there's nothing like finding out you're even a bigger ass than you thought you were. last friday when i was partying with my work homies, at one point we were recounting previous drinking debacles, and it was brought up that one time we were out and one of the girls was taking pictures, and i was so loaded that in one swift motion, i grabbed her camera, stuck it in my jeans, took a picture and handed it back to her. i'd totally forgotten about this, though after they brought it up as one of the hall-of-famers, i did get some vague, ugly flashbacks. haha. yup, i'm an idiot.. and everyone at the entire publishing company i work for has seen my UNIT. apparently it created a pretty clear pic, and wound up as the girl's screen saver at work for a while afterwards. at least when you're that disgraced, there's not much further down you can sink. if you can survive that and still have a job, you know you've found a home. sometimes i feel like my work colleagues are my family.
anyway, yeah, i'm back from my trip now. like i said, last friday was spent out with the work crew and included the usual drunken fun. plus i got to make out hardcore with this really cute indy chick named Zoe. so that was cool.
anyway, here are some bad, murky phone cam pics:
below is my boss peter who i think is saying "duuuuuude" in this pic. i don't know if i'm proud or ashamed to be helping proliferate the term 'dude' in britain - it seems like i've been personally responsible for getting some people addicted - but oh well. next to him is nick, another one of the top editors. i think he despises me, but he keeps trying to get me to work for him nonetheless, so he must be a very pragmatic guy, which i respect:
below is joel. he's a cool dude:
below is kalpesh, our new ad guy. he seems like a really nice guy. hopefully we didn't scare him:
below is a really nice pic of sarah, who is hands-down one of my favorite people there - smart, cool, you name it. hopefully she's not pissed at me for any roguish behaviour that night; i still need to give her a call:
below is punk as fuck me:
below is joanne. the get-together was sort of a combination good-bye send-off for her and iain. i always got the distinct impression she didn't like me much. but maybe i'm just paranoid:
below is kind of a hard-to-see pic of brian (in the foreground), who recently returned to the staff after an absence of several years. it was the first time i'd met him in person. he works for us from poland. i really liked him; he's intelligent, likes politics, good sense of humour, etc. although i overheard him and peter talking finances that night - i guarantee peter will pay him more than me, even though i'm better and have more time in at the mag because brian is british and i'm not. ah well
kind of hard to see, but this is peter striking a hiphop / crotch-grab / gang-sign pose - something else i'm not sure if i'm proud to have taught him:
this is a not very good one of me and iain:
this is me and iain's fianc (they just announced that they're getting married - awesome). her name is pronounced "rydah," as in "rider," but i'm not sure how it's spelled because she's finnish, so it's probably an unusual spelling by english standards. she is very cool and cute:
this is sarah and her boyfriend richie:
this is me and Zoe. hot make out sesh. good times:
anyway, after that i flew to hamburg for about a week to cover this thing. iain went too, and so did a bunch of other people. last tuesday, i met up with iain and some other people at some irish pub in central hamburg called Finnegans Wake. most people called it quits around midnight, so iain and i headed down to a street called Reeperbahn, which is a well-known sex district famous for its aggressive eastern european street walkers. and, man, that is a well deserved rep, because these chicks were almost violent in their attempts to get you to pay for a suck-off. the ones i saw were amazingly hot as well. weird. the whole street kind of reminded me of the pigalle district in paris, only a lot more sleazy. which is cool with me - that's my type of atmosphere.
anyway, iain knows his way around Reeperbahn pretty well, so he led us down this one side street with a bunch of stripper places on it. this is what it looked like:
we went into a stripper bar called The Doll House, and, man, i gotta say, i've been in my fair share of stripper bars, and these chicks were smokin.
the whole time we were around Reeperbahn, iain, who is like this fast-talking, swaggering Essex dude, kept teaching me the ropes about how to operate in the sex district of hamburg:
"Now listen mate, the thing you've got to remember about Hamburg is, that the whole place is designed to just suck you're fucking money out of you - everybody is trying to rip you off here. The key is, you've got to negotiate right up front, and get it nailed down exactly what it is that you're going to get for your money before you give them anything. Otherwise they're going to rip you off, pal."
