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!

Of birds and other annoying things.

 You know what's annoying? Birds! Yes. Fucking birds! (I guess I gave that away in the title, didn't I?)


Your daughter is sleeping through the night after months of night-wakings and then, the fucking birds start coming out again, because its spring or something, and start making the most annoying sounds you could ever imagine! Right outside your bedroom window!


Now, you might say: "Mayu, just close the window." In theory, that is a great idea, except Sarah get's really hot at night and demands to sleep with the window open. So I guess it is all her fault! But that's OK. She is pregnant after all. :-) Sorry about the rant, but it had to be said.


Oh, by the way, you might have thought that I was exaggerating with the tomato plants thing on my last blog post. "How many plants could Sarah really have planted?" - you may ask. Well see for yourselves:

Yes. Those are all tomato plants. The thing is that when Sarah planted these she didn't know that 70% of all tomato seeds will actually become plants. "Come on Mayu, that doesn't look that bad." Well, Sarah also didn't know that every plant, once it becomes a bit bigger, will need a gigantic fucking pot! Yes. Each plant needs a giant pot like the ones you see on those chairs. 


Those chairs that used to be for humans. That means that all those little plants you see by the window will be needing huge pots. I don't even think we have that many chairs.


Oh, and the plants you see here are not all of them. There are more in Olive's room and Rachel already took like a thousand. So yeah. It's a lot of tomato plants.


I guess I should be happy because I will be eating tomatoes for free for the rest of my life. Thing is, I don't even like tomatoes that much. Any ways, enough about the tomato plants. I guess I will just have to deal with it.


So, other than the birds and the tomato plants that are taking over the apartment like some kind of really aggressive mold, the day was actually pretty good. I mean, there were still some annoying parts, but hey, it's not realistic to not have any annoyances at all, right?


We finally found a cheap grocery store close to us (Lidl). It's just a few stops south of us on the train and we never knew about it until like last week! Amazing. Guess we should have tried going the other direction on the train some time sooner. Or just asked a neighbour or something. It's just that the further south you go, the more graffiti you see, and we all know what graffiti means: GHEEEEEETTOOOOOOOOOOO! But then Sarah mentioned that Berlin is practically covered in graffiti, so I guess I am from the ghetto. Touche Sarah. Tou...che! (Don't judge me if I spelled that wrong. It's French after all.)


Later a friend came over with his daughter and Olive and her played outside. The thing about Olive and the outside is that it can either be really awesome, or really annoying. This afternoon, it was more on the annoying side. See, Olive loves to destroy plants. And usually I am all for that (as long as they are not on our property), but today, of all plants out there, she picked the one with these huge thorns! I warned her that she would hurt herself, but she didn't listen. So she hurt herself. She cried and cried. Then calmed down and as soon as I put her down again, she ran back to that same stupid plant! I guess 13 month old humans do not have the ability to learn from their mistakes yet. So really it was a lose - lose situation. If I took her away from the plant, she would cry. If I let her play with the plant, she would sting herself and cry. So I let her sting herself. Then we went inside.


In other news: Olive and Minuet (one of our obese cats) are now officially friends after being enemies for a loooooong time.

Cute. 

So, I guess I should wrap this up since Sarah is waiting for me to watch The Time Traveller's Wife. She is really excited about this movie because she loved the book, but it got shit reviews, so I am not so excited. But nonetheless I will watch it. The things you do for love.

Any ways, hope you guys had a nice Saturday too and if you want, you can tell me what kind of things you find annoying in the comments. :-)

Until next time!