“This post’s title will be executed for high treason against comedy.”
Amirite or amirite lads? You are right, lad. Boy, it’s good to be back! Sort of, anyway. It’s been a rough three-ish weeks or however long it’s been since I last posted here. My life has been living and breathing chaos as of late, with an excess of alcohol and a dearth of proper sleep. But in a good way, I promise! No word on that other story I promised a few weeks ago, writing has been, once again, a victim of circumstance in my life. Which is unfortunate. Good thing travel wasn’t a victim, though, because just a few weeks ago I went to Lapland!
Sure, I know what you’re all thinking; “What the hell is a Lapland?” Or perhaps, “Didn’t you just go somewhere?” Or “What happened to Prague?” And my answer to all of those is “Yes.”
See that picture up above? That’s Lapland. Sort of. That’s the moon over a lake in Lapland! And Lapland itself is a general term for the area in the northern-most reaches of both Sweden and Finland, encompassing several hundred thousand square kilometers of gently rolling hills, forested valleys, ice-covered lakes, and winding rivers. It’s one of the most northern-most populated regions in the world, right up there with northern Alaska and upper Canada in terms of latitude, and the homeland of several branches of the Sami indigenous reindeer-herding culture (and the handfuls of Finns and Swedes who live there, too). It is, truly, one of the highest regions on Earth, and on this trip I probably traveled the furthest north I will likely ever go in my entire life. And I went there because, well, why not? It’s not every day that you have the chance to vacation inside the Arctic Circle.
I wasn’t alone in this trip, of course. I went on a chartered expedition/tour with a student tour group that took me and about a hundred other students from Stockholm all the way up to Levi Ski Resort, in far northern Finland. With me on this trip was also Julia, who you, dear reader, have met once before briefly in a Viking restaurant, and Carlo, whose back you have seen in a few pictures of the Swedish coast. Other than that, though, I didn’t know anybody, though that would certainly change once we got to Lapland itself!
Though I’m getting a bit ahead of things here, so let’s start with the beginning: we left Stockholm Sunday evening and drove for roughly twenty hours (more or less unbroken, minus bathroom and food stops) to get to our cabins for the week at the ski resort. Each cabin had ten people, and me and Carlo and Julia were all in the same cabin, luckily, so that was quite nice. But we still didn’t know what to expect, so it was a pleasant surprise to find that our rustic wilderness cabins weren’t so much “shit in a bucket” rustic wilderness cabins and more “Better Homes and Gardens” rustic wilderness cabins.
Getting to the cabin the first day, we mostly just unpacked, cooked food, and got to know each other a bit. On the trip overall, I’d say that somewhere between 75% and 90% of participants were German. I mean, this is a trip for international exchange students, so I’m not surprised there weren’t any Swedes on board, but I am consistently surprised at just how many fucking Germans there are in Stockholm. You can’t spit without getting a “gesundheit” from someone. I know more Germans that Swedes at this point, though the numbers are slowly evening out. Despite this, our cabin had a pleasant mix of (more Germans) a few dutch guys, a Belgian, another American, and people whose place of origin I have unfortunately forgotten. Oops.
But we weren’t there to make friends! Well, I mean, yeah, we were, but I wasn’t! I was here to get cold! To go in the snow! To see the sights! And get cold it did. Admittedly, it was only really frigidly cold the first night, that Monday. It got down to -15F (that’s -25C for my international friends) that night while we were out gallivanting about on frozen lakes, which is, don’t get me wrong, fucking cold. But it isn’t actually the coldest I’ve ever been! That dubious distinction still goes to the whole owl fiasco, where I was out looking for the stupid birds in -20F (-29C); only a few degrees of difference, sure, and we were in Lapland before true winter, but I can still say that I was colder in Minnesota than in the Arctic Circle. Go figure.
But we were not searching for owls this time around; we were searching for lights. Northern lights! Aurora borealis! At this time of year, at this time of day, in this part of the country, localized entirely in a field behind our cabin. In fact, seeing the northern lights was, ultimately, the entire reason I went on this trip at all. Seeing the aurora has been a bucket list thing of mine for ages; it’s something that I’ve always wanted to do before I die, along with going to the bottom of the ocean and meeting Weird Al. Some bucket list dreams are more attainable than others. And so this trip was possibly my best opportunity to knock at least one of those things out. And I did cross something off my bucket list that trip! I’ll give you two guesses which one it was.
That first night was the only night we really saw the Northern Lights, and I am sure glad we did, because I would have been pretty fucking pissed if we hadn’t. IT was the only night that was both cold and clear enough, even if the full moon got its big bright ass in the way. But we did see the lights! They moved! I saw them move! And I can check it off my bucket list and say that, yes, I saw the northern lights! And they were really, really disappointing!
Ok, not really, really disappointing, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. Just “disappointing” would suffice. Don’t let the pictures here fool you: the Northern Lights were kind of weak. You know how you build up the image of something in your head and then expect it to be that way? Like, say, I wanted to see the northern lights like they are in, I don’t know, Brother Bear or something. And so you get really excited for it, and you start looking for the wrong things. Like, for example, someone in our trip group chat texted “NORTHERN LIGHTS!” so we all immediately rushed back outside (after being on the lake earlier and seeing nothing), and went running off the snow to the nearest field. And we were like, where are they? And we’re looking up and down the sky, and then Julia says, “I think it’s that?” And I said, “What?”
Clouds. I thought they were fucking clouds. Or smoke from the town or something. They were gray, and pale, and wispy, and looked like a big blob taking up temporary residence in the sky. They did not look anything like what I had been promised. But they did get slightly brighter as we stood there, watching them. I did see a little green, eventually. And I could see them moving, just ever so slightly. And they did eventually travel across the entire sky and move on south, out beyond our view. But wow, they did not impress in person. These lights are glowers, not showers, apparently. Because they really only turned out on camera. All these pictures I’ve got here? At least ten times more vibrant than what I saw in person. Chalk it up to my bad eyesight and the full moon, maybe.
That isn’t to say I wasn’t excited! I am using the classic writing tool of exaggeration, of course. I was still thrilled to finally see these lights. Watching them move across the sky was beautiful and awe-inspiring, even if they were a little bit muted. It made me appreciate again the kinds of wonders that nature can produce, regardless of if anyone is there to see it or not. It was an absolute highlight of the trip and, probably, of my time in Sweden. But it was also a bit of a let-down, and maybe that’s ok. I just need to see them again, I guess. And next time, oh baby, next time it’ll be way better. Always something to look forward to.
Tuesday, the next day, was our first full day in Finland, and in the Lapland. And one of the most classic, most traditional activities in the Lapland is, apparently, reindeer herding. So of course we went to go visit a reindeer farm. When in Rome, and all that. And it was pretty cool! We listened to a Sami guy explain about reindeer herding, and how to herd them and care for them and what a year in the life of a reindeer herder looks like, some of methods of herding them, that kind of thing. We tried throwing lassos on (fake) reindeer, and feeding lichens to (real) reindeer. We could not pet the reindeer, because they aren’t truly “domestic,” the way that other farm/agricultural animals are. They’re somewhere between wild and domesticated, tame enough after thousands of years of human interaction to be fairly predictable, but still not quite in the same way that, say, cows or sheep are.
Getting photos with them was a bit of an exercise in patience and strategic positioning, because once they knew you didn’t have any food left, they didn’t give a shit about you. They could not care less if you lived or died. They had a job to do. And I did find that very funny, in a weird, uncomfortable tourist way, like, “huh, we’re really just kind of inserting ourselves into these animals spaces.” And if you think for two seconds about it you can kind of extrapolate that to “huh, we’re really just kind of inserting ourselves into these peoples’ livelihoods.” You know, kind of in that same way that cultural tourism kind of toes the line in any place. Our guide told us that, for all the work he puts into the reindeer, herding them and raising them and selling them, if you average it out, he makes around four euros an hour. And here we are, still, whole bunch of German+ tourists, and he is letting us screw around in the reindeer pens and giving us lichens to feed the deer and giving us homemade berry juice. So, yeah, very grateful to that guy for teaching us about his life and culture and being so welcoming to us. I am sure he had much better things to be doing, but I very much appreciate his time. It’s important to be a conscientious traveler, I guess is what I’m trying to say. And that’s why you should not steal the reindeer, because I was very very tempted to do so.
