The Not So Hard Goodbye

Before I planned on coming to Europe I planned on leaving at the end of July. Then I traveled around for 16 days and spent 4 months worth of money. I tried to switch my return flight to the end of June and I soon found out that switching flights costs a lot more than a $200 fee. All told, switching flights from July 31st to June 30th would have cost almost a grand. But then I found a $300 dollar flight through Iceland Air. It leaves tomorrow afternoon.

I felt guilty about calling it quits at first. But after spending half a year abroad it only seems natural that I'd want to go back and see people I enjoy being around. Throughout my entire stay here I have been ultimately solitary, occasionally making a few quick friends but never really feeling connected with anyone. I see people who have met here who will cry when they say goodbye and try (or at least pretend to try) to meet each other again some time in the not too distant future.

I've had none of that, which isn't so bad in its own right. It's given me a lot of time to get to know myself, or at least a better idea of what it means to "know oneself." I'd say I've made progress, but I'm no Dali Lama. The big thing about not caring about anyone I've met is that I don't mind leaving at a moment's notice. It's liberating! As for all the sights I've missed: they're not going anywhere.

Prague

I came to Prague expecting the prices to be similar to 1950s America: a dime for a hamburger; a penny for a pack of gum; three dollars for a horse. Every time I asked anyone about their trip to Prague, I'll would hear an inspirational anecdote about a 1 euro pint of beer or a 5 dollar t-shirt. I had thought of the city as one of the last frontiers for modern tourism and that I may be one of the last people to see it before tainted by Peruvian flute bands and bus tours.

Of course it was all a trap. The place has been a tourist hot spot for longer than I've been alive. The Peruvian flute bands still haven't immigrated, but the bus tours are plentiful, and the American tourists lured by the scent of cheep food and beer crowd the streets. They make nice enough company.

A flock of foreigners on the vehicle of choice for tourists on the go!

Rainbow in Rome

Rome Rome Rome. Rome is busy and full of guidos and average people. Average people by American standards. Like, fat people, and people who wear sandals and cargo shorts. The big difference in Italy is that those sandals are made by Prada and those cargo shorts cost a month's worth of pay at the pizzeria. Enough bigotry, I'll try and stay theme-based.

The cool part about going to Rome was that my stay coincidentally coincided with Europride. As the latter part of the name should suggest to anyone living in this millennium, this is a gay pride festival. The biggest in Europe, in fact. Jack and I had no idea it was happening on our last night there until our landlord asked us about our plans for the night. Being the spontaneous youngsters we are, we said "Uh, not sure." He told us about the festival: "It's for normal people too!" When he told us Lady Gaga was going to be performing in the Circus Maximus (where they used to hold chariot races) we could not possibly say no.

We went out for true Italian food that night and happened to cross paths with the flamboyantly epic parade that cut through the city. We caught it at the halfway point and the series of love-filled semi trucks to half an hour to finally pass us. There were trucks for lesbians, for transexuals, and for those who wanted the world to finally accept their S&M lifestyles. I've heard Italy was into plastic surgery, and true to their reputation I saw dozens of men with perfectly natural-looking breast implants. Jack pointed out one of the self-identified males and explained how fucking hot she was. "Dude, that's a dude." That's the spirit!

SHAKE DEM TITTIES!

After the parade passed us Jack and I went exploring to find an Italian restaurant that had better food than Olive Garden. We failed, and were charged 30 Euro for our stupidity at choosing the first place that had someone standing on the street, desperately corralling any tourists foolish enough to respond to their greetings.   The restaurant's card machine was supposedly broken, so I was forced to leave on a long search for an ATM  that according to the hostess was "down that's street." The entire time I fantasized about leaving Jack on his own to either foot the bill or escape with his wallet intact. The stupid moral part of me forced me to return. And I paid for the meal of peppered spaghetti and regurgitated sturgeon like I was supposed to.

The crowd at the Circus Maximus was enormous, as expected. I forced Jack to rush there because I knew the crowd would be even bigger than a Gaga concert that actually charged 60 dollars for admission. We managed to squirm our way through the dense crowd of belligerent Italians until we were maybe 200 ft. from the stage. I would have complained, but from the back row even the jumbotron would have looked like nothing more than a blinking piece of confetti.

GAGawD Worshipers

 Of course it wouldn't be a political event if there weren't speeches. We had to wait through a gauntlet of rants I couldn't understand a word of before Lady Gaga finally took the stage and put in her two cents. While it was in English, Gaga's speech was the most long-winded of them all. Many people heckled her throughout the speech. She knew what we wanted, and it wasn't to hear her rant about gays being awesome and her being 25% Italian.

But they surely wanted to here that her dress was custom made by Donatella Versace herself. Conventional designer clothes like pants and bags are hard to appreciate, but when it comes to dresses, top-tier designers create works of art. The dress looked like the subject of an MC Escher painting and captivated me for the entire show. That's not saying a whole lot considering she only sang three songs after her speech.

Gaga's a great singer, so great in fact that she can draw a crowd big enough to fill the Circus Maximus. It was clear that 90 percent of the audience came not to hear poorly-dressed lesbians shrieking about gay-rights because the field was nearly empty within 10 minutes of Gaga's show ending. I would have joined the exodus, but the following act was a troop of Spartan-bodied men dancing to Lady Gaga singles. The choreography was good enough, but the my attention was held at the surreal fitness-level of the dancers, which I had not though possible outside the airbrushed pages of GQ.

After the concert we partied.

Crawling through Barcelona

La Sagrada Familia

You know what? Barcelona was pretty, but who the fuck is surprised by that? Even if I could describe it in terms that would give you the perfect image of the awe-inspiring cityscapes I saw, would that be entertaining? I hope you're thinking "No, of course not!" because that's the right answer. Before I move on, I will say that I could take a picture in that town with my eye closed and I could still sell it on a post card. That's how good-looking the place is. Oh, and La Sagrada Familia looks like a temple out of Lord of the Rings.

Aside from a lot of walking around, oo-ing and ah-ing at all the pretty shit to oo and ah at, Jack and I went on a bar crawl that went through the bulk of The Gothic District. As you may expect, the Gothic District of Barcelona is filled with architecture in the style of its namesake. What's especially cool about the area is that all of these magnificent old buildings have been appropriated by restaurants  bars, and clubs. Now you can casually get wasted in  the very same buildings the Spanish Inquisition could have pre-gamed in before going out and torturing infidels to death.

Painting on the wall of the hostel

The pub crawl was introduced to us by our sassy receptionist at the Hip Karma Hostel. It was the only hostel I've ever heard of that doesn't allow drinking or even the possession of alcohol on its premises. But that didn't stop them from advocating some good ol' fashioned drunken festivities. Jack and I were sitting in the kitchen eating our chorizo and bread dinners when a young, refreshingly friendly American sat down beside us and introduced himself. He was Aaron, a 19 year old Adderall and weed dealer from Michigan. He asked us if we were going on the pub crawl and we gave him a couple tepid I-don't-knows.

