Hi! How’s it going! It has certainly been a while.

As is the case with all my posts these days, I’ll start with an explanation on why it has taken me so damned long to post a new update. The only difference this time, is that I’ve got a legitimate excuse. Yes. Really. I’m in the midst of crunch mode at work. For those of you who don’t know, “crunch” , as it is effectionately known in the games industry is that special time in a games development in which the amount of work left to do exceeds the time left to do it in. Yay. This has also been compounded for me, in that my teammate has been on holidays for the last three weeks, and I’ve been doing the work of two people.

But just because I’ve been working for faar too long doesn’t mean that I haven’t got a whole range of wacky and interesting tales to regale you with. I’ll start with Munich.

On the first long weekend of May, myself, Callina, Daphne and Zarina went to visit Germany. It’s sorta funny, despite wanting to go to Europe for ages, Germany has never really been on my must go to list. I am happy to report that this was entirely unjustified, because Munich was an awesome place.

To give a bit of an overview, the whole place seemed built around the concept of chillaxing. It was about sitting around with friends, drinking beer, eating giant pretzels, and having fun. I took to this like a duck to water.

As I sit here writing this, Cal came up to me and told me to include the following statement in the post: That Munich is like a characature of a German town – and I totally agree with this. The beer was flowing, the whenches were busty, the bicycles were numerous, and the leiderhosen was proudly displayed. It really was like something out of an episode of the Simpsons.

The beer proved a challenge initially – especially on the first day. After wandering around all day and sampling some (well a lot) of the food available, we came upon our first beer garden. And all the beer was in steins. And it called out to me. I was full, but I had to have one. The following was the result:

But practice makes perfect right?

Moving on – I’d like to offer a tip to all the many male readers of this blog. If you’re going to plan a trip to Amsterdam, don’t go with two girls. I would like to clarify this by saying that both Cal and Daph are fantastic travel companions, but unfortunately for me I overestimated their desire to go and explore the seedier parts of town. Which is really quite strange. I would’ve thought that all females would enjoy wandering around the red light district surrounded by prositutes, drug dealers, sex shops, and worst of all creepy english men on bucks weekends. But hey, you live you learn.

We did have a fantastic time though – unfortunately most of it is unfit to print, especially with my dearest grandma no doubt reading. It does however present me with a fantastic opportunity to try out a new plugin for the board I’ve been testing. It’s called the censor-o-matic and it seals all sensitive information from the delicate eyes of our grandmothers. So here goes:

Luckily for you, (and my Grandma) there was a whole lot of other news that was fit to print. I’ll start with the Flower show. This was the main reason for Cal and Daph’s desire to go to Amsterdam – and while trying to retain as much as my masculinity as possible, it was fairly justified. It was a big park about an hour out of town filled with fields of tulips, pipe organs, and many many tourists. Unfortunately for us we’d left it a little late in the season to visit, and half of the tulips were dead or harvested, but there was still plenty to see.

And Photograph.

The girls went somewhat bezerk in this department – I estimate out of all the photos we took between us over the long weekend, easily three quarters of them were doing arty closeup shots with tulips. This wasn’t really my thing, so I wandered off and spent the day snoozing on the grass in the sun. Not half bad at all.

And then there was Supper Club, something that is quite unlike anything I’ve ever been to. It’s a restaurant. But not. It’s a club. But not. It’s a bizarre fetish theatre, but not. It’s all of those things. The evening essentially went like this: We arrive, and after confirming our booking, we are assigned a bed for the evening. Yes, we were embracing something that if I were to do it at home would set Cally alight with rage – the whole evening you eat in bed. The food was a five course set meal, except you don’t know what it is, nor do you have any choice in what you get. You pay, and they bring food to you. They further pushed the status quo by not offering knives or forks for some dishes. We were simply given latex gloves and prompted to use our hands. There was a perfomance piece about half way throug – a guy came out dresseed as some sort of angry drunk clown came out and ate a cake. Yes. That was the show, but it was awesome.

And then there was the mspaint performance art.

I’m a massive fan of mspaint. It’s a simple, rather featureless drawing program that has been included with windows since Windows 95 (or eariler), and has an amusing habit of making anything drawn in it look like crap. Now I’m part of various “hip” internet communities in which anything made in mspaint is “so bad it’s good”. But at Supperclub things were different. They had a Mspaint artist. His name was Nicholas, and he had his laptop hooked up to a projector on the club’s main wall, and he’d draw random stuff as we ate.

I don’t quite know how she does it, but Cally managed to befriend Nicholas, and commissioned the following work:

! Gah! It seems I don’t have a copy of it. Daph! Hurry up and upload it!

How goddamn awesome is that?

So the food finishes, and the club winds down, and Nicholas and his friends suggest we go visit “A quaint Amsterdam establishment”. To which we readily agreed. Now I have to interrupt my own story here and add one crucial bit of information: Nicholas was Gay. It wasn’t until we were led inside the Gay bar that I realised how that might effect the night. But it turned out to be pretty cool. Nicholas introduced us to some of his friends, and we danced for a few hours, which was a lot of fun. I will add though that I was dissapointed noone tried to pick me up. I’m willing to put that down to me looking far too handsome and faar too straight for any of them – and not Nicholas constantly telling everyone I was there with Cal.

On Sunday, aside from a shared hangover, we spent the day mostly doing our own thing. I used the opportunity to resign to the fact that I wasn’t going to get the girls to go to the Sex or Erotica museums, so I went to these on my own. I made a concious decision to keep my hands out of my pockets while there. I have to say though, that they were genuinely interesting places, and I think the girls missed out. They had exhibits on erotica in ancient greek, japanese and hindu cultures, which was quite interesting in comparisson to modern stuff. I also went to the World Press Photography exhibition, which was on at an old church in the middle of the red light district. And it totally blew me away. I’ve never been so effected by photos before in my life. They were all so powerful, and so poignant – I was getting goosebumps with every step. This was my favourite, but I highly recommend you visit the website linked above and have a look at the rest, or better yet, go and see the exhibition when it hits your city (it tours the world). You wont regret it.

And that’s about it. Thanks for sticking with me through this long post – I hope you enjoyed it. With work dying down in a month or two, hopefully I’ll have a chance to update a bit more. Speak to you all soon.