mokudekiru

Weirdest night so far in Lund.

Part 1: Dirty children’s songs at a Sittning

The night started with a sittning at Krischansta nation. A sittning is apparently the traditional Swedish way to party – you sit at a really long table and eat and drink and sing — they give you a song book with song lyrics in it, and there’s a person in charge of telling people when to sing. Normally all the singing would be Swedish, but this was a sittning organized by the Erasmus Student Network, so it was only for foreigners and most of the songs were English (and a few various other languages).

Many of the songs, however, were extremely dirty. And involved sexual positions/preferences of either girls, or worse, cartoon characters (I know way too much about the private life of Yoggi Bear now).

Our table:

Oscar was in charge of leading the singing:

Other side of the table:

Sometimes we had to stand on our chairs while singing too:

After the sittning was over, they cleared out the tables to make room for the dancefloor and the Kristchansta pub/club started. It looked like this:

Part 2: Awkward dancing and the mystery of the disappearing iPhone

Now, I’ve been to a ton of club nights so far. Usually I don’t have a huge problem with unwanted advances, and if you’re not up for meeting new people it’s pretty easy to stick with your friends (due to the non-grinding rule of swedish dancing). But for some reason, tonight, several guys of various nationalities decided with great certainty that I was highly interested in dancing with them for extended periods of time. I’m really not sure where they got this from — probably the lack of eye contact. After awkward dancing encounter #2 or so, I realized my phone was gone!!! DISASTER!!! I figured it had fallen out of my pocket on the dancefloor and that someone would eventually return it to one of the bars or counters (or that it would be trampled, but I didn’t see any iPhone crumbs on the ground).

So phoneless and avoiding a large percentage of the attendees at this club, at some point I went to the bathroom just to take a breather.

Part 3: Strange Bathroom Encounter

The girls’ bathroom had 4 stalls, and 2 sinks. When I walked in, there were about 5 girls standing in front of the mirror doing makeup or washing hands, and all the stalls were full. After about 30 seconds, two guys walked out of two of the stalls simultaneously. People here apparently don’t take the gender segregation of bathrooms very seriously. Actually, there seem to be hardly any bathrooms that are even separated by genders — most bathrooms are just 1 room for each toilet/sink anyway, but I’ve seen some larger bathrooms with stalls that are also coed. Anyway, I digress.

So the dudes walk out of the stalls, and despite all the other people there (maybe it’s because I was giving them a weird look) they started talking specifically to me. Our conversation went like this. My commentary in italics.

One of the Dudes: Hej.
Me: Hej…? (but probably it was actually “hey” since I have an American accent)
Dude: Whatcha doing?
Me: Umm… just chillin’, I guess
Dude: Who just chills in the bathroom??
(so first they come into MY bathroom and then question ME what I’m doing there? Do not understand)
Me: I dunno, it happens.
Dude: I’m a guy so I don’t really understand the concept of “just chillin'” in the bathroom
(I’m pretty sure that by having this conversation with me they were, in fact, “chillin’ in the bathroom”)
*Awkward pause where we stare at each other*
Dudes: Well, see ya.
Me: Bye…?

Then they left.

Part 4: Meeting Swedes and the great iPhone search

If this night is sounding just full of awkward, here’s the part where it takes a turn for the slightly better. I found some cool Swedish people to talk to while I waited for the club to end. Once the lights went on, I asked everyone working at the pub/club/door to look for this phone, and after about 15 minutes, someone said they’d found it! She had seen it on the dancefloor, taken it into the kitchen, but then claimed it had disappeared once more. She did eventually recover my phone though, for which I was quite grateful. I worked hard to get that thing to work here.

Part 5: Chili-chocolate ice cream

This was probably the most successful part of the night. Ian and Jack walked me back to Sparta in exchange for snacks. My favorite Swedish ice cream flavor, chili-choklad, was involved. It’s mostly just chocolate ice cream but then you occasionally get a spicy piece of chili pepper. I swear it’s better than it sounds.

And proof that my korridor keeps its countertops clean and shiny: