Last Friday I celebrated Midsommar, the Swedish holiday occurring on the longest day of the year. I met up with Anton and we travelled to Johan Lantz's place for some beer and BBQ. The guys have been bugging me to try some Swedish "snooze," but I'm not too fond of chewing tobacco. I tried it a year ago, and let's just say one thing led to another and I ended up vomiting all over the Burger King parking lot. Good times.
In Sweden, snooze is a little different. Instead of having to pack and spit the tobacco, it comes in handy little tea-bag-like packets that fit snugly under your top lip. Anton offered me a packet of Gotham Grape, one of the weakest brands. After an what seemed like an eternity of snoozing, the taste dredged up my BK memory. "Are you serious?" Anton asked, "You had that in for like, 7 minutes." I ignored him and continued to feel dizzy and spit the remaining juice into various trash cans. Being the manly man that I am, though, I recovered before we arrived at Lantz's.
After the initial pleasantries and a couple beers, we dug into the traditional Midsommar feast. "Fresh" potatoes, sour cream, and canned raw herring. I drenched the herring in sour cream, forked it along with some potato, and took a big bite. The herring had the consistency of raw ground beef, tasted off ginger and vinegar, and was just generally not my favorite meal. You can see my reactions in my Sweden 2 facebook album. But the drink was supposed to complete the taste, and so I took a swig with the rest of my first bite half chewed. If you've ever wondered, potato, sour cream, raw herring, and Absolut vodka are not a delicious combination. Thank God I still had an open beer. Then they gave me spiced vodka, which is what Swedes really imbibed with the meal. According to my friends, it was much better than strait vodka. They lied.
Mercifully, that was just the appetizer. The entree was beer and steak. After dinner we played some video games, and we were supposed to go out. Unfortunately, Anton became a little under the weather, possibly from having a breakfast of wine and beer before coming over to have champagne, vodka and beer. I had some very attractive, some might say arousing pictures of him passed out on Lantz's bed, but he ended up erasing them from my camera. So overall, I was a little disappointed that we didn't get out, but it was still fun to hang out with the guys. Of course, the day of drinking may have had a negative effect on my diminished health, but then I would have missed the cultural opportunity of raw herring.
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