Rottin' in Denmark

Nordick

nobody@vox.com(Rottin' in Denmark) — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 07:40:54 -0700

Me, ordering coffee in Danish: [blah blah blah Danish]
Barista-dude: OK, I'll bring that out to you when it's ready.
Me, really sick of people switching to English when I speak Danish to them: ... Why are you speaking English? My Danish is fine.
Barista-dude: I'm Brazilian, I don't speak Danish. Nothing personal.
Me: [Feeling like an asshole for the rest of the day]

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Three guys walk into a parking garage: Distortion Final Party

nobody@vox.com(Rottin' in Denmark) — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 06:27:05 -0700

The final party was held in a far-too-artsy parking garage in Yuppiebro

Unlike people, Danish parking garages are prettier on the inside

Short people love it when you shoot them low-angle

The sky was sepia from all the hopps, weed and hair product in the air

This is what Christians think the end-times will look like. But with louder techno.

The view over Little Dubai

Quick, spot the homosexual

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Sun, speakers and skinny jeans: Distortion Festival '08

nobody@vox.com(Rottin' in Denmark) — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 01:37:21 -0700

The Distortion Festival takes over one neighborhood -- outdoorically -- per night for five nights.

Usually this means a lot of sopping throat-scarves, but this year it's been mad tropical

Girl to my Australian friend: 'Can you pull up your underwear? We can see your vert-crack'

The Hillary bus was there too. It parked in the middle of the dance floor and wouldn't leave

THOSE ARE NOT MY CLOTHES

A silicon-filled stress ball (titty-shaped, just to add to my dignity) exploded in my face at a suburban birthday party earlier in the day, so I had to borrow skinny-clothes from Skinny Friend. My extremities were the same color as my New Balances by the end of the night.

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

How working out in Denmark got me kicked in the face by a little girl

nobody@vox.com(Rottin' in Denmark) — Thu, 22 May 2008 07:03:17 -0700

Copenhagen is freckled with what are called ‘training pavilions’.

Pavilion

You can do something like 25 exercises on these things, all in the comfort of a waterproof, semi-public panopticon. I started using the one on the way to work last year as a way of staying in gay-shape (big arms, chicken legs) to avoid the gym, which is subjectively boring and objectively expensive.

So I do my little turn on the pavilion a few times a week. One of the charmingest features of this routine is that the Pav sits in the middle of Copenhagen’s ghettoest (i.e. most full of teenagers) neighborhood, and I am verbally accosted by youths roughly every other time I stop to work out.

Usually this consists of low-caliber stuff, pointing and giggling and whatnot. There are three girls, though, who seem to hang out at the pavilion every afternoon, and have taken to shout-counting while I’m doing pullups or whatever (“..Three! Four! Weak! Weaker! Homo!”). I used to find this discouraging, but recently it’s become just another cut on the soundtrack of my out-of-shapeness.

Yesterday, for some reason, the girls watched me silently for a few minutes as I went through my little Sisyphus routine, and walked over to me when I was done.

‘You’re pretty strong,’ the shortest one said. Up close, she looked about 14, or at least her clothes did. Black tights, billowy shirt, and a fluorescent cacophony of belts, ropes, shoelaces and bangles cinching the parts of her she wanted to show off. ‘Watch’, she said.

She then performed a few wobbly dips, while her friends giggled ‘you’re stupid, Anna!’ I, in full Terminanish, said something instructional about maintaining balance. This continued for several minutes: A grown man amidst three vaguely criminal tweens, instructing them on outdoor exercise.

Each pavilion has an inclined row of monkey bars, each one higher than the last. I never attempt these, since it feels like a terrorist training video, but the Leotard Queen wanted instruction and an audience for her attempt at the summit.

‘What should I do?’ she asked, hanging from the lowest bar.

‘Swing,’ I said helpfully. ‘And go up, I guess’.

She was about three bars up now, and gaining momentum.

‘Good,’ I said. ‘Now make sure you—OW SHIT!’

In a wild swing from the fifth bar, her rock-hard little Converse swung around and nailed me in the chin.

‘What the FUCK, little girl!’ I said in English, holding my jaw.

She fell to the ground, folded over with laughter.

‘You guys suck,’ I said, reverting to both Danish and elementary school. They were laughing too hard to notice my scorching rage, and I was too lightheaded to fight them, so I wobbled over to my bike.

‘I’m not going to come here anymore!’ I shouted through the good half of my mandible and rode out of ridicule range.

This morning I woke up with a sore jaw, nothing to do in the afternoon and an appetite for ruining a teenager’s day. This must be what it’s like to be middle-aged.

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

The further joys of friendship

nobody@vox.com(Rottin' in Denmark) — Fri, 02 May 2008 11:09:26 -0700

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]

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Drop the Zomb

nobody@vox.com(Rottin' in Denmark) — Thu, 01 May 2008 05:02:04 -0700

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.

Bar #2, resisting the urge to Thriller-dance

Best zombie-walk

Everything but the bloody nose was fake

I wanted one of the Normals to ask 'Are you here for the Zombie night?' so I could say 'No. Why?'

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

I've got sol, I'm superbad

nobody@vox.com(Rottin' in Denmark) — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 01:04:23 -0700

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.

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Out-of-context faces from my birthday party

nobody@vox.com(Rottin' in Denmark) — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 08:48:29 -0700

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Heat wave, Copenhagen-style

nobody@vox.com(Rottin' in Denmark) — Sun, 10 Jun 2007 04:50:07 -0700

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.

Islands Brygge

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Random afternoon awesomeness

nobody@vox.com(Rottin' in Denmark) — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 08:01:54 -0700

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:

Skyrockets in flight

Read and post comments | Send to a friend