that was iain's mantra the whole night: "Be sure you know exactly what you're getting up front. Stick by me, pal, I'll show you how it's done."
well, with a build-up like that, it was perhaps inevitable, given god's cruel nature, that iain wound up getting ripped off for about 180 euros in the Doll House that night. something he wasn't too pleased about when this was discovered. the evening culminated at about 4am with our table surrounded by naked chicks and iain furiously objecting and renegotiating with them. haha, awesome. moments like that make life worth living.
but proving that you can't keep good men down, iain and i were back at the Doll House the very next night, and this time with about six others in tow, including two pretty cute chicks - emma and sophia. it was the first time emma and sophia had been to a strip club - they were hesitant at first, but at the last minute i managed to talk them in to joining us blokes inside. i love taking people to strip clubs for their first time - especially girls. sophia especially - sophia was this really nice, sweet girl; just out of school, and this was her first job, she had just started, and this was her first business trip. haha, she was probably nervously prepared for some really hyper-professional experience in hamburg, and instead she gets a bunch of company ne'er-do-wells dragging her to a strip bar in the city's red light district. she was very shy and reserved, and i got the impression that she came from a very traditional family - she appeared to be of indian descent. the expressions on her face all night said so much about the world. i genuinely liked her.
anyway, it was a really fun night full of drink and chick and naked and laughter. the others left at about 2am, and, like the night before, iain and i closed the place out at 4, just sitting around bullshitting. then we headed out to Reeperbahn, got a couple of cabs, said our good-byes, and that was that. maybe the last time i'll ever get to hang with iain, because that hamburg trip was the last thing he was doing for the company before he moves onto his new job at a major london daily. kind of sucks. i was beginning to feel like i'd found a proper "mate."
oh well, in his drunkenness in london he insisted i come to his wedding, so hopefully that will happen. should be a nice party - planned to take place in finland.
oh yeah, this is some video i shot in the Doll House. there was no photography allowed, so i had to do it on the sly, so you can't see shit. but you can hear a few seconds of iain explaining the purpose of our visit to the club:
now i've got to move all my shit to the new apartment by Dec 31, and also get the january issue done by deadline. impossible? probably. but if i fail, i'm going to fail with some style, dammit!
anyway, yeah, i'm back from my trip now. like i said, last friday was spent out with the work crew and included the usual drunken fun. plus i got to make out hardcore with this really cute indy chick named Zoe. so that was cool.
anyway, here are some bad, murky phone cam pics:
below is my boss peter who i think is saying "duuuuuude" in this pic. i don't know if i'm proud or ashamed to be helping proliferate the term 'dude' in britain - it seems like i've been personally responsible for getting some people addicted - but oh well. next to him is nick, another one of the top editors. i think he despises me, but he keeps trying to get me to work for him nonetheless, so he must be a very pragmatic guy, which i respect:
below is joel. he's a cool dude:
below is kalpesh, our new ad guy. he seems like a really nice guy. hopefully we didn't scare him:
below is a really nice pic of sarah, who is hands-down one of my favorite people there - smart, cool, you name it. hopefully she's not pissed at me for any roguish behaviour that night; i still need to give her a call:
below is punk as fuck me:
below is joanne. the get-together was sort of a combination good-bye send-off for her and iain. i always got the distinct impression she didn't like me much. but maybe i'm just paranoid:
below is kind of a hard-to-see pic of brian (in the foreground), who recently returned to the staff after an absence of several years. it was the first time i'd met him in person. he works for us from poland. i really liked him; he's intelligent, likes politics, good sense of humour, etc. although i overheard him and peter talking finances that night - i guarantee peter will pay him more than me, even though i'm better and have more time in at the mag because brian is british and i'm not. ah well
kind of hard to see, but this is peter striking a hiphop / crotch-grab / gang-sign pose - something else i'm not sure if i'm proud to have taught him:
this is a not very good one of me and iain:
this is me and iain's fianc (they just announced that they're getting married - awesome). her name is pronounced "rydah," as in "rider," but i'm not sure how it's spelled because she's finnish, so it's probably an unusual spelling by english standards. she is very cool and cute:
this is sarah and her boyfriend richie:
this is me and Zoe. hot make out sesh. good times:
anyway, after that i flew to hamburg for about a week to cover this thing. iain went too, and so did a bunch of other people. last tuesday, i met up with iain and some other people at some irish pub in central hamburg called Finnegans Wake. most people called it quits around midnight, so iain and i headed down to a street called Reeperbahn, which is a well-known sex district famous for its aggressive eastern european street walkers. and, man, that is a well deserved rep, because these chicks were almost violent in their attempts to get you to pay for a suck-off. the ones i saw were amazingly hot as well. weird. the whole street kind of reminded me of the pigalle district in paris, only a lot more sleazy. which is cool with me - that's my type of atmosphere.
