Givin Up

If I keep thinking I'm going to explain the entire Paris episode I'll be on my last day next month. I'll make this easier on everyone by including a profound, succinct summary of the wonderful journey.

Day 4:

Went to Versailes with Nisha and a couple of guys we met through her high school friend, Hoyle. It was great. They were smart.

Day 5:

Went to The Catacombs with Nisha where I met with Abby and some other people from University of Wisconsin. Did you know there are over 6 million people buried there? On the way out I saw a pile of bones on a desk that were confiscated from people who wanted more original souvenirs than the aluminum Eiffel Towers peddlers constantly peddle around town. Then I went inside the Pompidou with the group sans Nisha. Some of the art hurt my eyes. That night I went to a club, The Social Club, with Nisha and her Stanford friend Claire.

Day 6:

Sacre Ceur alone. It's in the sketchiest part of town. There were posses of men holding out loops of string ordering passersby to stick their fingers in the middle. It's hard to say "Fuck off!" I saw the victims standing, hapless, as a bracelet no one asked for slowly formed outward from the loop. The men then asked for 5 euro for the service. That night was a family dinner with a bunch of Weslyan kids at one lucky erasmus student's suave apartment. Did you know they have a student porn magazine at that school?

Day 7:

Took the metro to the airport while managing to dodge the extra fee for leaving my zone by running after someone as the blockade closed behind them. One 2-hour nap later and I was at Lufhaven Airport in Copenhagen.

Louvre the Arts

I suppose I should take a break from my busy night of shirking homework to draw pictures of people having sex to shirking homework and writing another entry on my Paris trip, which was densely-packed with shit many people will die without ever doing. I think I'll skip the third day, or a least expedite the mention of it. After all, I'm in Copenhagen now and that's what the blog's about, right?

What did I even do? Oh god, maybe I should give it an entry on it's own. I went to the Louvre. This was a big deal for me. Before going to Paris I had no idea how much it would cost to get in, but I set my price limit at 50 dollars. I had to see it, no matter how big of a tourist trap rip-off it would be. My mom had a set of books detailing all the great museums of the world, so I've had a lot of time to ponder over the works of the Louvre that regularly appear in textbooks, TV shows, and shitty Tom Hanks movies (OK, maybe just one).

I keep bringing up the tourists in each of these entries, but seriously: there were A LOT of them at the Louvre, especially outside. What's most notable about these ones, though, is that they draw many scammers who grew to be a fixture at most of the Parisian tourist traps I visited. I took advantage of the beautiful sun I never got to know in Denmark to walk around the vast courtyard outside the famous museum where I encountered people trying to con me out of money in ways I only thought existed in comedy sketches.

Baby Arch

Walking through the wide sculpture garden that stretched to a small replica of the Arch de Triumph I always thought was the fo-real Arc, I was confident that I looked like a native Frenchy. I avoided bringing my backpack and even a water bottle for my day trip to as to avoid the tourist prototype I assumed the natives had in their minds. As it turned out, the scammers I mentioned could spot me from a mile away, apparently. I didn't get a hundred yard before a tanned adolescent boy walked up to me and shoved a clipboard under my chin. It was a poorly photo-copied petition with around twenty names written in the same ink and handwriting next to boxes filled in next donations that didn't go less than 20 euro. At the top of the sheet, a fragmented UNICEF logo gave the gypsy an air of authority.

"You like to sign sheet? It's for UNICEF."

"Um, what do you want me to do after I sign it?" Obviously, "Give a donation?" he pleaded.

Trying my best to be rude I mustered, "I hate UNICEF." and started walking away. The kid began to follow me, attempting to convince me how important his cause was. In an equally weak tone I trailed off, "Leave me... alone..." Shit, I need to take a page out of Chris Brown's book of rage.

The next one was even more gypsy-looking. She was an old woman, maybe just middle-aged, but she was wearing a billowy dress and had a sari over her head that gave her a prophetic sort of look. At first I though she was going to ask for directions, which I was happily prepared to give her with the map and compass I had handy.