Following the reindeer herding experience, we went back to town/back to the ski resort that is the town, and had a quick break to walk around the city a bit. We took this opportunity to see some of the sites, the cute little shops and stuff, and to eat some reindeer pizza, because of course they had reindeer pizza, and of course I needed to try it. Upon discovering a new animal, I think it’s perfectly reasonable to think, “Hmm, very nice. First question: Can I eat it? Second question: what would this taste like with cheese and tomato sauce?” This is just natural human experience. This is also why I have now eaten bear, moose, reindeer, rattlesnake, and anything else that crawls, flies, or swims, but not everyone agrees with me, so we’ll move on.
Did you know that Finland is: 1. a country that exists? I did know this one, but I want to make sure that you do, too. Did you also know that: 2. Finnish, as a language, is more closely related to Estonian and Hungarian and is not an Indo-European language? And therefore looks and sounds nothing like Swedish, English, or German? I also knew that one but it is a fun one to share because trying to read Finnish as an American sounds like gibberish. And, finally, did you know that: 3. the Finnish language has fifteen grammatical cases, a concept which I can barely understand because English has, like, maybe four, and I don’t think I’ve ever learned about them? Languages are wild, man. I’m glad I’m not a linguist.
We also took that time to climb 700 steps up the side of the ski hill to get some views from the top of the mountain. Though “mountain” is still fairly relative because this is, like, maybe five hundred feet of vertical gain? Hey, it’s more than Illinois has, at any rate. And the view from the top is super pretty! Even if we had to walk all the way to top and could have, in theory, just taken a ski lift. Or driven up, because there was a road at the back. But it’s about the climb, you know? There’s always gonna be another mountain. Always gonna have to make it move.
One of the strangest things about being in the Arctic Circle for me was the complete and total lack of sun. Well, not complete and total, per se, since we were there in November and hadn’t truly reached the winter solstice yet, but it was fucking dark almost all the time. The sun did not rise until after 9am, it set at like 2pm, and during that time I don’t think it ever crested the tree line. And if it did, well, it was too cloudy to see anything, so if you didn’t get your Vitamin D in the five-minute window at 12:26pm during lunch, you’re shit out of luck, buddy. At least the moon’s presence was near-constant. It was like having a little friend in the sky. A little friend who blocks out the northern lights with their stupid glow. Asshole.
But it does make for some wonderful nighttime scenes. What with snow being a great reflector of light, and the moon’s presence being a constant pain in my ass source of wonder, you could see just as clearly at night as any time of day. Which is convenient because it is always night time there. And on that second night, we went snowshoeing!
I’ve done a fair bit of snowshoeing in my day, having it taught it a couple dozen times to children back in Minnesota. But Lapland has two things that Minneapolis doesn’t: snow and hills. So this was my first time snowshoeing in really deep snow (technically this is a lie but let’s pretend), and my first time snowshoeing uphill (also a lie but let’s pretend again because it’s funnier). And it was my first time snowshoeing with a bunch of Germans who wanted to run into trees, throw snowballs at each other, and dump as much snow as possible on everybody (this one isn’t a lie, yay!). Which sounds terrible as I write this out from my very warm, very dry bedroom, cuddled up in a sweatshirt with a nice warm glass of MugTM Root Beer, but it was quite fun in the moment! There’s something about putting on big stupid shoes and running around in the snow that makes everyone into children again. Or at least makes the cool ones into children.
I don’t have much more to say about snowshoeing, but after snowshoeing we went back to our cabin and went in the sauna! Did you know that: 4. Sauna is a Finnish invention (sort of, but the Finns are really, really keen on them anyway) and says that you get together with your closest friends, strip down to your underwear, and sit in a sweaty room for an indeterminate length of time before running into a snow bank outside. And while I don’t have any pictures of that (because I’m not about to post my own or anyone else’s sauna bathing suits on here, and because my phone is allergic to sweat), I can tell you that we sauna’d every night. Sometimes several times, or over an hour! Just sitting in this hot, steamy room, pouring water over rocks and then plunging ourselves face first into the snow. Again, dry warm room now, sounds insane. But in the moment it’s invigorating. Electric. Quite excellent overall, would recommend. From now on if I can sauna, I probably will.
