Tag Archives: pony with horn

On the Road: Of Angel Chicken Wings and other oddities

Or (some of) my strangest travelling experiences

Those of you who follow my Blog for a while now, have probably read some of the tales falling into this category, but when I saw the Blogparade by Mit Kind im Rucksack (With Child in the Backpack) on ferngeweht, I simply couldn’t resist to participate and give you a little overview about mine and add a few I haven’t managed to write about yet.

I don’t know why, but it seems like on every journey I take – be it short ones or longer ones – something strange – or rather, ridiculous – is bound to happen, so this will only scratch the surface and I’ll mostly focus on the stuff that happened recently that I haven’t written about yet.

Sometimes these things happen, simply because the whole situation is strange to begin with.
Like when Breagit and I spontaneously decided to take a two hours train ride to Berlin, just to get some bread. Other times they happen because of the people involved, like that time I had a midnight chat in the back of my car at a Festival. Or when Black Kat and I went to a The Other (Horror Punk) concert at the Weekend of Horrors only to exit the hall into bright sunlight.

Sometimes there are other reasons…

Lost Direction

Whenever I drive somewhere for the first time and take someone with me, I always assure them:

„There is a high chance that I will take a wrong turn at some point.“

And I’m usually right.
It takes me a few times to remember a route, but when I do it’s not hard for me to follow it (or recognize it even years later), but when I use the sat nav I don’t always realize if the turn I’m taking is the right one.

But I’m good at that without proper navigation, too.
Two years ago Janzy and I went to Ireland for Halloween (I know, still lacking a travel log, I’m working on it) and for our first day we rented a car to get to our B&B in Navan and continue from there. Unfortunately my sat nav did not have maps for Ireland so we had to focus on manual maps, which wasn’t easy as the highways were a bit confusing, it was dark and we really had no idea where we were.

At some point we simply drove into the town/village Sword – and yes, that is really its name – and looked for someone who could help us. On our way we saw a few children dressed up for Trick or Treating and finally found an electronic market that was still open.

So we went inside and asked for directions to Navan.
The shop assistant was quite confused about our request and right away asked us: „What do you want in Navan?“
Well, we had our B&B there, so there was that…
Luckily he could give us easy to follow directions as it was somewhere close to his own home and after way more hours than we had planned we finally made it there.

Navigating during the day then worked way better and we didn’t have any troubles finding Newgrange and Tara, but back in Dublin something else was lost to us.

I don’t know how many times we walked up and down the O’Connell Street looking for the Hard Rock Café in the alleys on either side of the road, but for some reason we couldn’t find it.
Towards the evening, we’d partly given up the search, but still occasionally glanced into an alley, we went down the street again and lo and behold, there it was, mocking us with it’s bright name-sign as we approached.
It’s probably one of those buildings that you can only find when you’re not looking for it…

Strange Stops

With travelling comes taking breaks and some of them are more intentional than others.
Besides having a whole Youth Hostel nearly to myself (report follows) or staying at a Hotel that turned out to be Motel (same here) there were a few other accommodation surprises over the years.

Like that time Feuerflügel made arrangements with a friend of hers so I could stay there and totally forgot to tell me the guys name. Or the first time I decided to sleep in my car, because rain had soaked my tent and pretty much everything in it (see midnight talk-link). Or that time when I barely slept at all because of the location of the Youth Hostel (soon).

But accommodations aren’t the only stops.
Festivals are a great source for unintentional breaks, especially if you wait about five and more hours to enter a Festival ground that’s only a few kilometres away and people start running into the fields beside the road to relieve themselves (report later).
Or when you have to take a stop to wait for a Ferry because your sat nav decided it would be more fun to take that route instead of the bridge beforehand … (happened to me twice, guy-name link + Metalfest 2012).
Or you take a break on your way back from a Convention at a resting place called „Brocken View“ (The Brocken is a mountain in middle Germany), but it’s nowhere to be seen.

Sprachfasching (Word-messes)

Those who know me personally, know that sometimes the things I say don’t really make sense, but I’m not the only one suffering from that syndrome. Quite a bunch of strange words or discussions were created during my travels.

I told you about the Pony with Horn and the Spaghetti Fish and other things said during that particular Wacken, but I have yet to tell you about the (titular) Angel Chicken Wings.

During InGenius‘ and my visit to Stockholm we discussed a lot of things. Plans, stories, ideas, writing in general and how many wings Archangels in general and in particular in Supernatural have.
While we were in the greatest Book Store I’ve been in so far, I incidentally picked up a book about Angels that said that the Archangel Gabriel has in some sources 152 (or 146 or something like that) wings.
When I mentioned it in a later discussion, we imagined how so many wings would fit on a body and got to the conclusion that they had to sit on things like hands and feet as well.