"C'mon, let get a group from the hostel together!" How could we argue with that? He found another girl who was staying in the same room as Jack and me who went to school in Colorado. Despite being an American, the nicest response I got from this one all night was an eye-roll and a puff of cigarette smoke.

Alleyway in the Gothic District

The pub crawl started out at the first bar, which was supposed to be in a square but ended up being down a winding street that led us down a schizophrenic path of despair that amounted to us being half an hour late. Fortunately we were on Spain time and drinking time, so we actually got there almost an hour before they got the ball rolling.

The first bar was nothing more than another one of the ever-present Irish pubs one finds everywhere from Tennessee to Tunisia. Those Irish have globalized alcoholism far more than any other culture. I guess it's better than not having a national identity at all. I'm looking at you Denmark! We sat down at a large wooden table shaped like a spool turned on its side and enjoyed the beers we traded our tickets for.

A drunken Englishman got in an argument with Aaron over universal healthcare that eventually devolved into an argument over Europe's view of America. Naturally, the Englishman was pointing out how fat we all are, and then went off on a rant about how ugly our cars are. As I got more drunk and gradually more tired of the stale topic, I butted in and explained to them both that neither was winning the debate and the people around them were growing bored by the second. They stopped quarreling but the girl we came with, Matea, began giving the Englishman a philosophical blowjob that last until we finally left the bar. She's a self-hating American. It's a philosophy I can identify with but have gotten over since seeing how disgustingly elitist you have to be to think you're better than any country.

The next bar was metal themed, and the DJ only played requests. It was awesome. Above the two bars hung head phones that played the exact same music playing over the speakers except louder and clearer. It seemed like a silly thing to have at a place as social as a bar, but it was still fun putting them on and ignoring even the loudest person next to you.

The final bar was a club that, in true pub crawl form, had by far the worst prices of the night. At 6 euros a beer, I was force to go outside and by my booze from the Indians walking on the streets pushing warm cans of beer at a euro a pop. I picked up two and went inside again. The top floor was a typical club that was typically empty on a weeknight. The bar crawl brought enough frat boys and Aussies to fill it up halfway. The downstairs had a stage on which a Spanish rock band performed a couple songs before stage diving with each one of their members/groupies/stage managers.

We left without Aaron and I found him on the bathroom floor of the hostel in his underwear.

My New Favorite Color

Graffiti near the hostel

There was more to Amsterdam than drugs, like hookers! But before I depart from drugs, I must mention the amazing array of products offered at the smartshops one can find around town. After one too many tourists died from taking shrooms and wandering into oncoming traffic, the purveyance of psyclobin mushrooms has been forbidden. But that hasn't stopped the shops from selling chocolate truffles made with mushrooms. The only drawback is that you have to eat half a box to get the same effect that just a couple putrid caps would give you. I was dangerously close to buying a peyote cactus but got cold feet at the idea of crotching it through security at 4 airports. The shop clerk told me I could say it was a present for my mom but the 30 euro price tag and the instructions for usage (which included the drawn out process of turning the plant into tea, drinking it, and then vomiting it up) killed the idea for me.

Sorry for the digression, but I really enjoyed the drug culture of Amsterdam, although I've heard it's almost entirely marketed towards tourists. The Red Light District is also for tourists, actually. And I loved it just as much. Unfortunately, because of rumors of pimps breaking overzealous tourist's cameras, I have no photo-documentation of my exploration of the world's most famous whorezone, at least not at night.

I first went into the district unwittingly while visiting the Anne Frank house, which is located on the edge of the area. My image of the Red Light District was a haze of unclear preconceptions that only involved dark alleyways and brick streets. In the day time it actually was a normal looking place. In the night it was too, for that matter. If it weren't for the g-string clad women dancing in windows, it would have looked exactly like the rest of the city.

One image I was sure would prove true was that of, dirty, down-on-their-luck hookers who I would never dream of sleeping with in my worst nightmare. My noir scenario turned out to be completely false as a doubled back down some streets just to see the would-be GQ models attempt to usher me into their small professional bedroom. If it wasn't for a bad case of self-righteousness and a bread-and water budget, I would have taken the 50 euro dive in a heartbeat.

Red Light District during the day

My objective on entering the Red Light District was to see a live sex show, which is surprisingly hard to come across in suburban Minnesota. We managed to find one after asking a couple peep show bouncers where to go. Believe it or not, it was closed! It couldn't have been past two in the morning at it was closed! I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw the sign, but there was nothing we could do apart from cutting our losses and heading to the strip club.

I was surprised how comfortable I felt in the strip club just as I was surprised at my comfort in the district. I thought I was going to feel alienated, like a piece of my born innocence was dying away. Well, I guess that innocence died long ago with my first glimpse of internet pornography, because I felt perfectly at home sitting next to a guy who was rubbing his face in a middle-aged woman's vagina as I waited for the topless bartender to bring me my beer. The strippers dancing at the bar were hit or miss as looks went, but were all incredible at dancing. I never knew how far the pole arts had progressed until I found myself gasping at the sight of one stripper swing down a the pole upside down as fast and coordinated as a Michelle Kwan doing a double axle.

I did my best at shooing away the strippers as they attempted to coax me into getting a lap dance I knew perfectly well would cost me 10 euro. Short of running away, there was nothing I could do to deter these women. I shook my head violently as one of the least spectacular specimens wrapped her legs around my shoulders.

"No thank you!" She didn't respond. "No thanks!" I gave up. "Well, is this one on the house?"

"No, baby." Fucking swindlers.

She rubbed her body on mine in a routine that matched the other dancers' lap dancing move for move. They all went from front to front, to back to front, to titties to face. I refused to let myself enjoy it in hopes that she would go away and leave me with my money. Of course she finished her dance the same as if I jammed my face into her willing breasts and sat impatiently next to my drink until I finally handed her a 10 euro bill.

"Try to make sure no one else does this to me." She didn't keep up her end of the bargain, but I learned the rules of the game and was able to fend off the rest of the advances that night, usually by avoiding any eye contact.

"The road of excess leads to wisdom."

Intro to Amsterdam

It started out with a plane taking off from Kastrup Airport in good ol' Copenhagen. I learned quickly that if I made swallowing motions with my facial muscles I could avoid a debilitating migraine caused by the pressure changing in the cabin. Jack, my travel companion either did not share the same physiology or the same learning curve, and spent half the plane-rides doubled over in an emo stupor of excruciating pain I knew too well from past flights to Florida with my dad.

