In ze nude.

Today we had a day off and Kerstin, the most wonderful tour manager in the universe, organized a perfect day. We went to Miramar which is a big German water park.

It has it's loud plastic area with water-slides and screaming children with their screaming families, they also have a biothermal relaxation area but and what is most important, they have a naked sauna paradise area. It is actually forbidden to wear clothes there.
Thankfully you can have a towel and pretend to be cool about all the nakedness and that you are only taking a small break from your own nudity by covering yourself with a towel.

After a couple of hours splashing about in the slides and wave pool, we had to find something to eat. The food court that is located in the fun area is as loud as the area itself, mainly due to the aforementioned screaming families. We decided to find something a little quieter. For some cosmically challenged reason the only other food court was located in the naked sauna area. We thought that eating a pizza wearing nothing but a towel could be interesting so off we waddled.

I saw so many middle-aged penises today that I think I most certainly need to turn into a cougar once I reach the same age as they were. Maybe it will all be okay and I will have sagging boobs and a turkey neck that will go wonderfully with their wrinklies. I'd rather not think about it right now. I just ate a lot of meat at a Kebap place.

The most interesting thing about this sauna nudist paradise is how awkward it was to me. I've been to oodles of nude drawing classes and sometimes I spent days doing nothing but draw naked people. It almost bothers me that nudity bothers me in different context than what I'm used to. Feeling like a prude is sort of a sickly feeling.

We are a weird species. Covering ourselves up all the time. Monkeys seem to be fine about being butt-naked. But then again, they have all this lovely fur to keep warm and cover their pink parts.

Traveling Pilsburies.

This is the latest comic in the series I've been making and have been published regularly in Grapevine. I still haven't found a good name for it so if anyone has a fertile mind with great ideas let me know.

This was also the last comic I made before we went on tour. Which reminds me:

Travel log, day one.

We have finally arrived in Belgium. So far this day has been a pretty long traveling day with short intervals of glorious food eating. We flew to Paris and then we slithered our way to Belgium. One plane, four trains and two taxis. The actual traveling part wasn't that long, only around eight hours total. But when we tried to buy train tickets in Paris, the trip went from 8 hours to 11. It would have been alright but we had to wake up before 5 AM this morning after about 3 hour sleep so we were tired and braindead.

Gare du Nord's lower levels are a horrible labyrinth. We wandered around, read every sign and tried our best to understand french. We found quite a few signs with arrows that actually led to nowhere. Maybe it's french humor? I wouldn't know. We found an elevator that didn't want to go to our level at first. We waited and waited and when it finally arrived and opened it's hellmouth, a stench like no other invaded our noses. There was urine splashed on the glass walls and it reeked so badly that I felt like throwing up. I didn't notice the piss until I was almost touching it with my hair and then it was to late. The elevator had already claimed us.

At a small information booth we met the two rudest and most unhelpful people in Europe. The woman was so passive aggressive that her sour little mouth almost disappeared when she refused to talk to us. These people didn't want help us at all and couldn't bother to inform us that the city of Antwerpen is called Anvers if you are french speaking. The huge "Information" sign above their heads looked like some elaborate irony. Maybe it was actually a joke, some french humor I'm not getting. Some boring candid camera thing they show on planes in France and Germany and is always more abusive that actually funny.

In the end, thanks to my boyfriend/boywonder who figured it all out and managed to force tickets out of some machine. That man has a brain the size of a watermelon.

I've never understood people that have jobs where they have to interact with other people but seem to hate the human race. It's utterly beyond me. Like these people today. I think they should move underground so the rest of us don't have to see their sorry little faces. And there they can pee in their elevators as they wish and make signs that lead to nowhere.

Anywho, this was just a detour. The trip was fun and I'm very happy to be back on the mainland. I'm very excited to play at the festival tomorrow.

Northern exposure.

I made this Moomin Björk for an article in Grapevine. It was fun to have a license to do the moomins. I've always liked them.

We just played a benefit show this evening. It was for a little kid that has Leukemia. I never feel like I do anything for anybody so I like to be able to help someone. I hope he and his family liked it. I had fun.
I'm at a hotel in Akureyri watching CSI, sort of, and playing a computer game. I would like to call it multitasking but to be honest I don't think watching TV and playing a computer game while blogging counts as multitasking. I bet you have to do something productive to call it that.
I hope the flight tomorrow will be less bumpy than the one this afternoon. I don't like reflecting on my life more than I have to.

When I was a kid my parents decided to drive to Akureyri to go skiing. I was ten and it was in the dead of winter. On the way back, after an almost nice weekend(I'll explain in a little while.)... where was I? Oh yes, on the way back, it started snowing. The snow flakes grew larger and larger and there was always less space between each flake. My dad kept complaining that he couldn't see anything. We were in a mini convoy with my uncle and his family and a third car I can't remember. As we drove slowly through the thickening snow storm I started worrying about my life. I sat in the dark, stared at the snow and thought about the end and how it was getting near. I even chose a photograph for my obituary. I can still remember the photo I chose. We ended up staying at some hotel or motel. I find it amusing that most of my memories are not of me being a blissfully happy kid but about a worried and almost morbid small old person. I even talked like an old person because I spent so much time in my mother's weird amateur theater group where all the plays happened in the olden days. (That is a long chapter and story for another time.)

I mentioned the weekend being almost nice. This was mostly thanks to my horror of a cousin. Two years older than me and a misbehaving creature. I sometimes suspected him being a full blown psychopath. During visits to my uncle's house my mother used to check up on me because my cousin had a habit of beating me up for no reason at all.
Anyway, during that dreaded weekend I was sitting in a ski lift with my cousin and a puny little kid around my age. I can't remember who he was but he was probably the son of one of my mother's yoga vegetarian friend.
This kid kept complaining about his fingers being cold. Through his chattering teeth he complained in the queue to the ski lift, then he kept at it in the lift. We were halfway up the mountain when my cousin suddenly turned to him and shouted: " I'll help you get warm by cramming your fingers up your ass and sew it shut!"
If someone would write a book about my cousin, it would be a mix of Catcher in the Rye and Darkly Dreaming Dexter.

Eurovision.

I've been doing illustrations for different things. Nowadays I've done a couple for the Pro European Union organization, it's to advertise their meetings. I was also illustrating an article about how Icelandic people fear the EU. Both were fun to do.

I'm not a European Union enthusiast but I'm not against it either. I actually try not to think about it because I don't feel like I have a say in the matter. Who cares if I want to join? Our politics are a mess right now and the majority of our government clowns are against the EU.

Icelandic people are for the most parts, terrified of it. I think the rich people in Iceland are making the middle class and poor people afraid by telling them stories on how the horrible European monster is going to steal everything from us. But what they don't tell them is that the EU is not going to take anything away from us normal folks. The rich think they will lose money and power and that is what bothers them. That's why they run around shouting anti EU propaganda.
They think the Euromonster will eat all the fish in the ocean. The fishing quota is owned by a handful of rich people. They are scared that it will affect their property and money to join. Why should the rest of us worry? ... Eugh.. I really don't want to talk about this.