At some point InGenius commented:

„You could make a lot of of … Angel Chicken Wings from that“

We laughed about this and discussed it a bit further (how would one make Angel Chicken Wings in a SPN setting?). Incidentally SPN itself made a joke about frying an Archangel in the episode Changing Channels, well and there is always GraceCelestial Poultry, so it’s not surprising something like that comes up at some point …

Anyway, somehow we then got to the discussion about strange signs.
In my early days of travelling, when we explored nearby towns back in my school days, I once came across two arrow-signs, hanging directly below each other, reading:

„Lunch Specials: 5.XX DM“
„Funeral Services“

And yes, they pointed in the same direction …

When InGenius then told me about a sign that offered you:

„Second-hand Coffee to go“

when you read it the wrong way, I totally lost it and had to sit down for a moment, in combination with the Angel Chicken Wings this was just too much for me …

It’s in the genes…

Now, you’ve read a few strange stories, but long before I paid much attention to anything – or existed – there already were a few things that I’m told on occasion.
Contrary to what I grew up with, my parents travelled quite a bit before I was born and have many stories of getting lost while picking mushrooms, visiting bone houses and what not, to tell.

But there is one thing, I’d like to use as the final story of this post:

One time my parents and grandparents were driving with my grandpas Trabi (Trabant) and my grandma yelled at them from the back-seat:

„You guys keep looking straight ahead now.“

And proceeded to change the elastic band of her underwear right then and there. >_<
Doing weird stuff while travelling seems to run in the family …

For more stories about my travelling check out the On the Road-Category. 😉

Hope you had fun reading this

PoiSonPaiNter

Of Karl the Moose and Ponies with Horns

At the beginning of this month my flat got a new inhabitant.

Meet Karl:

Karl

Karl the Moose

What is there to know about Karl?

He is absolutely fluffy.
He is a Moose.
And he was supposed to me a Pony with Horn.

But how did he get into my possession?

He was a birthday gift from Black Kat, Schnitzel and Anice.

Yet, his story is way more fun than that.

His story includes an inside-joke, a thought spoken out loud and a horrible pun.

But let’s start at the beginning …

At last years Wacken (which I still haven’t reviewed yet) the following scene played out:

DarkFairy and I were waiting for Rammstein to start, when she discovered a man with a strange drawing on his back.
Without warning she proceeded to point at him and partly yell: „Look! He has a … Pony with Horn! … Unicorn!“ („…“ are pauses 😉 )

This description was so ridiculous that we kept on using it throughout the whole festival.
You didn’t have a proper argument for a conversation? Pony with Horn.
You didn’t know what else to say? Pony with Horn.
You agreed on the weirdness of something? Pony with Horn and an acknowledging: Pony with Horn.
We had great fun with the Pony with Horn that weekend … 😀

When later that year Kat, Iron Eve and I were in Hamburg for the HellNights (that are also still waiting to be reviewed), we ended up in a shop for flat decorations.
In that shop we saw several fake trophy heads that looked pretty cool and were awfully fluffy. (They had a bison, a shark, a mammoth and others hanging at a wall and thrown into a bin.)
When we skimmed through the catalogue I discovered that they also had a unicorn-version of this.
Without second thought I then said something out loud that I probably shouldn’t have said:

„When I have a proper flat, I’ll get that unicorn-thing for my wall.“

What a bad idea that statement was, became clear throughout the evening of my birthday earlier this month.
When I arrived at our meeting point Kat handed me an enormous package that I was not allowed to open before the other two arrived.
This in turn caused a weird conversation with the barman of the pub we went to:

„Should I put the package away?“
„No, I still need to open it.“
„Oh, so you don’t know what’s inside? A proper present then.“

Through shaking the package I knew that something plush was inside. Though I expected it to be something different.
I also didn’t remember my statement from several months before.
So when I could finally open it, I didn’t understand the present, until Kat reminded me:

„You said, you wanted to get it when you have a proper flat, but I thought you shouldn’t wait that long. Before Christmas there were some Unicorns left, but afterwards it was hard to find anything. So we got you the Moose.“

And this is how Karl the Moose came into my possession and I’d say he is one of the most hilarious birthday presents I got so far.
They even thought about adding a paper-horn. 😀

When I couldn’t quite stop petting the poor thing (the artificial fur is really soft and fluffy…) Schnitzel gave the Moose its name:

„If you go on like this he will be bald („kahl„) soon. You should call him Karl to make it seem like he is supposed to be bald.“

In retrospective a quite fitting name.
As I had recently seen it again the name „Karl“ reminds me of a crow (I think) from an old adaptation of  „The Snow Queen“. (I was shortly tempted to call my new laptop that arrived on the same day „Klara“, because of the crows companion >_< )
The other Karl it reminds me of, as I just noticed, would be the one whose Latinized name is in discussion for becoming the name of the Nameless King in the book I’m co-writing.

What also is fun, is the English version of his name.
As I said: „kahl“ means „bald“, following the pun, the English name would be „Baldur“.
Which by the way is a name-variation for „Baldr“, the god from Norse mythology, whose story I mentioned in this post.
I think it’s funny how those things tend to connect if you look a bit closer …

Short version: I have a new flatmate. 😀
(That has nothing to do with the Moose from Supernatural)

PoiSonPaiNter

P.S. It finally snowed! 😀