Landing in Amsterdam, we learned just how far away the actual city is from the international airport. It's the same for all the airports in Europe. If we were in Lord of the Rings, the journey from the airport to downtown would last for six chapters. It was easy enough to hitch a ride on a bus on a route that lead us to a Hard Rock cafe only a few blocks from our hostel. I had no idea how useful tourist information could be until I arrived in a country only knowing the name of the place I was staying.

The Hans Brinker Budget Hotel markets itself as "The world's worst hotel." The reception desk is decorated with post cards and posters with images of customers cheery faces at check-in and gaunt, heroin starved masks at check out. All these for sail from the receptionist at .50 euro a pop. I nearly bought a poster depicting the hotel's policy of cutting out sections of the carpeting to get rid of cigarette burns.

Long exposure of the hostel

Despite the "hotel's" self-inflicted reputation and dubious reviews on Hostelbookers, it was actually an extremely pleasant place to live. Well, maybe scratch the "extremely." The walls were thin and apparently Dutch kids were having something like a prom night rented out rooms on several of the floors. I had trouble sleeping the first night either from my surging excitement at finally leaving Denmark or the incessant screaming I could hear coming from outside my door. But for the price, I couldn't complain. It was a hostel after all, and in a room with 6 beds a little screaming from outside is a whole lot better than a fat guy with sleep apnea. 

Amsterdam itself was amazing. Yes it was pretty. The flowers were blooming and the flower market was in full Spring. Even Venus Flytraps and other tropical plants were flourishing in the weather. The canals sparkled as they pulsed with images of the cityscapes that inspired Van Gogh's imagination. But what really charmed me was that it only took a 2 minute walk outside the hostel to find what the Dutch call coffee shops.

Not to be confused with "cafes" (I think you know where I'm going with this), coffee shops are dispensaries of high quality cannabis, hash, brownies (space cakes), and and overpriced juices you are obligated to purchase if you plan on smoking inside. I was privileged to have the ability to enter these shops, which the government will be banning tourists from in within the next year. Each shop had it's own identity, one was comic book themed, others electronic, some reggae. But they all got the job done.  They had weed-smoking down to a science. The environments and the drinks provided were the perfect supplements to extremely high doses of THC. The music where we went was loud and had a baseline that even the most vegetative stoner would find impossible to sleep to. And the organic juice had the body and hydrating potential to alleviate a cotton mouth I thought to be incurable.

Quitting Trips

I promised myself I wouldn't go more than a few days without writing in this. I promise I was spending the last 16 days conducting serious business. It's fun to rehash the experience in bullets, since it comes out as impressive as impressive with even the most unenthusiastic delivery.

 I went to Amsterdam where I was forced into a dance by a stripper as old as my aunt.

From there I flew into Barcelona and got kicked out of my hostel for drinking and got drunk in the midst of a giant protest I couldn't understand a word of.

Then there was Rome, where I followed a gay pride parade to a Lady Gaga show on the same race track Spartacus raced on a chariot.

Prague was more tepid, I spent the last night in a 5 floor club with 15 people from my hostel getting ignored by a model and talking up her nicer brown haired friend.

I'll return to these cities in the next entries, but I thought an overview would be appropriate. I'm kind of sick of traveling and managed to spend 2000 dollars over the course of the trip when I budgeted to spend 500. I might be going home early and may not give a shit. I spent enough time gone to finally feel satisfied with having a home in Minnesota. At least for now.

Jacobsen's Ghost

Carl Jacobsen founded the world famous Carlsberg Brewery over 9000 years ago. I use "world famous" with a touch of irony because I had never heard of it before I came to Denmark and saw signs everywhere I looked presumptuously declaring Carlsberg to be "Probably the best beer in the world." The beer's OK, a couple grades above Keystone or Miller Lite. But I'm digressing.

You see, the Jacobsen became a big fucking deal in Denmark after starting his company and started what amounts to the Danish take on the Rockefellers. The Carlsberg foundation loans Denmark's national museum half of its permanent collection and owns billions more in assets. Many of this assets are pretty swell and accessible to the public. One of these is the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek (New Carlsberg Sculpture Collection).

Honestly, I didn't check out the museum because I get an erection at the thought of naked marble statues of Aphrodite. Rather, the museum has free admission every Sunday and I haven't done anything outside the house besides drinking for maybe a week now. It felt great finally having some purpose after laying in bed until 12 every day only to spend the rest of my time looking on the internet for new movies to watch. To be fair, it's been raining a lot lately so I haven't had much reason to go out.

I biked to the Glyptotek and got there an hour and a half before closing, which gave me more than enough time to go through the arc of fascination and boredom I expected from 10,000 old painting and sculptures. The whole place reminded me of the main visitor center in Jurassic Park. The ceilings were high, maybe 40 ft., and bordered with skylights that made the museum bright even when the sky was completely shrouded in gray.

The whole museum was actually spectacular. It was arranged like an art collection, but an art collection too big to fit in the building. Many statues found themselves in the main entrance way or in random inaccessible areas that were simply the only places left to put them. I could only appreciate a few of them because Greeks, Romans, and all Europeans after them took pride in their ability to copy their predecessors and create a body of work as diverse as a Taco Bell menu.

What I really liked about the museum was how much information was on the walls and under the works. Usually all I see is the artist, the medium, and the title, usually written in Danish. But here there were little blurbs about the historical place of many of the works. I felt like a scholar after going through only a couple of the rooms.

Replica noses that got taken off after collectors
thought they made sculptures less authentic

Tomorrow I'm going to Amsterdam so hopefully I'll have more interesting things to say about that than a marble museum.

Noir Night in Vesterbro

A couple days ago I volunteered to check tickets for the ASSITEJ International Play Festival for Young Audiences. It was an easy enough job: ripping tickets, counting them, and eating pizza meant for the performers. My job was made that much easier by the extremely low attendance. No more than 30 people showed up for either performance, which was a Brazilian play done entirely in Portuguese.

The play was being done in the Meatpacking District. It's a maze of rundown brick warehouses that look like scenes from a zombie apocalypse video game, or West Side Story, your pick. The stage was incredibly difficult to find amongst all the former slaughterhouses, and many of the audience came late and often ready to argue with any volunteers stupid enough to ask how they were doing.

I managed to stay up through an entire showing of the 2-hour play entitled "The Poem of Roses and Thorns." It was surprisingly entertaining, there was a lot of yelling, funny expressions, and the actors were exceptionally talented at balancing object of their heads. People who sat in the front row were given stage lights fashioned out of tin cans that turned on whenever the lights dropped, giving the dark scenes a cool campy vibe.

The show was OK considering I couldn't understand a word of it, but what I really enjoyed was getting a chance to explore Vesterbro after midnight. This area of Copenhagen has a reputation for being frequented by hookers and has more sex shops in a four block radius than I have cumulatively seen in my entire life. Theres a homeless shelter conspicuously placed on the busiest street in the area, a couple blocks from Copenhagen Central Train Station. Its windows are boarded up and the entrance is surrounded by a mob of old men showing varying degrees of depression and cleanliness.

