A night out - burgers?

En hamburgare på svenska. Pronounced, ham-bur-yar-eh. Or, for my english speaking audience, a hamburger. Granted it's a cognate, but it's still fun to put swedish pronunciation and spelling out there.

We went out for hamburgers with a subclub from the American Women's Club here in stockholm. The subclub, Stockholm After Hours, does social things all around the city - drinking, eating, trying new places. Seats fill up pretty quickly so it can be a challenge to get in with the group. I like the group because they tend to be the new recruits, and they tend to be my age-ish.

Some of you may scoff, omg, he's doing shit with a WOMAN"S club, but you meet some pretty interesting people this way. Plus, my mom's a member, so everyone knows me before I even go to functions. It makes it so much easier to meet and talk with people because they've already determined your common ground. I'm a facilitator, so it's always one of my social goals to build common ground. It's much more pleasurable not to have to worry about it. That's why most people keep friends around.

Anyways we are at Saddle and Sabre, a fun 'texas' themed pub on Tengérgatan. I had a hamburger, served sans bun, with jalapoppers. The poppers were uber, the hamburger marginal. They did have Sam Adams and Sierra Nevada on tap for SEK 39 though which is GOOD in this city. I start talking around and I made a total connection with a couple who was there.

Baltimore. Of all places, was the starting point for our connection. I'm all wtf, BALTIMORE. She was from Pennsylvania, he was swedish, and both about my age. Her brother just moved outside of baltimore, so they visited recently. Of course that led to the inevitable, oh, have you been here, and did you do this, and did you go to this bar ... Then we moved on to carreers. I've one of the more diverse educational backgrounds that I know of, so people are always shocked. Last night she was all I work for a pharmaceutical overseeing trials. I was like, no way I used to ... blah blah. It was nice to finally have a nonsuperficial conversation with someone. Then her husband and I talked. He's swedish and seems really nice. We both have lots of interests in football/soccer, so we debating all the local teams. League started up last weekend, so we will hopefully catch some games together so I can point out the crap of swedish soccer compared to the UK, and, say, Italy. We've already gotten passed the american soccer sucks.

All in all a good night. I'll probably through up some site stats later today. Though we start back to class for stupid midterm presentations. I hope they don't suck. And they are right in the middle of nap time ... bastards.

~Bsan