"Do you speak English?" she moaned. Why yes, certainly! She flipped over a note card she had in her hand, on the side she showed me was a note she apparently couldn't bother to read herself. It iterated a story reminiscent of a Craigslist real estate con. "I have been living in Paris for three months... blah blah blah, 4 kids... more bullshit... need money."

"Sorry, all I have is plastic." I pantomimed a rectangle with my hands and tried to make an apologetic expression.

"Just a few coins." she begged. I flashed the rectangle at her again as I turned away. "Sorry!'

The next one was my favorite, especially since I saw it coming. I walked up a flight of stairs to gain a better view and maybe catch a couple artful photos. As soon as I reached the last step, an Eastern European sitting on a bench stood up and began walking towards the sidewalk. The timing was too perfect. After ten steps I heard a voice behind me. "Excuse me!" Louder, "Excuse me!"

I felt like I was in the right ignoring him, even if he wasn't up to no good. I mean, that "excuse me" could have been for anyone. I got a few more steps in before the guy jogged up to me.

"Hey, did you drop this ring?" He showed me a ring in his hand. It looked like something you could get out of one of those quarter machines they keep by the doors at roller skating rink or a Chinese restaurant: all gold, sharp edges, one hundred percent grade A painted plastic. He was tempting my greed with a toy ring.

"Nope, it's not mine." He made an impressive attempt at convincing me that it was, in fact, my ring.

"But it has a chip in it, see?" He showed me a small indent in the ring. What did he want me to say? "Oh yes, now that I think of it, I recognize that ring." Right. I spent a good minute avoiding his sales pitch. By the end of it, I had to walk away. There was no way he was going to give up on me. I know what you're thinking, "But Sam, how would giving you a fake ring benefit a con-artist?"

Well, I thought that if I did take the ring, a previously unseen accomplice of the ring-bearer would come up to me and accuse me of stealing the ring. he would mention the marking and I would have to admit that there indeed was a blemish on the POS ring. After this point, I can only imagine that the accomplice would try to extort money from me, possibly by threatening to call the police. But I can't be sure! Use your imagination! Or maybe I just messed up and missed a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get a free toy ring. Who knows?

Yeah, I could talk about the Louvre, but not a lot happened there. There were some paintings, sculptures; a cute girl eyed me in the Egypt gallery despite my facial disfigurement. You can find the rest online. But I'll include some pictures, in the spirit of a blog that can be read or glossed over.

Turkish Baths = Sexy

Most of the paintings are HUGE

Mona Lisa Crowd

"Hercules Being a Badass"

Another Fucking Day in Paris

On my next day in Paris I jumped at the chance to see the Notre Dame cathedral, which looked incredible from every depiction and photograph I have ever seen. I'm a sucker for flying buttresses. After eating a very light, very French brunch of thinly sliced beef, fancy cheese, and baguette Nisha and her Belgian friend Janthe escorted me to the famous cathedral.

Pretty cool, no?

They drew the line at the courtyard, "We're not going in there with you." I could see why, the crowd around the church was massive. The line to the entrance was like waiting to go on Space Mountain on Spring Break. Worth the wait though, really. I wouldn't have been able to live it down if I skipped it merely because of my profound hatred of waiting and disdain for posses of flap-jawed tourists making trite observations. "It's big isn't it?"

The inside was just as epic as I expected. Well, maybe a bit less. I didn't break down into tears nor did I begin speaking in Hebrew before collapsing on the floor foaming at the mouth. But it was still pretty swell. The ceiling was massive and detailed enough to keep a bored churchgoer occupied staring for a least a month's worth of services. If you got bored with that, or if your neck started to hurt too much, the nave (central service area of the cathedral) is surrounded by beautiful stained glass windows and statues depicting biblical-looking scenes that could give comics a run for their money as far as entertainment value goes. I contented myself with wandering around the place, taking time to squint at the pretty sights and seeing if I could read the Japanese translation of the church rules. "Kutsu o..." nope. There were candles all over the place. it looked like it was the main source of income aside from what I assume to be a constant stream of big-ticket donations from classy French Christians. You could pay 10 euro and get a nice big candle or spend just one and get a candle in a tin like a wide shot glass. I guess the idea was you would light it, place it next to your favorite saint, and the pray as you feel your prayers amplified by the spiritual steroids.