I walked past the shelter and a man began walking at my side. He was eating what looked like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but I knew it couldn't have been that, it's Denmark. He asked me if I was looking for "anything," which of course meant cocaine mixed with baking powder. I laughed uncomfortably and said no, thanking him for the generous offer.

Probably because it's the area containing central station, there are many many hotels in Vesterbro. I could hep but imagine all the times people must take advantage of the close proximity the hotel share with sex shops, prostitutes, and cheep Vietnamese restaurants. It seems like the perfect place to have a date witha lady of the night. First dinner, then a romantic walk to pick up a 20-inch silicone penis, then finally to the hotel that redoubtably smells strongly of vaginal fluid and sweat.

I walked past some hardcore S&M shops that proudly showed off their ball-gag and whip selections in their front windows. I only entered one of the shops, which appear to be open all night. A bronze statue visible from the main entrance caught my eye and I had to give it the quality attention it commanded. In case you

can't tell, it's a man, penetrating a rabbit, penetrating a sheep, penetrating a pig, penetrating a cow, some more penetrating... then a dog is eating out a very pleased woman at the end. Great art. I'd expect nothing less from a Danish sex emporium.

One of the main reasons I decided to walk after hours in such a seedy neighborhood was because I wanted to find some real-life hookers in the wild. Not, looking to be a John for the first time, rather, I wanted to finally be exposed to a line of work I had never seen before outside of movies. My first sighting was a woman who looked to be in her fourties and wore black stockings with a suggestive skirt and flattering heels. While her outfit made her look merely like another Danish woman who was comfortable with her body, she walked around indecisively and paused in the middle of the sidewalk at random intervals to look around. I passed her and she began speaking Danish to a man who was walking behind me. Sounds like a hooker to me, but I still called her a "maybe."

Everybody's Stupid

The Peace Corps, churches, and my study abroad program all make clear that in addition to being volunteers, missionaries, and students, we are all ambassadors. Throughout the first few months here, I took my post very seriously. Fearing making a mistake and defacing my nation's image, I often remained completely silent in public, or at least very quiet. My absolute worst fear was coming off as one of the loud, fat Americans that is the most representative image in the eyes of many Europeans. 

What I've discovered now is that, as an American, it is impossible to prove people's stereotypes wrong. As it turns out, the bigoted image of the American is perpetuated by the bigoted reality of the European. Before I go too far down this path, I must explain that I've made friends with Europeans, but they all believe me to be an exception, one out of many in a country of ignorant, wheezing, trigger-happy Americans.

Many times I have met people and found it impossible to have an interaction that wasn't dominated by the person's disgust at my American-ness. I met one Lithuanian girl at a student bar. I asked her where she was from and she said, "Lithuania, but you probably couldn't find it on a map." In certain circumstances, this sass could be interpreted as a cute flirt from a sexually liberated girl begging to fuck. However, her cold frown told another story, and I responded like any dumb American should. "Probably not."

It was the truth, insofar as finding something on a map means searching on a blank map for a small country in the Balkans. Obviously, given enough time and a well-labeled political map printed after World War II, I could easily find it. But to expect the country to be ingrained in my geographical memory forever, that's just too much. That would be like asking a European to find Guatemala on a map, or Mali, a country some Europeans I've met never even heard of. 

You see, as much as people criticize the US for acting like world police (which I too oppose, for the record), they act like we should be masters of the universe and know all about every single country and each one of their fascinating, insignificant, histories.

In a brunch organized for my sociolinguistics class, I was met with similar criticism after making a benign remark about... applesauce. My teacher, a tall bearded septuagenarian, announced that he was going to bring out applesauce he had made from a tree that lived not twenty feet from where we sat. Half-joking, I said, "You can do that?!" I looked at applesauce the same way one looks at ketchup, something common and good, but never made in the kitchen.

An extremely tall and equally nerdy Dane who worked in the IT division of the university laughed at my remark as a fat lesbian Dane informed me in her deep accented English, "You ah not making a very goot image of America." The nerd related a bland impression that kept the flat, know-it-all tone he always had. "I thought all the food came from the store," said the privileged, ignorant, American.

I didn't bother defending myself. This was the kind of situation I have grown callous to while abroad. People who think Americans are dumb or blunt or loud will find it in every American. Where from a fellow Danes a remark would be considered sarcastic or, at worst, misguided, from an American it is the manifestation of a broken culture.

I cannot blame people for their assumptions about my country from me or vise-versa. I did the same thing from the beginning of my stay. I had a Danish roommate. He was an ass hole who played a lot of video games, so my image of his country mixed indelibly with my image of him. This pattern continued with everyone I met who wasn't born in the US. The Spanish girl becomes the Spanish people. The Italian I sat next to in class is the sheepish representative sample of a country. 

If you don't think in these terms though, the whole idea of having the multi-cultural study abroad experience is complicated. When you can't judge a culture from a few of its members, then at what point, if ever, can you say anything about the culture? What I've slowly been learning is that you never learn enough, unless you're actually staying in the country of interest. Five Italians does not make a country, not even a good random sampling, especially if they're all students. 

MS Pointless

Instead of working on the longest research papers I have ever been assigned in my entire life, I've been using MS Paint to kill the time. Because my wrist hurts from spending so much time drawing lines using my tiny track pad, I don't think I'll be able to spend much more time on the computer. I don't want my wasted time to go completely wasted, so I'll upload a couple ones I liked for posterity and your viewing pleasure.

This took forever with the curve tool!

Booking flights is tough. Booking flights that are cheap is even more tough. Now, trying to book those same cheep flights from Denmark... oh brother...

I'm planning my first trip through Europe. After talking to some people from England and Belgium, I've realized that when you live in Europe you really don't feel the same sort of obligation to travel everywhere in the union. To them a trip to France has the same sort of romance as a trip to Virginia. They have the time and they have the drive of not a kid in a candy store but a kid in a candy store he has lived in for the past twenty years. Now, eliminating the fact that you can't be a kid after living twenty years in any setting, I'm sure you can see my point.

But I'm from the US, so the whole kid in a candy store allegory holds true for me. As such, I need to experience every bit of Europe I can afford during my short stay here. I met I guy from New Jersey here who wanted to travel like I did. We decided to plan a trip that crossed through four countries over sixteen days. It sounded a bit ambitious, maybe a little irreverent too. But many international students have booked trips over the same period that go through ten cities, maybe more. For us, three days in Barcelona is quality time.

This is the story of us booking flights. Between credit card declines and website crashes, it took us around an hour to book each flight. I liked to break the monotony of the affair and voice by frustration with the websites' tendency to reject my payments and delete my contact information. Jack assured me my experience was normal and, in fact, better than most people's. I couldn't let him steal my spite so I directed my anger towards him whenever he tried to console me.

