Ciaran’s Omnipurpose Blog

I was in Stockholm this weekend to visit some friends and hook up with my online buddies from The Corporation, as we do every 6 months. One of the friends I was visiting, unconnected to the Corporation, is a very dear school friend, Karl. He and I got to spend the day together preparing for a party at his place. Whilst doing this, I learned a couple of very important lessons:

• Alcohol is very heavily taxed and anything stronger than 3.5% is sold by Government monopoly stores (Systembolaget)
• The number counter on McDonalds tills only goes up to 99.

Our first stop was the Systembolaget, where we picked up 7 cases of beer and 3 cases of prosecco:

Total price? I estimated this would cost just shy of £200 ($327) in the UK. Here it cost about £550 ($900).

After loading the beer into a cab and taking it back to Karl’s place, we did a bit of party preparation before going out to get cheeseburgers for the party. Karl figured on about 60 people coming to the party, so he went up to the counter and said, ”I’d like 100 Cheeseburgers, please”. They couldn’t believe it. “Yes, I’m serious. I’d like 100 Cheeseburgers”. The girl behind the counter was a bit flummoxed by this and a committee was formed to work out how to make this happen:

In the end, we had to settle for 99 cheeseburgers:

We took a stroll and came back 15 minutes later:

The two drinks on the counter were a freebie from the manager. I nearly declined the offer, thinking that the drinks at McDonalds are a bit unhealthy. Then I thought how stupid that sounded.