Kinda gives you vertigo

One of the statue scenes depicting

Death mackin' on Saint somebody

Maybe I would have liked going to
church more if I had some of these..

After getting spiritual, we got gelato on one of the streets near Notre Dame. Nisha said the place serves the gelato in the form of a flower on top of a cone. I was a bit disappointed by the poor effort shown by my drooping cone, but I suppose that's what I get for ordering in English. We would have eaten next to the Senne, but the walk there was a couple of blocks and it was a hot day. I had to eat it. We sat on the side of the river talking about how rich some the kids at the American School of Paris are and headed to the Pompidou, which is Paris' biggest modern art museum.

When Nisha told me the building was built inside-out I was all like "WTF?" But it makes sense when you see it:

We didn't go inside because the two girls didn't want to waste their time doing something so typically French. Outside of the building there were various performers including a couple Frenchmen who were playing with glass spheres, making them look like they were making the spheres levitate in their hands as they moved their hands while keeping the ball completely still. I was laughing the entire time at how unbelievable the sight was. I would have taken a video, but I didn't. Maybe I'll feel more comfortable acting impressed later.

Some Firsts In France

I had a dream weeks before leaving to visit my friend from UW-Madison, Nisha, in Paris that I, well, was in Paris, visiting Nisha. Topically, this sounds like a nice dream, a little mental warm-up before the actual trip, but what happened was maybe a couple step closer to a nightmare. I was dropped in the middle of the city and presented with the daunting task of finding Nisha's family's apartment without even having her address. Anticlimactically enough, the dream didn't go much further than that, but the reality of finding her place was just as stressful.

I arrived in the airport, Charles de Gaulle, on Monday. The airport was a frightening place, one of the biggest and busiest in the world and nowhere near Paris. I had saved an online correspondence I had with Nisha before the trip detailing where she lived and how to take the Air France buses to her neighborhood. I managed to get onto a bus that luckily was going in the right direction. The trouble started when I got off. 

Saved on my lap top was an image of an online map showing exactly where Nisha lived. The only trouble with the brilliant plan was that my battery was dead from watching a movie in the terminal while waiting for my flight in Copenhagen, and the map I got from the airport didn't even show the street she lived on. I ended up having to rush into the first building I saw that looked like it would have wall sockets for me to charge my computer. What I thought was a hotel lobby initially turned out to be the reception area at what the woman at the desk told me was a "really big company" as she urged me to make my loitering as brief as possible. I suppose a sweaty traveler sitting on a couch in a lobby doesn't communicate the most professional image for a company...

After getting some vague directions from a man who sat at the desk translated by the anxious woman, I set out again. After half an hour more of panicked panting, I found number building number 10 and figured out that "Rue" means street in French and is not, in fact, a street name. 

Petit Palais, one of the many art museums I didn't have
time to wander

Nisha's spread was incredible; a few blocks away from the Arch de Triumphe, and several more from the Eiffel fucking Tower! We took a walk after I stammered up the five flights of stairs to Nisha's apartment with her and her high-school friend Janthe (Yonn-tuh) around the neighborhood. You couldn't turn your head without seeing an astounding specimen of renaissance architecture. 

That night ended early enough, but the days only got longer, and even more fulfilling. I'll get to those later, God willing.