We finished booking our flights at three in the morning. I didn't know it until we hung out after, but dawn in Springm in Denmark, takes place at four. It's a horrible sensations, seeing the white light of the sun reflect off the cold modern windows around Amager. I used to think of dawn as a reminder that you were alive. Here, I feel like the sun is your parents scolding you for not doing homework. It hurts my eyes and gives me a headache. Even if I haven't had a drop of alcohol the night before, the second I spot the cruel Scandinavian Sun I feel like a vampire at the sight of a Catholic's crucifix. I cover my head in blankets and pretend it will go away, but after a few hours it's a battle long forgone.

Have you ever heard of A Spanish Apartment? It's a French movie set in Barcelona about a French erasmus student studying in Barcelona, the city I just mentioned. It's great. It totally captures the philisophical essence of studying in another country. Of course, it's nothing like what I've experienced here, where I cling to alienation like it's an old friend I only get to see on holidays. It makes Spain look like a real happening place, so I'm excited to see it.

Did you know that Europoeans call "study abroad" "erasmus?" Did you know that there's a difference? Did you know that difference is that they get money from the government? Did you know that Danes get paid $1000 USD every month to go to university? Each month? Did you know that the minimum wage in Denmark is almost $20 an hour? Did you know that they are charged 40% income taxes? Did you know that Danes, after taxes, are paid almost twice as much as I've ever been paid? Did you know the sun rises here at 4am?

Red Solidarity

This Sunday was the first of May first. While that not be explicitly interesting to the reader, he might be interested to know that Denmark and Europe at large celebrate socialism in all its glory on this date. The day is called The First of May funnily enough. It's like Earth day except with the Labor Party playing the role of Earth, and instead of people giving speeches attempting to get people to turn off the lights and taker shorter showers, people give speeches telling people to complain to their government about a lack of affordable housing and other stuff like that (I don't know Danish; I just know "arbejder" means"house").

Despite the obvious political overtones, the vast majority of those in attendance were young Danes just looking for an excuse to get drunk. There were many tents filled with people who were handing out a wide variety of propaganda. One of my favorite was a Danish organization that supported Kim Jong Il's regime in North Korea. I wanted to find out what their rationale was; perhaps it would revolve around a Western super-power conspiracy theory, since Europeans seem skeptical about many points in history I take for granted (I'm referring to the rumors of 9/11 being an inside job or that the moon landing was a video shot in Kennedy's living room). Because they couldn't speak English and there were not English translations of the literature they were handing out, I was left to develop my own theories about Kim Jong Il's true merit. Maybe he wasn't such a bad guy after all. Maybe North Korea is actually heaven, and the reason why they need aid is to... I'll be honest, I couldn't come up with anything. But I did support them by purchasing a pack of cigarettes that managed to escape the border patrol and end up in Denmark.

Jack's Chinese, so it was only appropriate that he
posed with the NK contraband

In addition to people pushing pamphlets and pissing in bushes, there were many tents that had performers. The whole park (Fælledparken) had a music festival vibe, although in between every performance there were long-winded speeches given by people I assumed were running for some sort of office. The main stage was dominated for the majority of the day by a raspy-voiced woman in a vest who yelled horsely into the microphone to produce a screeching guttural sound that resembled feedback.


Jack, the Asian posted above, knew a girl from school who was performing in one of the tents. She played sitar in Emma Acs' back-up band. I was surprised by the professionalism of the group, and actually didn't want to leave after the first song. It helped too that the girl sitarist was a beautiful Persian adaptation of Kate Hudson's character in Almost Famous. I took a pretty shitty video of their cover of Joy Division's Transmission, but the majority of the concert was original material.

 

They sound as good as they look. Seriously, the sitarist makes the band.

It was a sunny day when I arrived at the park, but after a couple hours the sky turned gray and the wind began biting the exposed skin of my legs. I always pick the worst days to wear shorts. Jack and I took the train back and I risked not buying a pass. It started raining on the way back and a Metro controller stepped on the train a couple miles away from our stop. I saved myself an $150 fine by escaping the train, but had to bike through wind and water to arrive shivering at my apartment.

Cut Your Hair

My dad has paid for and accompanied me all but two of the times I have gotten my hair cut professionally. This started out, because I was too young to drive there by myself, then I didn't have the money, then I didn't want to spend the money, then I didn't want to go alone and deal with something that I'd managed to avoid for twenty years. Here in Copenhagen, I didn't have the option of getting my dad to pay for it, at least not directly. 

Originally, I had resolved before leaving for Denmark that I would avoid getting my hair cut until I flew back to the States.The plan changed after someone accused me of having a mullet. I argued that to have a mullet my hair would have to be longer in the back than in the front, which it clearly wasn't. But even as I fought in defense of my hair, in the back of my mind I was becoming self conscious and desperate for someone to shave my head. 

The next day I took to the streets of downtown in search of a barber. I had tried to put off cutting my hair in Copenhagen because I assumed it would be expensive. My prediction was wrong, I imagined they would charge me something like thirty or forty dollars for the service, when it's actually more likely to cost from eighty to a hundred. Granted, I was in downtown, and I had seen places in Norrebro that were closer to twenty dollars. But I didn't trust want to my hair to a Turkish barber who probably wouldn't understand English.

Three of the salons I walked into told me their outrageous prices for a male hair cut. But, the last one had a deal for me. It was a well-decorated place, with little chandlers hung btwen each set of mirrors from the white ceiling. The walls were painted a sort of dilapidated yellow that looked like it was covering some structural damage. It went well with the lounge music that played to give the place a Mediterranean resort vibe. The staff were all good-looking and dressed in typical Danish fashion: skinny jeans, complex shoes, and artfully applied make-up. There was no way I was going find a deal there, but I was already in the door.

 The beautiful Asian working the register told me I would have to pay 380 DKK (~75 USD). I said "See you later then!" As I walked towards the door, a girl asked if I would be her "model" so she could practice on me during her apprenticeship. I asked how much and the Asian and the apprentice talked briefly in danish until an answer surfaced. 100 DKK, or twenty dollars. It felt like I had won a sweepstakes. A woman working at a cosmetics store I walked into that day in search of salon advice told me that you can sometimes get a good price if you get a stylist-in-training to cut your hair. But I never thought, me!

I arrived for my appointment early, which in Denmark just means that I wasn't fifteen minutes late. The one woman working when I arrived looked to me like she could have been the owner of ZENZ, trendy organic hair salon. She looked to be in her early fifties, with sophisticated crows feet picking out from behind the thick frames of her Buddy Holly glasses. She had dark short hair that looked like it had the same kind of surreal depth that hair only has in shampoo commercials. The woman told me to take a seat and then offer me something to drink. "Would you like some tea or coffee?" I said tea and she proceeded to list off no less than five varieties for me to chose from. I picked the fanciest sounding one and she disappeared in a small crevice. The whole place was no larger than my apartment's common room, leaving it just enough space for eight barber chairs and two wash basins. She came back with a little pot of tea steeping next to a big mug shaped to fit on the bottom.

