Stranger In A Foreign Land
(Part 1 of 3, I decided I want three seperate titles for three roughly linked events. Sue me (not really, I'm just a poor student)).
I wandered through the unknown terrain, staring at the alien constructions. Strangely-dressed creatures flowed around me, ignorant of what I was or what I was doing. Maybe they didn't care, maybe they were too wrapped up in the private business of their own existence to care, but as I roamed they let me intermingle with them despite my outsider status. I was not one of them, they were not like me, but neither party cared. I knew that once I was almost one of them, so recent yet so distant in the murks of the past, and I knew that I would eventually return to them, but right then and right there, I wasn't one of them, and I only had one aim in mind.
Well, this reads like so much bollocks unless I actually give the story from the start, so it goes a little something like this.
Fridays. My sabbath. No work, just a day sitting in the pub with mates. However, this Friday was planned to be a little different. Instead of a leisurely drinking session in a licensed public house, we were to trek to the wilderness that is the towns south of the river, and spend the evening at the house of a friend consuming cheap cans of beer. The usual drinking crew (me best mate, who I'll refer to as Homeslice for no reason other than we were talking about the word, and canny lad and lassie, who I can't be arsed to think up silly nicknames for). We all took the local Metro train service to Gurl's house (okay, there's a decent nickname), got some drink from the off-license, et cetera. We walked all the way to her place, got drunk, had a fair laugh with her family, then eventually were left at two AM to sleep on the floor/sofas. Of course, we first watched the most intellectually stimulating DVD movie ever, a feature-length episode of My Little Pony. Eventually, just as the story became interesting and the drama was building to a peak, the DVD crapped out so we decided to sleep.
Now, I'm around six feet and six inches tall. These sofas were two-seaters. I was not comfortable. I could settle down, but not quite sleep. Thus, I lay about until seven of the morning, at which point Homeslice stirred, I had a brief conversation and decided to make an attempt at getting to sleep... in my own bed. I left. Now, I'd never been in this area in my life, and the journey here was an whole sleepless night and too many pints ago. I struck out in what I hoped was the right direction. As I wandered, I met this strange breed: businessmen and other people who... get up early. Dressed in smart suits or uniforms, they colonised the streets like some form of absurd ant. Through them I travelled, dressed like a student the previous day, now ruffled after a night on cushions and an evening of alcoholic malarkey, with old-school acid basslines pulsing through my headphones to keep me awake and aware. They had slept a normal night, sober and clean, woken up and dressed tidily, and were now on their way to a nice averagely normal day at work. I was experiencing the worst of both drunkenness, sobriety and hangovers, and my sole aim was to get back across the world to my soft warm bed and sleep the mid-morning away in blissful idleness.
I got home in the end, and had a good kip. I was ill for about a week, but wshether it was related I'm sceptical. It obviously didn't help my mood trudging to and from the Metro at these strange hours, but the contrast between the lifestyles was almost comic, and I realised that one day I will have settled down to a sensible lifestyle with a general hum of base contentedness, which makes all these stupid events and odd stories so much more worthwhile.
I wandered through the unknown terrain, staring at the alien constructions. Strangely-dressed creatures flowed around me, ignorant of what I was or what I was doing. Maybe they didn't care, maybe they were too wrapped up in the private business of their own existence to care, but as I roamed they let me intermingle with them despite my outsider status. I was not one of them, they were not like me, but neither party cared. I knew that once I was almost one of them, so recent yet so distant in the murks of the past, and I knew that I would eventually return to them, but right then and right there, I wasn't one of them, and I only had one aim in mind.
Well, this reads like so much bollocks unless I actually give the story from the start, so it goes a little something like this.
Fridays. My sabbath. No work, just a day sitting in the pub with mates. However, this Friday was planned to be a little different. Instead of a leisurely drinking session in a licensed public house, we were to trek to the wilderness that is the towns south of the river, and spend the evening at the house of a friend consuming cheap cans of beer. The usual drinking crew (me best mate, who I'll refer to as Homeslice for no reason other than we were talking about the word, and canny lad and lassie, who I can't be arsed to think up silly nicknames for). We all took the local Metro train service to Gurl's house (okay, there's a decent nickname), got some drink from the off-license, et cetera. We walked all the way to her place, got drunk, had a fair laugh with her family, then eventually were left at two AM to sleep on the floor/sofas. Of course, we first watched the most intellectually stimulating DVD movie ever, a feature-length episode of My Little Pony. Eventually, just as the story became interesting and the drama was building to a peak, the DVD crapped out so we decided to sleep.
Now, I'm around six feet and six inches tall. These sofas were two-seaters. I was not comfortable. I could settle down, but not quite sleep. Thus, I lay about until seven of the morning, at which point Homeslice stirred, I had a brief conversation and decided to make an attempt at getting to sleep... in my own bed. I left. Now, I'd never been in this area in my life, and the journey here was an whole sleepless night and too many pints ago. I struck out in what I hoped was the right direction. As I wandered, I met this strange breed: businessmen and other people who... get up early. Dressed in smart suits or uniforms, they colonised the streets like some form of absurd ant. Through them I travelled, dressed like a student the previous day, now ruffled after a night on cushions and an evening of alcoholic malarkey, with old-school acid basslines pulsing through my headphones to keep me awake and aware. They had slept a normal night, sober and clean, woken up and dressed tidily, and were now on their way to a nice averagely normal day at work. I was experiencing the worst of both drunkenness, sobriety and hangovers, and my sole aim was to get back across the world to my soft warm bed and sleep the mid-morning away in blissful idleness.
I got home in the end, and had a good kip. I was ill for about a week, but wshether it was related I'm sceptical. It obviously didn't help my mood trudging to and from the Metro at these strange hours, but the contrast between the lifestyles was almost comic, and I realised that one day I will have settled down to a sensible lifestyle with a general hum of base contentedness, which makes all these stupid events and odd stories so much more worthwhile.
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