Midnight in Paris

Some game at the Chiquito bar

And so it turns out. I go at it, the nightlife of Paris. An leisurely adventure filled with clubs and electronic beats? Well not quite this time. As I have my humble but not unappreciated place to recooperate a bit outside of Paris, it's not easy to get in and out just without further adue. Just a few stops away from Versilles is a whole bunch of stops too many to make it back after hitting up the bars. But the bars are bars, French bars. Bars packed with soul and character. In fact as the clock strickes 04 I get to see quite a few of these characters in and outside the bar I'm chilling out in. Although a coffee isen't available on the meny a plate of fries and a beer are. Not the worst of companions for writing a bit in the night. One of the worst for staying in shape though

=(

Mr.Goodseed (Bongrain) A very french young man in so many ways

After my coffee with Charles Bongrain (goodseed if you choose to translate names) so close to fountain st. Michael that we could almost have been sitting in it it was time for me to head on to the party. The locale of the party was conveniently located at the beginning of rue du Menilmontant, a cozy little place called "Chiquito" would hold most of my night. Beers for 2.50 Mojito for 5 and "Monaco" for 2 are not a bad deal going out. Well at least not coming from Sweden. For those of you that are wondering why I'm even mentioning a "Monaco" it's because this drink is new to me. So from what I heard from my friendly bar-counter neighbour is that it's a sweet beer for girls, her words not mine. In it is fruity sweet syrup, carbonated water or tonic and beer. I could be mistaken on the tonic water. It could have been soda of some sort as well. I'll just have to try it next time I have a bar at my disposal. I'm a bit too afraid to order one at a random bar.

Sabrina the birthday kid and fille extraordinaire (on the left) and Métte also a fille extraordinaire (on the right) two dear Parsisian friends of mine =) 

The Party was in tribute to my friend Sabrina who's 31^st birthday is was. One year wiser and maybe one year closer to death, of age as much as of the unlimited alcohol that was at her disposal tonight. Seriously though, It was a good gathering with plenty of open-minded and social people. And to my delight with varying English ability. Varying as it present to me the opportunity to try out some french. A gift gently wrapped with the boxing glove of unpreparedness my face made out with tonight. It was still fun though and the crowd was a bit from everywhere to even a few Spanish words came to use =)

Tour du France, the intoxicated night version

Walking from no26 rue du Melimontant to place du République is an interesting experience on a Saturday night. Not only because my newly acquired friend tried to talk me into sleeping at a random girls place as a over night solution with the argument that I don't have to sleep with them. After all girls do it all the time(this reminded me about one of those episodes from "how I met your mom"). But rather the social interaction that takes place on the streets in between. Streets like Oberkampf definitively shows a different french society than the touristy one. If you've ever head of french kickers and hudlums, this is one place they might hang out. But it's not that it's shady, only shady. It's also busseling with life and people from clubs and bars. As we three musketeers walked our way onward I received the general explanation of the places and I do have to say that a slightly drunken tour of the quarters of the night is way more entertaining than most tours I've ever been on. And I've been on a few (Yes I have Asian family, but this is not why).

the bar of destiny where all stragglers show up in the dead of night

Reaching my bar of destiny a hounded meeters from the place du République I get to witness a range of interesting characters. Each one most certainly having a untold story of adventure, rise and decline. Well for some mostly decline I guess. One of the more noteworthy "dudes" grabbing my attention is this man in his mid 40's slightly drunk and trying to talk to women walking up and down the street. With slightly drunk I mean the type of drunk where hard balancing acts like walking all the way on a big rode which one has to all himself would be considered a pass. So stumbling up and down the road then. The maybe best part might be that he could't really utter any coherent words. Although it be so that my french is preposterously inadequate to determine this. Either way the shower of saliva would with no doubt plug the targeted ear and effectively block all attempted communication. After a second though the funniest part was probably when the repeatedly pretended to talk to someone on his phone after a failed attempt. And believe you me, they all failed.

All characters here are not remarked by excessive drunkenness, but this one was.

Fellow commuters waiting for the first train out to the burbs

Stockholm Nights

After a short visit back home I'm now back to writing and traveling. Sort of. I realized that although Stockholm feels very much like my home town I'm  not really in touch with what others have seen and done in Stockholm. Sure the girls are nice and the city beautiful. There are so many other sides to my Stockholm though. Skipping the first fever ridden day of my home coming I'll share my second fever ridden night instead. Mind you that I'm not talking about some phenomenon like Stockholm feaver but an actual getting sick fever.
After being gone for a while the first thing that popes into ones mind is meeting up with friends and doing something really quaint. So we decided to do something we all had grown up with. Yup that's right a Gibb, a Haxx or a LAN gaming night as it is also called. This is when you chill out together and play computer games. A tradition starting early for me growing up in the suburbs of Stockholm. Growing up we used to haul our old stationary gaming machines of differing caliber over to each others houses or some communal building we had access too. A couple of times I think we even got some locale sponsored by our municipality.
Growing older and as laptops got more powerful an office or a lecture hall where the new spots of gaming and fiddling around with computers. Now although we could most likely scramble a few gaming machines we go old school and visited a gaming cafe to do our gaming. Being a bit older it's nice not to have to deal with the hassle of distributing all the games and such and making sure every machine works and all.

