The life and times of Gustav

Lately I’ve been quite crap at updating the blog, but one person has stayed true. Don’t feel too good for him; he has vested interest. He wants his story to be heard. And, really, who am I to stop him?

So I’ve decided that I will kick off my return to blogging with a condensed version of his life.

The life and times of Gustav

Gustav was born in Sweden where he learned Swedish. At the age of 23 he moved to Munich in search of a new life and a more Swedish hair colour. 

He met a strapping lad by the name of Simon and a crazy-haired lass by the name of Agnes on a debaucherous night out at the Hofbräuhaus which included – but was not limited to – the climbing of greasy cranes and cramming schnitzels down heaving gullets at four in the morning. 

After that everyone became fast friends. 

Also critical to the story is Emilia, who is curiously both Norwegian and Swedish, and Mark, who is random.

You could say that Gustav’s life in Munich was going rather well – he was working his way through intensive German courses, immer doing well and immer telling delightful stories that few people can remember. But one thing still stood in his way; his hair was a worryingly dark shade of blond.

“Oh no!” he exclaimed upon looking at himself in the mirror one day, “what will the other super blonde, super attractive Swedes say? They’re immer walking around with blonde hair!”

Luckily Gustav could rely on Simon, Emilia and a homebrand hair bleach. 

On one fateful day in February he knocked down the door of The Palace de Geyerstrasse and demanded that its inhabitants strap his head up in a giant condom and smother it with a white paste.

Reluctantly Simon agreed and spent several minutes prying beige-coloured tufts out from underneath the latex cover. 

Gustav roared with laughter, “I look so cool!”

And dared another person to coat him in bleach. At first nobody spoke up, then slowly a wayward hand crept forward and lifted a finger in interest...

 ...but instead Mark's sister, Jess, bravely took up the challenge. 

She slaved over Gustav's locks and watched in amazement as they turned the colour of gold, while everybody silently feared that they might fall off. 

The room was thick with anticipation as Gustav disappeared into the bathroom and maddened laughter could be heard from within - an unfortunate side-effect of the chemicals. 

Finally he emerged, looking one-third more Swedish.

He pondered his new look

and joyfully exclaimed, "I'm ready to meet the woman on this box. Look guys I think she likes me. She's immer looking my way."

And he lived happily ever after.

The End

Censored

Some things should never see the light of day.

Once of these things are NYE photos, which our gorgeous friend Lucie has been humane enough not to put anywhere public.

But because I don’t want all of you to miss out on having a good laugh at my expense, I’d like to describe them to you.

Picture a couch. A rather large couch. A large couch which is nonetheless struggling under the weight of my person. A person which is struggling to stay within the bounds of the black dress it is wearing.

On this couch, from left to right, there is:

Mark who is gazing a little hazily at the camera through red eyes, giving the impression that he’s spent most of his afternoon prying sharp, destructive objects repeatedly into his retinas.

Simon, whose recent visit to the solarium has rendered him excessively red and shiny when exposed to the flash of a camera (but perfectly fine when seen in natural light), who is attempting to act nonchalant by rolling his eyes into the back of his head.

And me.

Actually let’s talk about me. Because, despite everything, it’s hard to focus on Simon and Mark due to the sheer amount of photo space being taken up by my cascading flesh.

Oblivious to the desperate way in which my stomach is attempting to reach for the cake by crawling out of the sleeves of my dress, I am beaming with drunk pride looking every bit like the poster-girl for Spam.  

Spam. Almost like meat…but not quite!

Once more for emphasis

BEFORE:

AFTER:

Why it’s a good idea to speak German before going to a German hairdresser:

It was coming up to my birthday and my hair was getting long, which meant that unless I could find a hardware store (to get some gardening clippers or maybe a diamond-blade saw)…or alternatively a party with a theme like “Things that make you shout “kill it before it eats a baby!””, it was time to seek professional help.

The only thing standing in my way was my inability to communicate in German.

Kein Problem!

The chappy I stumbled upon at the only salon open on New Year’s Eve seemed very keen to help me out and kept repeating “beautiful. I make them beautiful.”

