The Pied Piper of Stockholm

Hello again!

So this past Sunday I went to the 1-year birthday party of a friend's daughter. And let me tell ya: 20+ kids in one room can be awesome, frightening, pure chaos and super fun all at the same time! Sarah didn't come since she had some work to do and really deserved (and probably needed) a break from her daughter and her husband. We can both be pretty annoying at times, but most of the times we are awesome.

For example. Here is Olive being pretty awesome:



Awesome on-command dance moves FTW! (FTW = For The Win, for those non-nerds among you)

Now, I don't know if you knew this, but not only people you know can be awesome (wow, did I just write a sentence with two "know"s and one "knew"? Guess I did). Sometimes, you stumble upon complete strangers that are pretty awesome. And it just so happened that Olive and I ran into an awesome person on subway ride home back from the party. Well at least I thought he was awesome. Opinions will be polarized is my guess.

So, it was this 13 year old kid (I am guessing he was 13, but I'm usually pretty bad at guessing children's ages) who sort of looked like he ran away from home (this is not the awesome part by the way. Olive, please don't run away from home!!!) and was traveling with his 3 pet rats. Yes, three pet rats. As in Rattus rattus. Or maybe they were Rattus norvegicus, but let us not worry about the technicalities. Now, I knew that some of you might think: "OK. Mayu ran out of things to say and is now making shit up!" So I took a picture. I didn't ask him or anything, I just used my super secret spying device, a.k.a. iPhone and pretended to do something on it, while really I was taking a picture. Sneaky, sneaky. I think he didn't notice. At least he didn't send his rat army to attack me. So, if proof is what you want, proof is what you get:

Yeah. There he is. The Pied Piper of Stockholm (minus the pipe).

Not only was he traveling with his awesome herd of pet rats, but he was also wearing a Carlsberg t-shirt. One of my favorite beers and definitely the beer with the most awesome commercials (as you can see here). Yes, even better than the Heineken commercial. At least I think so. If I had to say one negative thing about this kid it would be that that tattoo on his hand was not ready. He just drew it with a pen.

What do you guys think? Are rats awesome or disgusting? Those are the only two options so get off your fence! On a side note, my sister used to have an albino pet rat. Don't let this fact influence your answer though. You can still say rats are disgusting, even if you like my sister.

So I will be ending this post shortly, but I thought I would introduce a recurring "feature" in my blogs: Mayu's Fun Facts. These will be lesser known bits of information that could be useful in very specific situations, but will be completely useless in the vast majority of situations. They may or may not be related to the topic of the post. So here it goes.

Mayu's Fun Fact #1:

Rats cannot sweat. Instead they have to use their hairless tail to regulate their body temperature.

Now, this information will be worthless most of the time. But what if one day you encounter a rat that has been the victim of some kids that were up to no good and they covered their entire tail with tape. If you didn't know this you might not be concerned. How harmful can a bit of tape be? Right? Well, in this specific scenario tape can be deadly! So one day, one very unlikely day but still, Mayu's Fun Fact #1 will safe some poor rat's ass. :-)

Until next time!