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.