I hate the foreign police

So my visa renewal was rejected by the menace known as the ‘Czech Foreign Police’. It was rejected on a technicality relating to my current housing situation, so I’m going to have to ‘leave the country in 30 days’ and get a new visa somewhere else. The Czech foreign police are somewhere between petty criminals and evil stepmothers on the short list to run the IRS in Hell. First of all, considering they deal ONLY WITH FOREIGNERS, you would assume they would speak a foreign language, especially English. When my friend Brett went there to register his new long-term visa, he was told (after asking if the woman spoke English) “No. Learn Fucking Czech.” Everyone here has a horror story of standing in line for two days, crammed between a dirty Chechnian (from females, insert ‘lecherous’) and a noisy Vietnamese family, only to be dismissed offhandedly by some demonic bureaucrat because a particular paper wasn’t notarized in triplicate and signed by George Bush personally. But my story has a fine resolution. I have to take a week off work (during which I will spend 4 days in Istanbul) then go to Dresden on the 7th of November to get a new visa. After which I will walk into the Foreign Police building and slap the receptionist in the face. Gently, not too hard, just so she knows that I have beaten her little system, and that whenever she goes to her troll-like family (or more likely, hairless dog) in the evening she’ll know, and I mean KNOW, that to wake up in the morning is utterly useless disgrace of a life.

More pictures of Autumn

http://nickmoles.myphotoalbum.com/slideshow.php?set_albumName=album03 Feel free to comment below. Anything resembling 'you're a badass photographer, nick' would be appreciated.

Slavia-Sparta

Check out the photos here http://nickmoles.myphotoalbum.com/slideshow.php?set_albumName=album02

Pictures

I don't feel like posting anything today. Go to www.nickmoles.myphotoalbum.com to check out some pictures.

Drink of choice

Here are a pair of amusing articles. The first details what kind impression it gives a man when a woman drinks one of the following:

Cosmopolitan: A bit trendy, and some guys view it as snobby. Also, it shows someone with expensive taste. So if the guy's paying the bill, steer clear of this one, especially if the date's going badly. He doesn't want to have to take out a loan to buy you drinks.

But here is the much more amusing, detailing the impression men give. here i am!

Beer on tap: Women told me they think a man who orders a beer is reliable, down-to-earth and low-maintenance. But he may put his dog — possibly a Labrador mix named Prince — before them.

Sorry

My apologies for all the fake comments that keep popping up. I don't know how to get rid of them, and would appreciate any assistance. Hey: If you're bored at work, and want to review the whole religion thing, check this out. Bizzare.

Lonely Planet

I went to the bookstore by the Andel metro station on Sunday to pick up the Lonely Planet Istanbul. I'm addicted to the LP - I spend most of my tourist minutes in any place walking past gorgeous monuments with my head buried in the damn travel guide. I then get my picture taken next to something cool by a small japanese man and head back to the pub near the hostel. Mission accomplished. While at the bookstore I was absolutely shocked to discover the Lonely Planet Austin, San Antonio & the Hill Country . I buy lonely planets for their historical description of the Vatican, not to go see the SRV statue on Town Lake. Nonetheless, it's great that Austin is in much larger letters than San Antonio on the cover, 'cause everyone knows SA is a shithole. I was pretty tempted to buy this. I always buy the LP whenever I go anywhere, and I'm coming to Austin for Christmas as a 'foreign traveller'. I would be insufferable - we'd be laying around someone's flat, trying to figure out something to do in the evening, and I'd pull out the travel guide, and read the "what to do in Austin" chapter. I could even try to find 'Lakeway' in the 'Excursions outside Austin' chapter, fail, then refuse to go there. I might be disowned. Disowned or not, I'm heading to Istanbul on the 3rd of November. I got this awesome deal: Round-trip direct flight from Prague, 3 nights in a 3 star hotel, all for $215. That's not a misprint. I'm unbelievably excited - I've been wanting to go here forever. My mom might freak a bit, but my friend Michal said it's safe, and they have an ample supply of post-pub doner kebabs, one of my 4 main food groups (besides beer, schnitzel, and yoghurt). This trip also prompted this exchange: Me: "What is a 3 star hotel? I have no idea what that means." Jana: "You know the places where we usually stay? They have no stars."

Girlfriends

Well said. http://www.theonion.com/content/node/41456

Party!

DSCN2825
Originally uploaded by nickmoles.

Last night I had my first keg party.

(Well, Kyle and I once had one back in 2003 or something, but we just brought the keg back from a party on a mini-golf course. we didn't even drink the whole thing, leading me to speculate how cool it would be to bathe myself in beer. I chickened out, though, and soon found myself in the strange situation of being ashamed that I hadn't ended up covered in beer)

Matthieu and I decided to do it american-style, with kegs and plastic cups and chips and pizza. We invited about 40 people, which was a hell of a lot, and figured we'd get about 20 (people here are lazy). We picked up a 50L Keg of gambrinus, which is about 100 large czech beers.