Marie, the apprentice, arrived I had finished my tea and the sophisticated woman placed the pot in the over-sized cup and brought them back into the crevice. Marie directed me to a wash basin where she shampooed and conditioned my hair. It felt somewhere in between a massage and a doctor's appointment. She dug he fingers into my scalp and rubbed the suds into my hair as she commented on how much dry skin I had and asked how often I washed my hair. I stared at the crystalline chandeller above me blissfully.

She told me she was going to practice pruning my hair into "an Englishman," which is just another variety of the short-on-the-sides-long-on-the-top style that's so popular nowadays. It started out as fun. I was excited to get a hair cut by a professional who didn't work at Cost Cutters. I didn't even care that I had no say over the style. I always hated having to tell the barber what to do, then being responsible for the outcome, which never satisfied me. During the process, she offered to make me a latte, and a realized that eighty dollars for this kind of service was not a rip off. I said yes, of course. 

The only bad part about it was that I had to sit for a full four hours until the process finally ended. My hair was longer than I hoped since I was going for a length that would keep me going until I got back home. But Marie told me she would be cutting it again during the month. Whatadeal! The results are below!:

                   "Mullet"                                                          "Englishman"                                                         "Undercut"

Inevitable Breakdown

I feel like this wouldn't be an honest account of my time spent abroad if I didn't bring up some of the more unsavory aspects of spending time away from home. I'm talking, of course, about homesickness. Honestly, I didn't want to mention it just because it's the most trite subject in travel. It's just one of those things, like jet-lag and culture shock; it comes with the territory.

Every other time I've been dislocated, I've left places where I didn't didn't feel like I was leaving anything behind. I left for college without knowing anyone in Wisconsin except for maybe a couple classmates I never planned on talking to. Even though I was stuck there for 4 months with limited contact with my old friends and family, I never looked forward to going back home. I never missed my generic suburban town, my former classmates, my family. I felt like the best thing for me was right where I was. Actually, I felt like the best place for me was even further away from home (cf. where I am now).

It's funny how hard it is to keep up this topic now that I've come down from the ledge. Well, not literally of course. But I started this post right after having a long video conversation with my dad, in which I let every single one of my anxieties pour out in a violent torrent of self pity. It made matters worse when he suggested my unspoken thought that maybe I should change my flight home from July 31st to an earlier date. I fantasized about being back home a month early, surprising my friends and maybe getting a chance to spend a little more time in Madison feeding my parched addiction to cheep beer. By the end of the talk I resolved not to give up, even if that meant being an emotional wreck by the end of July.

Toby or not Toby

I met another one of my long-time-coming goals today with the help of my handy dandy credit card. Yesterday, I woke up three hours after a group I promised to accompany left for Kronborg (Shakespeares's "Castle Elsinore"). So I made a pact with Anna, my female Italian roommate, that we would go today.

We almost didn't make it after we saw that train tickets to the castle were more than 20 USD and I had the pleasure  of swiping my card only to see it declined by the ticket machines that operated with the ease of a Rubik's cube. Only after finding an ATM did discover that I had a modest 4 dollars left in my month's budget. I withdrew 60 bucks while closing my eyes and pretending the money wasn't digging me a trowel deeper into college debt.

I ended up getting lucky actually and managed to just buy a pass for my bike and use my "klippekort" (clip card) for both trips. Anna had the misfortune of buying a 25 dollar one-way pass that turned out to be nonrefundable. She blamed me for the mistake. After all, I did convince her to come back to the station when we were turned away from the machine the first time. I couldn't blame her for being bitter after I managed to dodge the same fate only by virtue of recognizing her tragic mistake. Whatever.

Luxury is spelled R-E-R (jk, lol)

We took the RER directly from Orestad -- conveniently placed a block from our apartment -- to Helsinor, a pretty seaside town of tastefully painted red and yellow houses and an epic fort that housed the inspiration for Hamlet. The RER is by far the nicest of the three trains that run through Copenhagen, replacing the discarded beer bottles and drowsy homeless with polished bicycles and young families on their way to visiting other young families. It feels like you're in business class, except with 3 more feet of leg room, even with a bike across the aisle.

Anna was done sulking by halfway though the journey. It was such a nice day, she would have had to be clinically depressed to even pretend not to enjoy herself. My sanity, on the other hand, was quickly fading by the the end of the journey. She has a hard time understanding English, and many native-English speakers have a hard time understanding me, so Anna has taken to my aforementioned habit of nodding and smiling whenever she doesn't understand me. She's exceptionally bad at it though, and laughs absently at me when I ask things like, "Where are we now?" or "What time is it?" 

Couldn't get a view this good outside a hot air balloon

The castle itself was good. Maybe just all right. I mean sure, it was cool; look at it. But after seeing so many Western European castles, all built in roughly the same time period, they begin to feel as captivating as a state capital building in the US. They're all pretty, and I appreciate how many peasants had to starve to death to fund such spectacular undertakings, but I'd be a lot more interested if they included a giant statue on the outside, or a big dome, something original. Maybe I'm just an ungrateful product of our easily-bored, wasteful generation. 

The inside, like every other castle, was packed full of luxurious furniture, intricate tapestries, and paintings of elderly men waging war in armor I know would have made my grandpa's knees implode if he ever had the opportunity and stupidity to equip a suit of plate mail. For a beautiful Easter afternoon in the dawn of tourist season, the grounds were surprisingly spacious. Only two groups of people asked me to take their photos, and I even felt patient enough to offer reshoots in case the origin photograph didn't capture their true selves. 

The only part of the castle I really enjoyed was the casements, which was a big basement used for storing items that needed to be held near freezing temperatures year-round. Anna, being a fragile Mediterranean girl, was in a rush to leave the area as soon as we left the tunnel leading to the empty exhibit. I wanted to bask in the eerie candlelight that brought back memories of the dripping ambiance of Cisterne. There was glowing writing on the walls that made bold, misspelled statements about heroism and the legend of a giant who sleeps under Denmark and will awaken when the nation is under threat.

After leaving the caverns Anna wanted to lie in the sun and found an excellent location near the beach in front of two drying fish carcasses. "It smells like shit here." I told her. She laughed and nodded at me. Being sick for the past few days, she didn't have the physical capacity to detect the violently offensive odor herself. I contented myself ignoring the bugs and the smell by sleeping until Anna grew bored and we left for ice cream before catching the train home.