He seemed sincere.

In my broken German I said something along the lines of “shorter, but not too short.”

He indicated that he understood by moving his hand to show two centimetres.

I gave him the okay sign and he grabbed the scissors.

I began to worry when forty minutes later HE WOULDN’T STOP CUTTING MY HAIR.

He was like a crazed man, mumbling “beautiful” as he hacked and sliced.

Panic overcame me when he asked me to stand up, face my chair and rest my palms on the seat so that he could slice from a different angle.

And then HE KEPT CUTTING.

The entire process lasted more than an hour (and far more than two centimetres).

This is me on a good hair day:

Bad tourists

I don’t think I’ve quite confessed to this before, but Mark and I suck as tourists. We still haven’t been inside a single museum and the list of things that we should have seen, but haven’t, could be turned into a guide book.

But since Mark’s sister is in town, we decided to curb our bad habits and show her everything that Munich has to offer (because there’s loads).

Unfortunately our initial attempts started dismally. We promised Jessie a fantastic walking tour that would fill her with knowledge and memories, and instead we joined the ranks of a disenchanted, rude, arrogant and racist tour guide. His name escapes me but all you need to know about him was that he told a lovely-looking Italian woman that if her English wasn’t good enough to keep up with what he was hammering out at 100 words a second, she had better pay for a private tour because he wasn’t going to slow down for her.

We gave him several chances to redeem himself, but the dude just wouldn’t take them. The entire incident would have been painful and not worth mentioning if not for a misdirected ice-breaker. After ten minutes of insulting everyone in the tour, as well as some passers-by who were speaking too loudly for his liking, the guide decided to gain some rapport by getting everybody involved in a team naming activity. He threw up suggestions of past team names like Team Awesome and Team Beer…just in case you were wondering; we were a group of 36 adults.

People started to uncomfortably shuffle their feet, avoiding eye contact so as not to get berated by him any more than they already had, when out of nowhere Simon’s voice rang out loud and clear “Team Patronising?” Several people giggled. Several held their breath. The guide ignored it and chose to dub the team Team Poopy Pants.

We left shortly after.

Luckily when we started the tour we had bumped into Simon’s Deutsch Akademie friend, Julia, her boyfriend and a friend who was visiting from Russia and they – being good Munich citizens and tourists – suggested that we go to the BMW museum. So we went.

Minutes later there we were, surrounded by cars, diagrams, television screens, engines, interactive games and all we did was jump from bike to bike. 

 

We’re just bad tourists like that.

Our brush with death

So there we were, innocently sipping our delicious German beverages (Glühwein, heiß Apfelsaft mit something or other and the like) at our local hangout, the Jazzy-C – you may know it for being the workplace of a particularly tardy waitress – when, out of nowhere, we were violated.

Mark was in the middle of commenting on my sideburns, I was snorting Glühwein through my nostrils, Jess was picking her jaw off the floor and Simon was juggling pity and disgust when, suddenly, a wiry crazed hobo with a laptop materialised at our table. One minute it was all merriment and “hahaha Agnes doesn’t have side burns” in reproachful but uncertain tones and the next it was incomprehensible German sneering. In German. In clear, but nonetheless completely impenetrable, German.

Like “ich ven$&#^sdf vboisb$#%sdn”, meaning something like “I despise you. If my unwashed ponytail wasn’t holding me back I’d shit on all your faces”. 

For several surreal seconds the crazy continued to stare us down and spit angry words through his teeth, one hand squeezing an empty chair at the end of our table – a quiet reminder that he wasn’t afraid of modern-baroque velour.

We gave him our best stunned expressions; the innocent kind that say “it’s not our fault that one of us may or may not have sideburns” and asked him in polite German to repeat himself.

This maddened him. Take this as a lesson: never ask a crazed hobo to do such a thing. He raved and ranted stabbing us all with his eyes before finally shouting “SHIT IN BRAINS” (in perfectly clear English) and storming out.

We still can’t work out what he said or why he chose to accost our table, but now we go to Jazzy-C armed to the teeth.