The holiday season appears to have officially kicked off, with the usual onslaught of corporate parties, binge drinking and excessive junk food consumption.
Already I can feel that my arteries have hardened and my liver strained another notch.
As I have two jobs, I am in particular subject to such affairs. As one of those jobs is in the City, there is really no escape from it all. so the past week has been sent writing stupid holiday greetings cards to market data teams in all the big banks, overlooking the fact that I don't like them and they don't like us. Next week, it will be time to take key market data types out to lunch and flood them with alcohol (and other substances). Yesterday was my Russian employer's Big Christmas Party. Christmas parties are a fairly new event in Russia, for obvious reasons, but despite this, they tend to go over the top. So, we started with an end of the year meeting, food and several bottles of champagne- at 11 am (utrom vipit, ves den svoboden!) next we moved on to the O2, where the office manager had rented us out ski slopes. The O2 is a completely soulless place, with even less charm or point to it than, say, the Mall of Americas in Minnesota. I had been highly dubious when we were all told about this plan, figuring that any artificial English construction of a ski slope would be horridly fake, and it was. However, I have to confess that the snow tubing (which we ended up doing) was actually really fun. We all sat in these tyre-like things and went flying down the fake ski slope at super speeds. The instructors spun us girls (um, all two of us) so that we would go down the hills spinning alarmingly. Fortunately we had all drunk a respectable amount before hand, so when I got rammed into by two of the guys and was sent flying out of my tube, backwards, and landed on my head, it didn't hurt too much. To keep the pain at bay, we then headed for more drinking. And then some horrible food, and more drinking.
Tonight my other company is having its Christmas party, a more classic English affair: an open bar until 11pm.
4 commentaires:
lovely. so far i have avoided two x-mas office parties. but won't miss next thursday's one. there is spanish paella involved in that one. and i love it. i think i am also going to start drinking.
you should have seen the snow stuff, it was actuallly quite funny. my liver has almost recovered..
not to defend russian drinking habits, but I was very much surprised to find out last year in Germany that they too have their routine of drinking sekt at noon.
all taking place either in the back garden or in the conference room of the institute of course
шаманское по утрам пьют только аристократы и дегенераты (from a soviet comedy Бриллиантовая рука)
look, i will NEVER attempt to defend the Germans and their drinking habits- they think beer is an acceptable thirst quencher!
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