The keg was the best I've ever had. I forgot that in the US we usually drink bud light and icehouse at keg parties. This stuff was cold and fresh and incredibly satisfying. In fact, Matthieu and I tapped the thing at about 6pm, and proceeded to get steadily drunk about 2 hours before the party even started.

We both took the day off to clean the damn flat. The term 'bachelor pad' is probably a good description of the place - the fridge is empty of anything except ketchup and mustard, with a lonely bag of frozen peas in the freezer. the sink is permanently full of dirty forks and plates, as we usually just wash one dirty plate and fork if we need it. And the place is damn dusty and covered in candy wrappers and old beer bottles.

But we cleaned the hell outta the thing, and were shocked at the end how good it looked. It stayed that way for about 5 hours until the party started. This morning we woke up and the place was covered in beer cups and wine bottles and empty bags of chips and nuts. Back to normal.

The party itself was a shocking success. Last time we invited 30 people and got 13 or so. This time we invited 40 and got about 30, a significant increase. I think the x-factor in this was that we were offering everyone free beer. Everyone commented on how cool it was that they didn't have to lug their own bottles to the party and watch them mysteriously disappear from the fridge, leaving them sober and dispondent and having to make a beer-run to the filty nonstop around the corner.

The party was also gender balanced, which impressed everyone. Very international as well, in the picture above are a pole, a czech, an irishman, a texan, an englishman, a portugeeseishman (?), and a quebecoisier-bastard. There was also a guy from Wisconsin, which confused everyone.

My mistake was to take shots with the guy from wisconsin. he found my stash of slivovice, the deadly moravian plum-brandy. We ended up dancing at Akropolis at 3am, a situation that I blame entirely on the state of wisconsin and the province of moravia. damn them.

So the keg party was cool. we're going to try to do it again in December, leaving enough time for the little old ladies that live in the apts next to us to stop being so pissed off about the noise. But I do appreciate that they didn't call the cops on us, like your normal czech babushka.

Now I must go and lay down and wait for Sunday, when my hangover should finally go away.

Fridays

Aaah, Fridays. We’ve spent the last hour here at work trying to throw various markers and tape rolls into the shirt pocket of a colleague. In addition, we’ve changed the background of our colleagues’ computers to a tiled picture of other employees, leading to innuendo of deviant reproductive practices. Fridays at my office are nothing more than an 8-hour planning session for the weekend. My roommate and I are currently planning to have a party next Friday (the 14th), and have been shooting emails to each other on whom we should invite and who should get the cold shoulder. Someone I am not overly friendly with has just sent out invitations to his party – I believe I am not on the list. Bastard! I’ll just come anyway and chat with him like he’s my pal, then spike his drink with rohypnol and write swear words on his forehead with permanent marker. But I digress… There are some attractive new women in the office, so my teammates huddled together to discuss. I accused one colleague of checking out ‘all the new guys’, and laughter ensued. That’ll probably be the highlight of my day.

Trashy British People

British people are bizzare to me. As americans, we get fed a steady diet of Masterpiece Theater and proper english accents that, once heard, cause involuntary lactation. On the other hand, Britain still manages to have a significant quantity of white trash. Several of the people at my office, while respectable, have totally incomprehensible accents, and definitely don't act like proper british gentlemen. Prague also suffers from roving bangs of british 'stag parties', which are like frat boys who never went to college and repress their latent gay feelings for each other by ill-advisedly spending their cash on the gypsy prostitutes on Wenceslas Square. This article perfectly describes the british white trash, or 'chav':

Mr. Carroll is an object of national fascination in part because of his apparently pathological criminality, and in part because he represents a kind of Briton known as a chav. Chavs, whether rich or poor, tend to favor gaudy jewelry and expensive-but-tacky clothes with big logos and to behave in a way that others find coarse or obnoxious. Male chavs wear tracksuits and baseball caps; female chavs pull their hair tightly back in buns or ponytails, a style known as a "council house facelift," from the term for public housing.

This is a fantastic description of their appearance! But how about for their activities...

Chav behavior - outrageous spending sprees, drunken brawls, inappropriate public displays of affection, screaming matches with loved ones in bars, destruction of property, late-night stumbling and/or vomiting - provide celebrity magazines here with much of their material.

The article itself is about the 'Lotto Lout', a chav that won about 16mil dollars in the lottery. It's hysterical, so check it out. I decided to check the Wikipedia article on Chavs as well. Some highlights -Chavs apparently used to be called 'Yobs'. It doesn't explain why... -They're known for hanging around places called 'chavaramas' -Actually the wikipedia article is hilarious, and I recommend reading it as well. This is just a reminder that no society can escape trashy young people. Every country, no matter what its reputation, creates dumbass kids who harass older people trying to make money or excercise or shop or generally do something other than oogle trashy-looking girls.