Wednesday was a trip to a Husky farm to try our hands at dog sledding. And while the trip left me with many, many more questions than I started with, it also left with a newfound fascination of dogsledding. Questions like, “what is the primary means of income here to support 201 husky dogs?” “How can the huskies best operate at -30C?” “Why is his lady British?” “Wow these dogs love to run, why don’t I love to run?” “How did this place get started and where did these dogs come from?” “Why do they keep calling it a Husky Farm if they don’t eat the dogs?” “How does this lady know the names and personality of 201 dogs and I can’t remember my friends’ birthdays?” “Wow they really are gonna put me on this sled and holy shit the dogs are going how do I stop?” “Where do I buy five huskies and a sled?” These questions, and many more, were ones that I did not get answers to. But the biggest question of all, “Was this fun,” I do have an answer for, and it’s a very strong YES.
If I’m being totally honest, the husky dog sledding might have been my favorite activity of the entire trip. I absolutely adored it, way, way more than I expected to. We were only out on the trail (“the trail” being a 5km loop through a large field) for about twenty-five minutes, half of which I was sitting tied to the sled while Julia mushed the dogs, but it was incredible. It isn’t even about the dogs, not for me (though the dogs help; they are adorable). There’s something about the speed of it, the fact that your control over the vehicle is highly limited but also crucial to the safety of your dogs and yourself, something about the fact that you have to push while going uphill to help the dogs and you feel like a part of that team, something about the sheer energy that the dogs bring to it all, I don’t know what it is about it but I loved it. I really, really would have wanted to do a lot more.
I don’t suspect this is something I’ll do again anytime soon, and I’m not probably going to go out and get a bunch of dogs to attach to my car or anything like that. But I’d totally jump at the chance to do this again. Even though the dogs don’t actually got that fast. They just kind of trot. Still feels fucking fast around corners, though!
Speaking of fucking fast around corners, we also went cross-country skiing! I’ve technically done that once before, on a school trip in 8th grade, but it might as well have been my first time skiing because I am so, so bad at it in every possible formation. Downhill skiing? Broke my ankle the first time, years ago. Cross-country skiing? Held up the line and was the slowest for a kilometer. This time I fell about six times, repeatedly had to get out of the way to let people pass, and almost lost my glasses. But you know what? By the end, I kind of got it. I went down two little hills and around a corner without falling. And then I, you know, fell on the flat ground for no reason, but I had fun! I accomplished something. I skied and didn’t kill myself! And I even said (truthfully) that I’d try it again. So good times were had by all.
Our final full day in Lapland/Finland was actually not technically in Finland (or Lapland) at all; on Thursday, we got up early to hop on the bus and drive to the Arctic ocean. Or, rather, the Lyngenfjord in Norway, to be exact. I mean, I think that still counts as the Arctic ocean? We were surrounded by cliffs on three sides, and an oddball Norwegian with an excessive amount of saunas on the fourth, so I don’t know if I can entirely call it the “ocean,” but we did go way up north and get in the water. And this, here, is probably the furthest north I will never go. Mark it on a map.
Our primary purpose here was to dive into the water and say that, yes, we did swim in the ocean within the Arctic Circle. We saw a fjord, and we saw some rocks, and we saw some water and very nice mountains, but we spent most of our time warming up in the sauna after seeing, uh, the inside of the water. I did submerge my entire body, head and all, which a friend very helpfully told me after the fact is a bad idea, but it didn’t matter because I guess the water was still about 8C warm (46F) and not total ice water? Felt like fucking ice water to me! I dove into the water three times, and yes I did do that by choice, and then immediately regretted it after being entirely submerged. But the saunas were quite warm and roomy. And full of Germans. There’s a joke here somewhere. “How many Germans does it take to fill a sauna?” “How do you get fifteen Germans in a sauna?” “Twenty Germans walk into a sauna.” There’s something here, and the punchline is either “Beer” or a vague reference to World War Two.
After toes in the water, ass in the sauna, we also drove a bit more around the fjord and saw it from different angles. Or at least we did, for the fifteen minutes that the bus drivers allotted us to take pictures for. I don’t know who was calling the shots on this tour, our friendly tour guide Svetlana or the bus driver’s union, but I know that there was an “Instagram-famous” bench in front of the fjord that I did not get a picture in, and I am moderately dismayed about it. Guess I’ll just use the rocks instead, like some sort of hippie.
Our arctic ocean day wasn’t just thirty-second dips in the fjord, though! We also went to Sami/Lapland buffet and Lapland’s largest gift shop, for some reason! I mean, the buffet I get, it was excellent (or at least I thought so), but the gift shop was… a gift shop. It was enormous, very American in style, and supposedly sold the pelt of a polar bear somewhere, but it was a little crowded for my taste. Good thing the buffet wasn’t so crowded, so I could crack the bones of the chicken with my teeth and suck out the marrow in peace. And then proceed to teach Julia how to offend polite company by doing the same thing. I love buffets.