Although the more typical clientele of an internet cafe like inferno online are considerably younger than us we figured we'd have a great time anyway. Besides we'd probably kick ass with these kids anyway. Yup that's right we probably would. We're not your ordinary bunch of old school gamers. Having an previously no1 ladder ranked FFA WC3 player, a old national team captain in dota, ladder ranked no1 in 2v2 at SC2, previous QA lead at DICE, game designers and game development entrepreneurs and with more random remarks within the gaming world our bunch of peeps still managed to keep it civilized and all just for fun. I do guess we are getting older though since people started to drop off around 2am instead of the 8am customary retreat time.  Despite this and a few technical issues we still managed to play a list or recommended games.

• WC3 TFT dota
• Q2
• L4D2
• CS 1.6
• SC1

I guess reading this list does reflect on the fact that we are a bit old school. Still we had a good time and I recommend you to have a go at it while in Stockholm Sweden. After all we do host the largest LAN parties in the world and have a very very strong gaming culture.

The People of the After Work

Nightlife in KL is best kicked off with a after work in my opinion. Starting the night with a few cold ones to keep the humid heat at bay en enjoying some good company. The people of the after work are a expat and business oriented crowd. It consists largely of:

• Europeans and Americans
• Chinese Business People
• serial-cultural empyed locals

Europeans and Americans have a culture of after work and happily donates large chunks cash for the perks of sin taxed alcoholic beverages. Not only do they provide a physical cooling sensation but also loosens the nots in ones shoulders after a hard day at the office. But more than shoulders are loosened. Yes tongues are loosened as well and it's during after works (AWs) that a lot of stories are told. If you want to get the lay-down of a bunch of random things just sit down at a bunch of random tables close to a bunch of random expats and listen in on their stories. Sometimes quite entertaining and sometimes apparently quite inviting. A buddy of mine and his company was randomly approached at an AW by people looking to recruit. It's a place where business and pleasure kind of blends together and you never know when you will meet one of those friends of yours that might not be the best to introduce to your business partners.

Chinese hare are quite similar actually. Although from what I've heard their conversations seem to tend to stick to business related topics a lot more. And when they don't they are often filled with wisdom's related to business. In fact the Chinese here are very business oriented. Sometimes in a quite hilarious way. I recently heard about the Sun Tzu's art of war applied in business approach. And spectacularly the small snippets of "wisdom" and how they are proclaimed in lose statements and how to's are sometimes not too far away from conversations at after works. Exchanging experiences in the Chinese business life can be quite interesting. Non related but worth a read is A story of zen. Naturally these are not the only conversations but they are the more notably conversations. Another interesting thing here is how they have trophy wives and girl friends very openly and which is sometimes seen as a status symbol. Sitting there without joining in in the conversation I'm not sure a European expat would bring that trophy girl to this gathering.

Joining these two groups are locals employed by foreign or international companies that have gotten used to this type of corporate and social culture. Many of which are serial-cultural employees. And to define that term that means people taking job after job in companies from a certain nationality or with a specific corporate culture related to one. One can see many people working for one Swedish company and then another and then another.. I'm not quite sure where to put these guys. Sometimes being more western than not and sometimes still being very local. Mostly being very western. Maybe that says something about the importance of corporate culture and how it can be more dominating in ones life than the cultural area and sphere one inhabits during off hours...

Shake that Mony Maker

I'm sure some of you have heard the expression shake that money maker. Well them gold diggers come in all shapes and sizes. There are always plenty of articles online describing how there are plenty of girls in the developing world wanting to date those "rich" foreigners. Specially here in Jakarta I'm finding a whole bunch of articles about it and how to meet those hot local girls. Ha ha, you thought I was gonna write something about my experiences here didn't you. Well OK then. The night scene is in fact filled with plenty of women one might call gold diggers. Looking for a man to pay her bills or take her away to a richer place. I'm not going to claim that all women here are like that but a whole bunch of em are, at the clubs. I'm not even counting in the prostitutes now. Anyway that's not what surprised me. What surprised me was to what degree money makes the wheels turn here. I recently went to a salsa place here in J-town and learnt something else than salsa moves too. I learnt that almost all the men in the club where hired my women who want to dance. There is in fact such a shortage of dancing men here or at least that don't require to have their steps lubricated with cash that the whole Latin dance scene here runs on it. Where did the spirit of dance go? Well at least both men and women here shake their asses for them dolla dolla bill ya'll.

Photo by: http://www.flickr.com/people/chifeng/