A Glance of Paris

Everyone always harps about Paris being an incredible city that everyone in the world needs to see. This is the kind of thought process that has kept it so thoroughly and permanently infested with tourists since the middle class could finally get their hands on international plane tickets without selling the organs of their first-born child. Upon seeing the Eiffel Tower my first night in The City of Lights, the mass of tourists posing for pictures, pretending to poke the tip of the spire with a pointed index finger, I was afraid that I was going to spend the next six days swimming past gawking tourists to catch a glimpse of the landmarks I have grown up seeing on TV and in National Geographic. 

As it turns out, the beauty of the city, and the prices - far lower than in Denmark, land of the ten-dollar beer - far outweighed the annoyance I experienced as a selfish, elitist college student. And  anyhow, I'm a tourist too, a tourist who wanted to see Paris before I died, like every other person clutching a camera and wearing a money-filled pouch around his neck.

It would be too scatterbrained for me to attempt to go over my experiences in a single long-winded post, so I'll see if I have the patience to rehash my trip in a few concentrated entries.

Birthday With the Scrapes

I went to a party of nurses three whole zones away from my apartment. That probably sounds meaningless to anyone outside Copenhagen, but to get from zone 3, where my apartment is, to zone 30, where the party was, takes a 20 minute train ride and a half-hour bus ride. We were running late, but the bus ride gave me time enough to mix a couple vodka-limes in an empty Coke bottle. After the bus though, we still had a meandering walk from the station. We were looking for a house to left left of the tunnel under the highway, but there were tunnels every quarter mile under the highway. When the nurse who was celebrating her 21st birthday (plus 7) went outside to yell "DONNA!" from a balcony we were nowhere near close enough to hear her booming Australian accent. Four desperate phone calls and a couple wrong turns later, we landed in front of a three story house with eleven bedrooms.

I spent an hour getting to know the nurses in the Irish girls' program getting fed wop and drinking more vodka and lime while trying out the "vodka sauna" (sauna in which Bacardi rum was poured onto the coals). I stumbled out of there with maybe two thirds of the completely female party population to go to an Irish bar on Stroget called, transparently enough, The Irish Bar.

There I finished my vodka and my lime before dancing on a 4-foot counter with the Irish girls. The next thing I can recall, after sucking down the last of my ten-dollar bottle of Russian potato liquor, is walking on a street with blood running down my cheeks and meeting two very attractive, surprisingly sympathetic, Danish girls.

[maybe] a flight of stairs later in the morning

"Are you OK?" one of them asked in a sexy voice that made her "ay" vowels sound like sexual advances. "Yeah..." She told me to sit down, and I did. She called the Danish emergency number and they both talked to me until the EMTs came. It was the closest I have come so far to getting with the beautiful Danish girls I had avidly anticipated before arriving in Denmark. I don't remember what was said, but I distinctly remember that the girls were more sympathetic than any of the vitriol Danes I have dealt with in customer service.

The Irish girls brought cupcakes and ice cream

Aside from the horrible deformation, my 21st birthday the next day was satisfying. Orla and Donna went with me to a restaurant downtown, Cafe Dalle Valle, that had half-priced entrées four days a week. Wowee zowee is right folks! I cancelled out the great deal on a platter full of Danish-quality nachos by paying almost twenty bucks on the girliest drink on the cocktail menu. They both very delicious, but considering the size of the drink they gave me, enough liquid to fill a cologne sample vial, I would pass given the choice again. I paid to have an orgasm in my mouth or to get instantly smashed. What I got  was a puddle of mint Frappuccino.

Trying to detect signs of a party in my mouth

We went to the only bar we could find that was open on a Sunday evening and ordered traditional Irish libations, apple cider and Guinness. After shooting the shit with each other for half an hour, laughing about the absurd cost of my effeminate cocktail, a man speaking Russian stumbled into the bar asking for a drink in what appeared to be his best impression of the mumbling Mr. Bean. Following shortly after was a young Danish man who ordered a pair of Irish car bombs once he heard it was my birthday.

When the Dane went to the bathroom, I consulted the Irish girls. "Is he gay? I think he's hitting on me." They said no, he was just nice; there was no gay vibe. When he got back he told me he was going to order another drink. "Would you like anything?"

