The Restroom

Wednesday was a Finnish public holiday.  Obviously everyone goes drinking on Tuesday night.  The Wundergirls and Wunderboys invited me to join them for pre-Epiphany drinks.  (Sidenote: it appears the Wundergirls and Wunderboys have started referring to themselves at the Wundergirls and Wunderboys.  I am very pleased and tickled by this.)

After a nice traditional Finnish dinner, someone suggested we go to the restroom for drinks and karaoke.  I think I looked at them blankly for 5 solid minutes as I tried to figure that out. 

Ahh, "The Restroom":



The first thing I did when we got to The Restroom was to go to the restroom, which is conveniently and thematically and accurately the first thing you see when you walk in.  Then there were many beers.  And many songs, including but not limited to:

• "Summer of  '69" by Bryan Adams
  Performed by Ville and Jaakko - The boys did a lot of hand-holding and lovingly looking into each other's eyes during the more tender parts of the song.  And during all the musical breaks, Ville was kind enough to announce to the audience that there would be a "25 second musical interlude" at certain points during the song.
  
  
• "Pamela" by Jaakko Teppo
  Performed by Tanja, Tanja's friend whose name I can't remember but when Tanja reads this and tells me what her name was I will fix this, and me - Um, this song is in Finnish.  And even though I've listened to it a few dozen times and am getting better at pronouncing Finnish words, I was totally lost.  I resorted to mouthing "strawberry, watermelon, strawberry, watermelon."  But I did sing the chorus, and make the moped sound effects.
  
  
• "9 to 5" by Dolly Parton
  Performed by me - Duh.  When have I ever not sung this?  Seriously, when I die just put "Tumbled out of bed and stumbled in the kitchen" on my gravestone.
  
  
• "La Isla Bonita" by Madonna
  Performed by Ville, Jaakko, and me - This one was hard, because as a child I rewrote the lyrics to this one to be about allergies at harvest time, and I kept almost slipping and singing those lyrics.  "Allergic to the harvest breeze, full of pollen makes me wheeze, blows through the wind and in my eye..."
  
  
• "Bohemian Rhapsody" by Queen
  Technically performed by Steve - I say "technically" because we all couldn't help but join him.  We all got carried away with the spirit of Freddie Mercury, and sang the shit out of this song together.  It was equally epic to the Muppets version.  How I remember it, anyway.
  

Later we moved on a non-karaoke bar, but when the super catchy "Wonderwall" by Oasis came on the loudspeaker, we were all still in a sing-songy mood and drunk enough that we sang along, anyway.  Oh!  And I just remembered the Finnish American Idol was there, I forgot about that!  That is the second Finnish American Idol I've seen since I moved here, Helsinki is crawling with them!