Pig's Happy

Jesus Christ. I've said it before and I'll say it again: Copenhagen is EXPENSIVE. I try to be financially responsible, but that goal is made impossible by my simultaneous desire to be chemically irresponsible. Last night a Russian-Italian girl invited me out to a bar, The Happy Pig, with a group of people I had never hung out with before.

I was excited for the chance to branch out, but I was reluctant to say yes on account of my wisdom about going out in the 3rd most expensive European city. After staring at my Facebook Chat window for a couple of minutes, I fell for the "oh, what the hell" logic that so many of the international students use as their life philosophy.

The group was meeting outside of the McDonald's in downtown, so I had to shell out thirty bucks for a train pass. Granted, the pass was worth 10 rides. But at $3 a ride, I wasn't feeling too lucky. I risked the train ride to downtown without punching it. I managed to make it all the way to Kongens Nyortov (King's Court) without seeing any ticket argents. I got off a stop early because I didn't want to risk an agent slinking into the train and callously doling me a $150 fine.



I met the group fifteen minutes late. There was the Russio-Italian, a Japanese girl, a Turkish girl, and a guy from Italy. We parted for the Pig, where a Danish girl told us we had to check our coats for $4 a pop. "Does this count?" I spread my jean jacket apart, showing how it barely could be considered a coat, really.

This is what The Man uses to own you

"Yes." The coat attendant dully replied as she hung up the Turkish girl's jacket. My protests about denim being used as shirt fabric didn't help my cause, and I ended up paying the four dollars like everyone else. The Pig turned out to be just another sports bar, but was good because it was empty enough for us to find a seat. Like every other bar in Copenhagen, The Happy Pig offers a special in which you get ten shots for $20. It sounds like a great deal by the city's Dubai-esque perspective on money, but the shots must be one of four different types of 20 percent alcohol liquors. They taste great, yes. One was strawberry flavored and looked and tasted exactly like Pepto Bismol. After drinking eight or so of those, I was beginning to feel the beginnings of intoxication. That was after twenty dollars.

After we finished spending oodles of our hard-earned cash, we sat at a table next to the empty dance floor upstairs and silently thought about how little we had to talk about. It's times like these that I give myself some credit for not having many friends on my trip abroad. It's hard to make friends with people who are boring, or bad at English, or a terrible combination of both. The group I was in was composed of a healthy mix of all three. The Russian-Italian girl got so drunk she didn't want to talk or dance. Talk about a party, right?

A Japanese guy we rendezvoused with at the bar had a great idea to make the time more productive. He started stacking the overpriced shot glasses. It became a half-hearted contest that felt like Jenga, except with a little more desperate lifelessness. I cheered loudly when Saki, the Japanese girl, put the final glass on top and sent the spectacular structure toppling to the sticky table. After that, we sat some more.

I was happy I decided to go home before one. It gave me just enough time to practice dancing in the wild (another dance floor started getting action) just long enough to get sick of it. Honestly, I think I've been getting better at dancing since I've been here. No longer do circles of sour-faced strangers surround me whenever I enter the dance floor. Some day, I'll be able to charm girls with nothing more than seductively gyrating my hips.

When I was getting ready to hand in my ticket to get my jacket back, fate delivered a poetic kick directly into my balls. A beautiful blonde girl with superbly tight jeans and an exotic accent told the Russio-Italian, "You look exactly like one of my friends!" Small talk arose and when I mentioned the I was leaving she said, with all the suggestion that went along with it, "That's too bad." Kill me now!

The Yes Man

I'm having a hard time figuring out whether I'm submissive or open-minded. I'm constantly being asked to do things, or invited to do things I feel reluctant about, but I find it impossible to say no. Case in point, the Irish girls.

They invited me to go to the beach with them. I was supposed to meet them there. Little did I know that the gave me the directions to the wrong beach. When I figured that out Donna told me that they were at another beach, which I reached only to discover that they were actually at a beach a few miles south. I wasn't so bitter when I finally reached them. I packed along a bottle of wine and a pack of cigarettes that wouldn't have been as good had I given up and drank alone back in my apartment.

Once I finally reached them we stayed until the sun began falling rapidly and I started seeing my breath. Ï think we should leave soon," I told them.

"Oh, you should come get pizza with us!" Donna suggested. I told her I didn't have money for that Rockefeller shit. "But it's free; my friend invited us over and he's going to give us some." I pointed out that it was probably frozen, and that her friend, a guy who she slept with on a cruise to Norway, probably wasn't looking forward to her bringing any more penises into the picture. "Aw, c'mon."

Gets me every time. "Well, let me get some pants. Where does he live?"

"You can't get pants; you have to come with us! And he lives on the edge of town." Things started to unravel from here on. The Metro, a train going through the bulk of Copenhagen, was not sufficient to get us there. Neither was the S-Tog, which goes hours outside the city. No, we had to take the RER, a line that goes all the way to Sweden and the edge of Germany. This guy lived in Roskilde, a city two hours west of Copenhagen.

They told me this once we got to Central Station. "No, I am not going there! Do you know how far that is?"

"C'mon, Sam!"

The train was nice inside at least. Orla took to sleeping on one of the seats as Donna and I watched silently. I was stewing over letting myself get roped in to going out into Viking territory at ten in the evening equipped with nothing more than a pair of beach shorts and a digital camera.

We met the friend, a football player from Ohio, outside the station. He came with a friend from Venezuela. The walk was completely silent aside from the clinking of the twenty-four pack of Carlsberg Dredless, the footballer, had on his bike and the scratching of a lighter as the Irish girls attempted to smoke a joint of hash and tobacco. I struck up a conversation with the Venezuelan, who told me about anaconda hunting in the Amazon. "It's fucking scary dude."

The dorm, the dorrorm!

They brought us to their luxurious dormitory. In the common room was a group of students who, despite having an ample supply of booze and THC, were exceptionally cold. Dredless made some pizza that was actually delicious and, surprisingly, not frozen. We stayed until four, when I left for the train in a huff, but went back to retrieve Orla because I didn't know how to get back to the station.

My train pass had expired, but I refused to pay again, as did Orla. Despite standing directly in front of the ticket-checker's private compartment, we didn't get so much as a glance for the entire journey home. The train took us directly to Orestad, which I thought was going to take two more transfers to reach. it was dawn when we could finally see recognizable scenery. Really though, eight dollars for pizza is a deal in Denmark, so I had a hard time feeling like the night was wasted. That, and a French guy rolled a blunt I didn't have to pay for.

I Predict a Riot

My Greek roommate turned 25 yesterday and him and his friends invited me to go out to The Jazz Bar inside Christiania. I had never been to any of the bars inside the "freetown" since I first visited and wandered into a
dive bar made of unvarnished wood filled with thick smoke and wrinkled alcoholics. This time was different.

As we walked toward the main entrance of Christiania, an unseasonably warmly dress man grumbled, "Watch out for the gas." I ignored him and, with a coaxing tone, he yelled after me, "Take it easy man."