"No thanks." He pressed me. Typical... He asked me what I wanted. I said "surprise me," not realizing the flirtation connotations of the trite phrase. The bartender developed his own variation of a Jager-Bomb that had a shot of schnapps resting against a shot of Jagermeister over a pool of Red Bull. He called it a "Disaster." It was delicious, but the Dane left me with a bad taste in my mouth.

Sure enough, before leaving, the Danish guy who was spending more money on getting me drunk than I ever will, mentioned a fancy restaurant in Copenhagen, MASH (Modern American Steakhouse). "I will pay for you. I am going to give you my number, and you should call me when you're back from Paris."

I wish I could say I smoothly accepted he number and just left him feeling a mild success, but I ended up stuttering through a rejection. "Well, uh, considering the implications of that..." He cut me off before I could finish. "It's OK."

I suppose that's the price you have to pay for free drinks.

Fags (Continue to Avoid Offense)

Before coming to Denmark, I enjoyed nonchalantly telling my friends that I was going to quit smoking as soon as I got off the plain in Copenhagen. I assumed the high cost of everything would translate into ungodly high cigarette prices. They have a 200 percent tax on cars, so surely they must tax cigarettes to the point at which only billionaire oil tycoons can afford them. Not so...

While the average pack of twenty cigs costs around 7 US dollars here (a price hike enough to make some religious smokers reevaluate their habits), there are also packs of ten that sell at every store in Denmark for around half that much. This means that drunken, or addictive impulse buys are that much easier here. I cabn get a pack of ten Marlboro Reds for four bucks. Since that's less than a miniature euro-burger at McDonald's here, it's easy to make the decision to buy a back of deadly diet suppressants. Needless to say, I haven't quit.

"Smoking can kill"

But I think about it all the time, quitting, that is. Unfortunately I think about smoking just as much. I hate to say it, but I think I;m at the point where I can safely say that I am dangerously addicted to the things, despite the warning labels that dominate the face of every pack, giving dire warnings like "SMOKING CAUSES IMPOTENCE" and "SMOKING KILLS." The warnings still don't stop what seems like half the population of Denmark from smoking, and looking damn good while they blow smoke in your face.

I've been searching for quitting strategies. Not online, because the internet is full of more bullshit than Charlie Sheen and Tom Cruise, COMBINED! One quiting technique I've tried out in the field was, every time I've wanted to spend four bucks on a pack of smokes, I've tried to displace that desire by spending that money on an equivalent amount on something else, usually food. This has only achieved mild success in my experience, especially today, when I spent it on beer. I ended up actually spending twice as much on beer because I was inspired by the massive selection at the grocery store (Bilka, for those curious enough to care). Now, this started out fine, I mean, besides spending ten dollars for no good reason. But I ended up getting a little drunk, and a little impulsive... I bought a pack. Back to the drawing board.

The Rustiest Night

After more than two months pondering all the great shows I've read happen all the time in Copenhagen, I finally made it to my first concert. It wasn't Owen Pallett, the first act in town that caught my interest. It cost thirty dollars to get into his show so I procrastinated after failing to attain them the first time (as detailed in a particularly gripping blog entry), until the concert date had actually passed. I know I once said it may have been a once in a lifetime opportunity, but let's be real; he plays shows in the US most of the time anyways.

I followed a lead on a Facebook event at a bar/club called Rust. Caribou was scheduled to be there and the cover was only twelve bucks. WHADADEEL! It was on a Thursday night, so I figured I could wrangle them up and convince them to go, since they usually devote weekends to partying, but ofter get stuck at the get drunk phase. I knew the task wasn't going to be easy since most of the time when I play music, either Jesper slams my door or Orla gives me a motherly glance, "How can you listen to this?" I showed Orla "Swim," the Caribou song I thought would be most accessible to new listeners. Her response was predictably tepid, and I ended up going to the show alone. I have missed too many good shows because no one I knew would go with me, and this night I was not going to flake like so many close-minded partiers and mushroom-tripping friends! I left the apartment without the girls, which was a great decision since I don't think they ended up leaving the kitchen table. 

