Dateline: 11:08 06 Sep 1996
Location: Stockholm, T-Centralen 
Streeeeeeeeech.  Being the incorrigible cheap-ass that I am, I just walked from my hostel at Zinkensdamm to T-Centralen to save 13 kroner.  No trivial excursion, either: walking fast, with 2 pauses of a few minutes to make a phone call and eat an apple (breakfast!) the trip clocked in at just under an hour.  And I was carrying my fully-loaded backpack, too.  But when you've got time to spare, not much money and want to work up an appetite for the all-you-can-eat buffet deal you're going to...


The hostel deserves a few words.  It was expensive, but this is Sweden so that was only to be expected.  The shower was most pleasant, but what truly flung me to the heights of ecstasy was the bed.  It was so big I could stretch out in full for the first time in 3 weeks!  The pillow was less than a metre cubed, so you could sleep on it without breaking your neck.  And the mattress was juuuuuust right.  Add on a nice, thick, fluffy, warm sheet and truly, I was in heaven.  For the next 10 hours, at least; around 7 AM I was woken up by the most remarkable snoring.  A faint attempt to replicate it:
...nnnNNNNRRRRROARRRSNORTT!!!ffrrr...

The position, duration and volume of the <SNORT> changed at random.  At times, this came in chorus when from the wall behind a much quieter and more normal "rrrr" was heard, sometimes as an echo, but they tended to fall in and out of sync.  Around 9, the snoring stopped when the poor guy sneezed so violently ("ats-BOOM! BOOM!") that we thought something just exploded.  Shocked by the sound he himself had generated, even Mr. Snore-O-Tron woke up, and there ended that saga.



Ooh boy.  After almost giving up hope, I spotted a Pizza Hut and promptly dove in to get the buffet: all you can eat pizza & salad, plus a drink (singular), for 65 kr.  Well, I interpreted the instructions literally and downed a personal record of 8 large slices of Pan Pizza, crusts & all, plus N plates of salad.  Hey: it's yesterday's dinner plus today's breakfast, lunch and dinner.  The amount was enough to garner a few looks from the employees, being some 3-4x more than the average.  No matter, at least I won't be hungry for a while; I suspect I just consumed more calories in the last hour than in all of last week combined.  Oddly enough, I wasn't the only Finn in the place or even close, with perhaps 50% of the clientele jabbering away in Finnish.  Even though the Pizza Hut buffet is identical and cheaper in Helsinki.  Small world, small country, small city.


The day's budget 
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