flight time and the time change, we landed in Oslo around 10:30 pm and dashed off to the hotel. Having slept a bit on the plane due to absolute boredom, Blaine and I decided to grab a bite and a couple of beers. Never got around to the food.

Today is a national holiday here in Oslo, and everybody at every bar is completely wasted. I mean stupidly, staggeringly, blindly, falling-down drunk. It's awesome. Blaine and I wound up in the park across the street from the hotel, at some sort of restaurant/beer garden called Saras Telt. Don't know what it means, maybe something along the lines of "We have the drunkest patrons in town."

Blaine and I grabbed a table and ordered a couple of large draft beers, 78 Norwegian kroner each. That would be $13.00 EACH, y'all. The place was closing, and it was last call. The waiter was nice enough to sell them to us, but only after we explained to him that we'd only just arrived from Iceland and this was our first and possibly last beer of the night.

About 10 feet from us, there was a cute-as-all-hell girl packing up a small PA system. So I hollered at her, "Hello… HELLO!" She looked up and I asked if she had been doing karaoke or playing music. She got a rather annoyed look on her face and said "Karaoke? Karaoke? How about I come over there and kick your ass, Swedish-style?"

My heart melted.

So I'm like sorry, sorry, we just got here and we missed your show. So what were you doing? When she realized I wasn't being an asshole (I know, rare for me…), the ice broke and we struck up a conversation. Her name was Alexandra, she's Swedish and lives in Sweden, and is a singer/songwriter. She'd just finished playing for four and a half hours and was packing up for the night. I asked her if there were any other bars nearby that were open later than this place and she said she knew of one and would we like to join her there for a beer?

See if you can guess what my answer was, based on this picture of her:


Click to enlarge.

We wound up going a few blocks away to a bar called Dr. Jekyll's, where we sat outside and had a great time. You will never know how much I regret having to work the next day. Maybe you can guess that, too.