Rust was actually extremely close a street in Norrebro that I frequented while looking for cheep cell phones and bikes from dodgy Turkish vendors. I must have been a block away from the place at least ten times without even noticing it. I didn't take the route I used to through Norrebro though, and felt like I was slowly getting more lost with every drunken stupor I took. It was as foggy as a werewolf movie and dark too. The eerie atmosphere helped me cope with the long, uneventful walk from the train station. My excitement for the show was nearly as gone as my drunkeness by the time I arrived at the entrance.

Hate

My mood wasn't helped by the long line of pushy Danes who didn't even pay me a glance as they budged in front of me. Fuckin' skanks. I don't know how long I stood in that line, but it was long enough for me to consider turning back and going home more than a couple of times. But, in the back of my mind I knew that there was no more fun waiting for me there, so I resigned myself to stand at the mercy of the budging hipsters who rolled in clicks much deeper than one. It was a struggle remaining occupied in that line, or even pretending I was occupied. Really, the only interesting things I had to do were stare at people awkwardly, stare at the brick wall awkwardly, or stare at my phone, a little less awkwardly. Sure, in a perfect world I would have struck up a conversation with a random person, been introduced to all of her friends, and then spent the rest of my night having rip-roaring fun with a big group of new people who loved me and thought my understated brand of sarcasm was the funniest thing they heard since Demitri Martin started doing stand-up. But that didn't happen. Whether it's true or not, I feel like a fool whenever I speak English to Danes, or when I speak Danish for that matter. One particularly bitchy woman in a cafe mocked me for saying "Huh?" when I didn't understand what she or the cashier was saying. Other times I just feel guilty for forcing people to act different just because I can't speak the language. I was also feeling too resentful toward the big pods of friends around me to feel comfortable pretending to have anything close to a pleasant interaction.

Inside was a more inspiring story. The venue was incredible. I went upstairs as soon as I got through the front door and got lost staring at a wall in a bar that I thought might lead to the show room. There were two bars at Rust, both of which had walls and ceilings covered in mirrors that made the small compartments look like long hallways. After trying and failing to enter three of the mirrored walls, I eventually found the stage on the bottom floor.

For a guy who records ambient music that's only really good for smoke seshes and quiet conversation, Caribou puts on a pretty good show. He wasn't much of a showman (no jumping around on stage for the  DJ who's now in his early forties), but his beats were heavy enough to keep a crowd moving. A lone man in a bright orange suit took a particular liking to the music. He flailed his arms around the dance floor and even performed a toe-stomping jig for his captive audience. A crowd began to circle around him, more to avoid his groping hands than to give him the space he needed for his flamboyant dance moves. He reminded me of the way I dance when I really cut loose, except I try to avoid falling to the ground and somersaulting backwards.

I left after a young guy took the tables. Had I checked in my heavy wool coat, I may have been more willing to stand in the hot mist of the dance floor. But my skin was getting itchy from the mass of fabric slung over my arm, and I already counted the show as a success.

Getting home proved to be much more complicated than the trip to the show. As usual, when I most needed the Metro to be operational, it was shut down for maintenance. I asked a Dane what direction Islands Bryge was, since it was the closest landmark I knew I could walk home from. He told me I was better off waiting for the train to start again. I walked off. I was walking the right direction from the beginning, but I wasn't confident in my drunken navigation skills or the directions of Danes who I was worried would give intentionally bad directions just to spite me for speaking English loudly at them.

5:30 I had mad spins and a camera

It took nearly an hour for me to reach the station I asked about. When I finally got there an electronic sign flashed in red that the next train home was coming in ten minutes. At least I didn't wait around for an hour and ten minutes... 

Learn Me Some

Teachers at Copenhagen University leave a much deeper impression on me than any of the professors I've had in Madison.