After that, though, our trip was coming to a close. That was our final evening in the cabin, and though we had the opportunity to go to the downtown area and enter several clubs, we decided against it and had a cozy evening in. Which was just fine with me, because honestly, I feel like I made a few friends on this trip (despite, you know, not being here to make friends). Making friends on trips like these is funny to me for two reasons. One, I’m fairly certain now that I have some mild sort of face blindness, so all these new people were logged in my head as “who does this person look like that I know?” or “what is something about this person that is distinct enough to remember?” So I was constantly struggling not to call people by wildly wrong names for people that aren’t even on this continent.
But it’s also funny to me, two, because these are all short-term exchange students. To a letter, every single one of them will go home to (probably Germany) somewhere in January, and I will never see them again (with exceptions for Carlo and Julia, of course). So as a person who places great emphasis in their life on relationships with others, it’s funny to me that, despite all this, huh, I can make friends here! And it was easier than I expected! I just needed to loosen up a bit and talk to people. By the end of the night, we were singing karaoke songs for just ourselves, playing card games and drinking spiced wine, and it was infinitely more fun than going to a stupid club would have been. And you’re telling me it was this easy to make friends the whole time? Where have I been?
But then that was the end, and our last hurrah was a trip to the Santa Claus Village, in Rovaniemi, Finland. The Santa Claus Village is cool in that it’s very pretty, great for children, and sits smack dab on the Arctic Circle so you can jump in and out and say “look I’m in the arctic! Look I’m not in the arctic! Wa Wa Wee Wa!” The Santa Claus Village sucks in that it’s basically a small-scale version of everything we had already done, but stupid expensive. It was forty euros to get a picture with Santa. And the dude didn’t even look like Santa! I looked at him and immediately thought, “Who the fuck is this guy?” And everyone else had the exact same reaction.
It reminded me a lot of a winter version of the corn mazes/pumpkin patches/apple orchards that I love going to so much. It had a wide variety of activities, mainly for children, but the difference here is that, since there’s no entry fee, they charge you for everything. So we did a total of zero activities, and instead just walked around. But in good company, that’s just fine.
Twas quite a place, that Santa Claus Village. I will not remember it fondly, and I will not speak further about it. But it was good for one thing: a meme! Yes, it’s that time of the post again, where I throw out whatever random bullshit I packed into my back pocket. And this time, it’s the OFFICIAL SANTA CLAUS FOOTBALL CLUB AND FOOD TRUCK! Who told him he could organize a youth soccer team? Aren’t the elves enough?
Then there’s the night we made pizzas in our little cabin, which went well enough until we attempted to use oven paper to cook the pizzas and, I guess, make them more crispy, or something? I don’t know, I don’t use baking paper for pizza, I think it’s an abomination, but Carlo insisted. So we gave it a try. And, uh, I think we got the wrong paper because it bonded to the fucking pizza. That’s not crust. That’s paper.
I’m always a big fan of warning signs, especially the ones that aren’t immediately clear as to what they’re trying to warn you about. This one, sure, think about it for five seconds and it’s clear it’s for slippery surfaces, but I’ll be damned if I didn’t think this was telling me to do some funky dancing for the camera.
But that’s enough of the memes. Before you go, though, I want us to get serious again, real quick. It won’t take long. I had an experience at the end of this trip that was… questionable. Questionable in that it made me question my sanity. I just need someone… anyone to understand the mental state that I was in for a few minutes on the bus ride back to Stockholm, and how it nearly drove me to madness. For my last trick, I’d like to take you on a journey. Allow me to paint a picture with words and photos, and I hope that I can convey to you the sense of unease, of dread, of creeping chaos that can only be generated by contact with the otherworldly, the eldritch. By meeting spaces where the veil between reality and imagination is thin. By finding something so surreal, so uncanny, it could only have been made by a madman or by something beyond our comprehension. By entering… the Circle K Backrooms.