"He's probably tripping out of his mind right now," Jack said convincingly. It seemed like the only logical conclusion to be gained from such a nonsensical statement. The whole place was built by hippies and what better to do on a warm Spring night than take a couple hits of acid? We found out what the man meant soon enough.

What we found inside was a post apocalyptic scene I was happy to get a peak at. A police riot squad marched amidst flaming trash barrels and a miasma of teargas. Onlookers lined the street and dispersed as the line of cops crossed them. Bottles crashed in the distance as sparks flew through the grey air. The sound of the teargas grenades exploding like artillery was actually more frightening than the flaming Molotov cocktails, which appeared to be duds on impact.

We only stood around until the cops began marching down the street attempting to disperse the crowd. The only violence occurring was coming from disembodied arms throwing fireworks and bottles at the police from behind fences and shrubbery. The bar we went to had a nautical vibe and was right next a canal that used to be frequented by scurvy-ridden, conditional homosexuals known as sailors. There were ropes on the walls, wooden floors and no regulations on smoking. It felt like how I imagine Seattle to be. For around eight dollars I drank a beer that was brewed in my area of Copenhagen, Amager. A couple rounds were drunken, four poorly-received cigarettes smoked, and we left again to check out the progress of the conflict in Christiania.

This is what was left in the morning from the fires. 

I didn't have my camera with at the time so the news

story has a better photo.

The battle had spilled onto the street, where there were two roadblocks made by the rioters from wood, furniture, street signs, and plenty of gasoline. People threw anything they could pick up into the ten-foot flames. A few minutes of that and five armored vans whose windows were protected by metal grates plowed through the puny barrier. A crowd of police left from the back of the vans an threw some teargas around as a giant plow mowed down more of the fire-moat. I would have stayed until the tear gas started to make me drool and cry uncontrollably, but the cops began shooing people away once they started putting out the fires. They wore water-tank backpacks and sprayed the piles of garbage like they were fertilizing plants.

Art Underground

The ceiling of the cistern dripped with hard Danish water that formed thin stalactites that stretch as far as two feet towards the ground. I could see my breath even though the temperature outside cavern was in the fifties. A disembodied child yelled from the dark just to hear the sound of its echo. I could feel her pain. After all there wasn't a whole lot of stuff to keep kids interested in The Cisterne, a modern art museum buried under Fredrickserg Park.

I had been meaning to check out the place ever since I first stumbled on it. I kept putting it off for the same reason I've been putting off going to Hamlet's castle: no reason. Maybe a little procrastination, coupled with a reluctance to spend money any something other than food or alcohol. It was a deal getting in actually. A little less than eight bucks for students, and a couple extra if you're not. The museum is a deep lair that's poorly lit and filled with morbid glass sculptures usually covered in blood.

One of the bloody statues

Some of the art creeped me out, and I think of myself as a fairly callous person. But this on work was a pack of small ceramic dogs that were fighting with each other. They were painted in black fur, white for teeth, and liberally splashed with red paint that spilled out of small chips in their skin. It was a frozen dog fight with plenty of casualties to keep my eyes occupied.

The cold was nearly unbearable. It felt like I had stepped back in time to a month ago when I couldn't go outside of the apartment wearing fewer than four layers of thick clothing. The museum was small enough to see before I finally succumbed to the chilled air that pierced through my pitiful wind breaker. I ended up running out of the place after feeling like raising my heart rate was the only way to survive the cruel cold of the biggest walk-in freezer I have ever entered.

S-Toggin' Around

All right, I'm back in business. I've been keeping up with class readings lately, bought some food, and even found the time to go for a run today! Not to mention that I've made a respectable dent in an Ayn Rand novel fat enough to kill a guinea pig if I dropped it in the wrong place.

Yesterday was another free S-Tog (regional train around Copenhagen suburbs) Sunday. I took a 45-minute ride while reading from my Sociolinguistics textbook. I saw on a map there was one stop a ways south called Jersie that was particularly close to the Baltic Sea. It was a typically tragic-looking day that was painted in grey-scale, but I wanted to see a beach, regardless of how ugly it was going to be once I found it.

I got off at the train station in Jersie feeling aimless, the way I usually do when I go on train rides alone and with no purpose in mind. The map showed the coast as being west, so I took a left out of the station and walked until I hit water. I saw a cool poster for an upcoming Grinderman concert on one of the concrete beams of an underpass. The members of the band were dressed in Gladiator armor and I could hear God's voice telling me I needed to rip it of. I tried to gingerly detach one of the most promising posters from a corner, but succeeded only in tearing violent line through the header.

The beach only took a brief stroll to reach. There was a nature trail that lead to it. Once the trail opened it was like I was in Savannah, Georgia as I faced the reed-covered sand dunes and the cute little boardwalk that carried me over a nice little bog. Except it looked like this:

The Vikings Called this Sunny

I took to wandering around the place, feeling the sand, testing the salt content of the water (it's salt water), and digging a hole I was too lazy to cover with leaves and create a clever trap. It was a nice long beach without much litter. I should come back when it's sunny.

Pity the Food

I sometimes find it hard to draw the line between living like a college student and living below the poverty line. Maybe it's just misguided self-discipline that leads me to into the latter life style thought. It may not be surprising to the reader that I spent all of the money in my Danish bank account during my week in Paris. I thought I was going to come out of there with at least forty bucks left to my name. I had the fortune of finding out how wrong I was after waiting in line at the supermarket for half an hour just to see the machine reject my card as the last of my wish list drifted down the conveyor belt. "There's an ATM over there." The cashier pointed across the mall. It was nice of him to pretend that I wasn't just leaving the grocery store because I couldn't pay up.

This was on March 21st, and I get my monthly allowance on the first of every month. So that gave me ten days to survive on nothing but the nonperishable food I left in my drawer and whatever money I took out of my savings. Naturally, I tried to go without spending any money. Those savings are for travelling! I'll admit it, I  ended up squandering perhaps eighty dollars from the American savings account, but less than half of it was on food. What can I say? I'm easily roped into drinking. Usually by the second "C'mon!" I'm out the door at an ATM.

As I was saying, my life style did not reflect the money I just said I spent. I allowed myself two bags of potatoes, carrots, onions, oats, and milk. After the oats and milk were gone, I developed a life style similar to that of an Irish serf who inexplicably attended university. Two meals a day consisted of potatoes, fried or baked, depending on my mood. There was some cheese in my fridge that was good for adding some flavor to a couple of meals and may have given me a healthy day's worth of protein spread over the course of two weeks.

A bag of rice I had left in the drawer helped satiate me a few times. By the end of my fast I got creative and took to frying a batter I developed. Flour, water, oil, salt, sugar, burnt on the outside, raw on the inside. They tasted a lot like scones actually. Maybe they didn't, maybe I was starving.