10 posts tagged “copenhagen”
My French friend, walking around town: What's is this place ahead? Amigo?
Me, wondering why I possess this knowledge: Oh, that's Copenhagen's gay sauna.
France: My uncle goes to gay saunas a lot.
Me: Why?
France: He's gay. Don't you all do that?
Me: [sigh]
The reason for my duck-banished hangover this morning? Zombie Pub Crawl!
Billed as 'One night, the dead will rise and feast on the beer of the living', the Z-Crawl is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. Last night's turnout was more than 350 people, and some of them had clearly spent their entire day (and, possibly, lives) getting ready for the big event. We had open wounds, hanging eyeballs, dead fetuses, zombie priests and one dude dressed like a Zombie Care Bear
.
The shuffle from bar to bar was the perpetual, repeating highlight of the evening. The zombies banged on car windows, chased pedestrians and fake-bloodied up the city, all while being led in a chant of "What do we want?!" "Brains!" "When do we want 'em?!" "Brains!"
We finished up the night at a gay bar, just the four of us, with an excuse to be drunk and grotesque for once.
The arrival of warmth and sun in Copenhagen always completely re-introduces the city. I was biking the other day around sunset (8 pm now, and only latening until July), and I realized how pretty this place is. I haven’t been struck by the loveliness of my foster-city in eons, and I think it’s simply because I haven't seen it in six months. It’s been dark, or raining, or cloudy most days, and I’ve been walking around in my Gore-Tex burrito, trying to keep the climate out. The definitive image of winter for me is always the top of my front bike tire, because it’s often too cold or too windy to look straight ahead when I’m on my way somewhere.
It turns out, though, that Copenhagen exists above the first story. And I own clothes that perform more than heat-trapping mummification. And there are colors in this city beyond the gray and sepia. These things only strike me when we finally get all full-spectrumy in the spring.
I’ve been reading ‘Gilead’ by Marilynne Robinson the last few weeks. It’s a slow, dusty kind of book, one that should be read to you by your grandpa in a rocking chair. It starts out
I told you last night that I might be gone sometime, and you said, Where, and I said, To be with the Good Lord, and you said Why, and I said, Because I’m old, and you said, I don’t think you’re old. And you put your hand in my hand and you said, You aren’t very old, as if that settled it. I told you you might have a very different life from mine, and from the life you’ve had with me, and that would be a wonderful thing, there are many ways to live a good life. And you said, Mama already told me that. And then you said, Don’t laugh! because you thought I was laughing at you. You reached up and put your fingers on my lips and gave me that look I never in my life saw on any other face besides your mother’s. It’s a kind of furious pride, very passionate and stern. I’m always a little surprised to find my eyebrows unsinged after I’ve suffered one of those looks. I will miss them.
I know, right!?
The book continues in this vein, a dying father writing to his adolescent son, through a few decades of the postwar Christian midwest. I’m not quite finished with it, but I feel a ‘Dancer in the Dark’ caliber moan-and-cry is waiting for me on the last page.
So this has been my spring so far. Long bike rides in the low-watt sun and droning geriat-lit. By the time summer rolls around, the only thing heavier than my mood will be my quadriceps.
So the last few days here have been in the 80s, which for Denmark is the downright bayou. This, combined with the 11 pm sunsets, means that of the last 48 waking hours, I've spent roughly 47 of them outside. Here's a few pics from the first sprint of Danish summer.
My Spring Resolution is to take my camera with me everywhere. With the possibility of getting thrown out of this country looming in my every daily thought (and nightly, slurred mope-fest), I want to enjoy what I've got as much as I can.
Though my Godless American friends may not know it, this is Easter Weekend here in 2-percent-church-attendin' Western Europe, and the government's highly secular gift to its subjects is a full three days off work for the weekend. Take that, Thanksgiving!
Like most European capitals on holiday weekends, Copenhagen has been zombie-movie-caliber deserted the last few days. The Jutland Hejira has robbed the city of all of its small-town transplants, and the streets' library-grade silence has become morgue-strength. But hey, it's a great excuse to bike around like the Omega Man, taking pictures and eating pastries at all the cafes I can usually never get a seat at. This is what I did today:
Ever since March gave winter a good rogering, Denmark has been a fucking tremendous place to live. After a record-soggy January and February, we Copers are now languishing in horizon-to-horizon blue skies and 15-degree afternoons. This time last year it was negative-2 and I was still wearing a hat, scarf and gloves just to walk to the corner kiosk to buy firewood.
Anyway, I decided to bring my camera along on my routine sunny-day Tour de Copenhagen. I've been doing this loop for almost a year now, and it never gets old. This is some of the shit that I pass by:
OK, jeg skulle indrømme at Seattle er ikke så charmerende det helt år. Nu, for eksample, Seattle lige skulle til at slå rekordet for regn i en maned. Rekordet er 15.33 inches i december 1933, og står Seattle på 14.74 lige nu (Ja, ja, hvad betyder 'inch'? Din fod er sandsynligvis 10 inches læng). Også, det sneer åbenbart i dag, so det brækkes snart, tror jeg. Sidst gang tog jeg hjemm for jule, det regnede hver fanden dag. Bogstavelig hele dag, alle dage for den 30 dage blevet jeg i seattle. Argh. Men for to år siden, det kom til 20 grader i januar, sååååå...
Her er hvad, seattle ledede som i går...
Det ligner mere eller mindre københavn i maned...
I realized last weekend that America is a post-Halloween country. Our Halloween celebrations consist of irony-centered activities and pomo costumage. The 'scary' aspect of Halloween might make a cameo, but it's mostly just an excuse to dress skanky (women) or look like Tyler Durden (men).
In Denmark, however, Halloween is still the way you remember it. Everyone dresses as a ghost, or vampire, or the ubiquitous 'guy who got beaten up'. The candy is all shaped like worms and bats. The drinks are colored like one of the Four Humours. You find cotton spiderwebs in your hair the next morning.
This is one of my favorite things about Denmark. Even the holidays are wholeheartedly earnest.
The downside to the holiday season here, however, is that there's no Thanksgiving buffer zone between Halloween and Christmas, so this weekend, a mere 4 days after taking down the pumpkins, everyone is putting up a tree. Denmark isn't really post-Christmas, they've just refined it down to its most charming aspects. No parades, no 'Jingle Bell Rock', no shopping orgies. Just Christmas dinners with friends, stronger drinks (they release 'Christmas beer' this weekend), and an open-late downtown. It almost makes the 4 pm sunsets bearable.