anyway, iain knows his way around Reeperbahn pretty well, so he led us down this one side street with a bunch of stripper places on it. this is what it looked like:
we went into a stripper bar called The Doll House, and, man, i gotta say, i've been in my fair share of stripper bars, and these chicks were smokin.
the whole time we were around Reeperbahn, iain, who is like this fast-talking, swaggering Essex dude, kept teaching me the ropes about how to operate in the sex district of hamburg:
"Now listen mate, the thing you've got to remember about Hamburg is, that the whole place is designed to just suck you're fucking money out of you - everybody is trying to rip you off here. The key is, you've got to negotiate right up front, and get it nailed down exactly what it is that you're going to get for your money before you give them anything. Otherwise they're going to rip you off, pal."
that was iain's mantra the whole night: "Be sure you know exactly what you're getting up front. Stick by me, pal, I'll show you how it's done."
well, with a build-up like that, it was perhaps inevitable, given god's cruel nature, that iain wound up getting ripped off for about 180 euros in the Doll House that night. something he wasn't too pleased about when this was discovered. the evening culminated at about 4am with our table surrounded by naked chicks and iain furiously objecting and renegotiating with them. haha, awesome. moments like that make life worth living.
but proving that you can't keep good men down, iain and i were back at the Doll House the very next night, and this time with about six others in tow, including two pretty cute chicks - emma and sophia. it was the first time emma and sophia had been to a strip club - they were hesitant at first, but at the last minute i managed to talk them in to joining us blokes inside. i love taking people to strip clubs for their first time - especially girls. sophia especially - sophia was this really nice, sweet girl; just out of school, and this was her first job, she had just started, and this was her first business trip. haha, she was probably nervously prepared for some really hyper-professional experience in hamburg, and instead she gets a bunch of company ne'er-do-wells dragging her to a strip bar in the city's red light district. she was very shy and reserved, and i got the impression that she came from a very traditional family - she appeared to be of indian descent. the expressions on her face all night said so much about the world. i genuinely liked her.
anyway, it was a really fun night full of drink and chick and naked and laughter. the others left at about 2am, and, like the night before, iain and i closed the place out at 4, just sitting around bullshitting. then we headed out to Reeperbahn, got a couple of cabs, said our good-byes, and that was that. maybe the last time i'll ever get to hang with iain, because that hamburg trip was the last thing he was doing for the company before he moves onto his new job at a major london daily. kind of sucks. i was beginning to feel like i'd found a proper "mate."
oh well, in his drunkenness in london he insisted i come to his wedding, so hopefully that will happen. should be a nice party - planned to take place in finland.
oh yeah, this is some video i shot in the Doll House. there was no photography allowed, so i had to do it on the sly, so you can't see shit. but you can hear a few seconds of iain explaining the purpose of our visit to the club:
now i've got to move all my shit to the new apartment by Dec 31, and also get the january issue done by deadline. impossible? probably. but if i fail, i'm going to fail with some style, dammit!