Imagine the approach: it’s nearing 9pm. It’s been dark for the last five hours, and you’ve been trapped in this uncomfortable bus since that morning. You’ve been napping on and off for a while now, but can’t quite seem to get comfortable. Now there’s an announcement being made that the bus will stop for approximately twenty minutes, so get out and stretch your legs. Alright, sure. You have to go to the bathroom anyway. Off in the snow-covered distance, where all is either shrouded in darkness or lightly illuminated by a cold moon, you see it: the Circle K.
Now, I already have a strong distaste for the Circle K. Not anything specifically about them or their gas or something, but just their continued presence in my life is frustrating. I may have mentioned this once before, but the Circle K was one of the first things I ever saw when I moved here, and the fact that I am continually haunted by this American company everywhere I go is a pain in my side. An absurd amount of gas stations around here are Circle K’s. Nearly every time the bus stopped going to Lapland, and now coming away from it, we stopped at a Circle K. I cannot escape this tacky-ass convenience store, no matter what I do. But this one? This one was different.
Sure, it looks fine enough now. It’s a gas station. It’s a Circle K. Nothing remarkable at all. Go inside, go to the bathroom, get a small candy or a hot dog or something, it’s fine. It’s a convenience store. There is no indication anywhere that there should be anything else in this space except the Circle K. There are no signs for other businesses. There are no hallways leading out from the main floor of the Circle K to, say, a family restaurant or something, as is occasionally the case in the states. But after I’ve finished up in the main store, Carlo and I decided to take a brief walk around the back of the store, just to give us something to do. But here’s where things begin to get odd: as we’re walking behind the gas station, through the unmarked asphalt of a standard parking lot, we suddenly realize that there is another room behind the Circle K. And it’s got this weirdo pyramid design going on, too. It’s lit up. There’s people inside. There’s tables and chairs. And a spiral staircase.
Now, I want to clarify something here. I want this to be perfectly clear. This is the same building; these two rooms are entirely connected by one roofline and, presumably, a single base foundation. But there is no connection between them. There is not a way to get from the inside of the Circle K to this back room, and vice versa. Or at least not publicly. There may be a door in the staff area, but it was not available to us. So it was a bit jarring, to say the least, to come back around the corner and find a brand new business that, until this moment, I didn’t realize existed. It certainly wasn’t sign-posted anywhere up to this point. Except now, we couldn’t find the door, because we came around the wrong way back, apparently. There was one door into this space, and we had to walk around the entire edge of the building, make at least a 270-degree rotation, to find it. And all it said was RESTAURANG in big, ugly letters.
I don’t know what I expected from walking into this place, but it wasn’t a pizza-and-kebab shop. To be fair, pizza-and-kebab shops are a dime a dozen in Stockholm (and most of them are not very good, unfortunately), so I should been able to make that guess, anyway. There is nothing inherently strange about the presence of a pizza-and-kebab shop here. But it’s just everything else about the space that upsets me. I can feel it mocking me. Mocking architecture, and any sense of good human design. This is a space that, at first glace, appears benign enough, but deep down, it is not a space that was designed by someone competent. It was, perhaps, not a space that was designed at all. Perhaps it grew into being, or was planted here by something else. But I get ahead of myself: Look at this restaurant and tell me that it doesn’t make you want to walk off into the ocean.
I want to draw your attention to a few things here, namely the spiral stairs. Yes, hard to miss as they are, please consider their placement. Then consider it in relation to the ordering window, and the kitchen, and the seating area. Then consider the fact that there is a second floor at the top of those stairs, where you can eat your food. And you can sit and look down on everyone on the ground floor, or they can look up at your ass in a chair.
Don’t forget, too, that this is still inside the pyramid! It goes up! This restaurant lobby is way, way taller than it needs to be. These images are taken with a wide-angle fish eye lens, yes, but believe me when I say that this was an incredibly spacious roof. It’s weird. This is a weird room, right? This is a wacky-ass design for a restaurant. It’s kind of fun. I like fun! I like folk art, I like self-taught artists, I like the kooky and the strange and the surreal. I have a deep appreciation for tourist traps and roadside attractions and bizarre, unusual shapes and forms. But this? This is too much. This is anomalous. This is hazardous. Being in this place screams “WE ARE WORSHIPPING FALSE IDOLS” and then asks you to buy a pizza with tuna fish on it.
