surprise 50th birthday

❊ oh dear blog, i missed you!
jerry and i just got back from his mum's surprise 50th birthday cruise. jerry's sisters had planned a huge scheme for her; stole her mobile phone and her car while she was at work, pretended to call the police, lead her on a huge mission to the bus station, then lured her onto a bus that went to copenhagen. while she was stressing to death (and pissed off because no one had planned anything for her 50th) all jerry's brothers, sisters, in-laws, aunt and uncle piled onto the bus and broke out singing happy birthday. jerry and i had gone even further with the trick by dressing up in costumes (jerry an old man and me a muslim woman) and sitting a few seats back from her reading, newspapers. when she thought the surprise was over, jerry pulled down the newspaper and started screaming in accented swedish that they should all be quiet. yvonne looked at us both in confusion and asked 'who are you, i recognise you?!' ....she was so happy that we'd come as well, and the best thing was that she'd bought the whole scam and was genuinely surprised!

in copenhagen we all jumped on a cruise ship to oslo, that goes through all the norwegian fjords, and the partying began. after dinner, we started off drinking in the hallway outside the cabins and partied until we got complaints from the neighbours and then forced to leave by security guards. then we moved on to the kids play area and between rounds of shots, toasts and speeches, we took turns diving into the pool of plastic coloured balls. jerry's brother-in-law even stripped off to his underwear to jump in!

everybody got so drunk that we became a big trouble making gang, rampaging around the ship until finally we found the piano lounge. the pianist was sitting alone, playing to an empty bar. so we all piled in around the piano and began singing along rowdily to all the abba songs, making requests, dancing our arses off (i even pleaded to jump up and dance on the piano, but he said no).
we were having so much fun and causing such a racket that we drew in all the other guests walking past and im sure that piano man had the best work-night of his life! he let me sing 'hey big spender' and 'im a believer' to the whole crowd and i was drunk enough to get right into it. jerry's mum who never drinks, got totally smashed and even got hit on by a young guy in the piano lounge, until first jerry went up and threatened him with 'hey that's my mum' and then jerry's 's step dad, 'hey thats my woman'.

everyone had drunken D&M's, telling each other how much they loved each other etc and jerry's sister and brother tried to conspire with me to bring jerry back to live in his home town.
it was a fantastic night! ...unfortunately we paid for it the next day, hungover and sleep deprived to the shithouse, with three buses to catch (including an over-nighter) to get back to sweden and to good old åre....