Tuesdays I'm in my Sociolinguistics class with thin old Danish man and an obese American woman who constantly reminds the class that she speak three languages fluently. The man speaks frankly, and occasionally says things that would get people whispering if he were to lecture in the politically correct States of America. Last week he was explaining to the class the western world's view of Japan. The description he gave of the Japanese as being "meek, servile, and submissive" was fairly benign. At the end of it he jokingly said "I'd like to have one for a slave." Good thing she can't speak English.

The fat woman sits in class when she lectures, except when something needs pointing out. She often tries to interject with information during the man, Steen's, lectures. He usually ignores her when she does this, even though he does the same to her, except maybe louder.

Wednesday's I have an Australian expatriot who leads a class on a World War I battle worthy of countless pages of scholarly analysis and no mention in any of my high school history classes. I like him enough; he responds to the things I say and even appropriates them for use in class discussion. he does this for most students actually, all except a couple. There's a grey-haired Danish man who used crutches to walk. He asks questions the professor, Stuart, says he'll get to later in the class. The other guy who seems to get the short end of the social stick is a middle-aged Brit. His answers are often too noncommittal or too softly spoken for Stuart's taste. Stuart frequently interrupts, "Well, yes don't we already know that? The class can't hear you when you look down and mumble." He's got the charm and the bite of a Mel Gibson character.

The lecturer is different every class in my Thursday Danish culture course. Last time it was a plump Danish woman who gave a presentation on vikings. Did you that Thursday is for Thor's Day? Neither did I! After the fifteen minute break in the middle of class, the teacher began making snorting noises in between her sentences. She passed it off as if nothing was awry, and the rest of the people in the lecture hall were acting as if it was as normal as itching your nose. I thought she was merely clearing her sinuses, but the loud full-throated bellowing lasted until the end of the two-hour class.

Lusty Mothers

There's nothing worse than dumping your girlfriend to study in a country filled with couples gawking at each other and holding hands as they push along luxury baby carriages. I can actually think of countless things that would be worse than that, not the least of which would be sticking with a girlfriend who you won't see for twice as long as you ever went out with her, all while retaining the joys of fidelity without any of the sex. But that just takes away from the poeticism of my first statement.

Anyways, Copenhagen really does make a body long for a relationship. Whereas in America, I scoff at the immature couples who's idea of intimacy is confined to nausea-inducing make out scenes and public genital fondling, I find myself enviously staring at Danish couples (which seem to compose half of the population and plague every sidewalk and train) as they whisper into each others' ears and giggle at the hilarity of my fuming jealously. They always hold hands and always look like they belong together. When I see a good looking couple in the US, I invariably fantasize myself seducing the female and leaving the a pathetic mass of rejection in my callous wake.

But here I just feel... happy for them... almost. Mostly envious, but I certainly don't imagine myself as a macho home-wrecker as much as a healthy male should. I just feel like I want a girlfriend who I can be with in public and show off how great of a boyfriend I am.

Typical Danish couple...

This place really shows off the advantages of monogamy with its god-like Scandinavian parents. I don't know how they do it, but even after giving birth two of three times, many of the mothers here still manage to look like porn stars. It probably helps that many of them marry and conceive young. I have seen mothers with multiple school-aged children who scarcely have a wrinkle on their foreheads and a body to kill for. It's winter fashion season, so puffy, body-masking, coats are what I see everyone in, and I may be giving some possibly frumpy moms too much credit. But faces say a lot about a person's bod type, and those legs don't lie!

Maybe getting a girl pregnant wouldn't be all that bad... Let's be real though, Dane's are some of the highest paid people in the world (with a minimum wage of about 20 USD/hour), so raising a kid with someone isn't as much of a death sentence (or destitute sentence) as it is in America for the plentiful bounty of knocked up jail bait. I don't want a wife for a long time, but the couples here make a strong case for marrying while you're still both young, virile, and astonishingly attractive.