The more you think about, the less sense it makes. The more you question it, the more the facade of logic begins to slip away. Why would you put the spiral staircase in the center of the room? This means that everyone’s line of sight on the ground floor, from the table to the kitchen to the staff to the people outside the windows, is drawn directly to these spiral stairs. I love spiral staircases, I want them in my house someday, but they aren’t exactly user-safe in a way that public spaces should be. And where do the stairs go? To more tables. So you can eat sitting directly on top of the place where they just made your food. That doesn’t seem very disability-friendly to me, for one, and two, also seems a bit unsanitary! Let me just go tromping around with my dirty feet all above where these people cook. And how about that line of sight again! What if something happens and someone needs to get the staff’s attention? What if someone trips or drops their food off the stairs? Where is the line supposed to form? And then there’s the roof, too! Sure, great for natural light, but that second floor has got to be one of the draftiest goddamn spaces in this part of the country. That must be so expensive to heat.
This, all of this, combined with the fact that we had no idea this place even existed until we stumbled across it, absolutely baffled me. This is a restaurant unlike any other restaurant I have ever seen. Who designed this, and why? Who approved this? Who walked in here one day and said, “I think my Circle K needs a pyramid at the back, and the center of the pyramid is some nice spiral stairs. So that you can eat your tuna fish pizza on two levels of elevation.” And the geese, too! Why the geese? I love the geese but why are they there? Everything about it is nonsensical!
From all of this, all these factors combining together to create just a really weird restaurant, I have reached the conclusion that this space was not originally intended to be a restaurant. It is a restaurant wearing the skin of something that came before it. Hell, I don’t think it was even originally supposed to be a gas station, either! But that still doesn’t explain the design of the space itself! Thus, my hypotheses. There are, in my opinion, only one or two possibilities for this liminal, aberrant construction. My leading theory is that this weird pyramid was once the site of a yuppy new-age religious cult that went bankrupt in the late 90’s. Sort of like Heaven’s Gate, or those weirdo mega-churches that pop up every hundred miles in the US, this was a Christian mystic worship center that attracted the attention of some very wealthy clients and who, with their financial support, constructed a rural compound. But since they weren’t doing things by the book, so to speak, they wanted to draw as little attention to themselves as possible during construction. So the design was done by someone with no formal architectural training, and the Circle K Pyramid was built. Then, sometime after that, either by scandal or some sort of alien abduction taking their wealthiest members, the church went bankrupt and was forced to sell the property. And so some entrepreneur on the up-and-up saw this and said, “Gee, this is great location for a gas station!” And then someone else said, “what about the pyramid, still containing the spiral staircase and the still-bleeding corpse of the deceased-but-dreaming Dread God, Xylenhuachl?”
“Eh, turn it into a pizza place.”
I think this is the most likely explanation for the things I have seen here, and the reason for my madness. I hope that it is not too late for me to return to this pyramid for a more thorough examination of its structures and methodologies…
Alright, well, that’s enough of that. If I’m being real for a minute, yes, I like this restaurant because it is weird. I do all of this out of a love for the beauty inherent to the mundane, the boring, the pedestrian, as well an appreciation for the outsider art that surely birthed this complete and utter design failure. Whatever circumstances, whether based in a bankrupt religious cult or otherwise, generated this space, I’m all here for it. I will never know how this place came to be, so it is better yet to dream about it. It is a space yet ripe for stories, and I think that’s wonderful. But coming across this in the mental state I was in, I just could not wrap my mine around it. And somehow, that’s kind of beautiful in its own right, too.
Then I saw the truck carrying another truck and I lost my fucking shit. Goodbye. I’m going home now and I will sleep for the rest of time, or until God Himself rectifies the mistakes He has made here. Whichever comes first.
But that was our last major stop, and it wasn’t even a real stop to begin with. And so we kept on driving until morning, stopping briefly at a MAX burger around midnight and then getting back to Stockholm at 7am. From there I napped for about two hours and then went to a party that started at 2pm, of course, because there is no rest for the wicked. All in a day’s work, and let me tell you, I am employee of the fucking month. But it was an incredible trip, and I am quite grateful to both the friends I went there with and the friends whose lives I briefly intersected at this time. I will likely never see any of those people again, but for these brief moments, we shared the northern lights, and I’m happy for that. The people that pass into and out of your life may not always touch you in ways you can articulate, but they were still there. I wish everyone to have experiences like that. It’s what makes things worth doing.
And, of course, the Circle K Pyramid. That’s what makes things worth doing most of all.
