Copenhagen!

Well, I've just spent 4 wonderful days in Copenhagen, Denmark, visiting my good old friend Michael who's been here doing some research for his Master's thesis. All I can say of Copenhagen is WOW. It is an incredibly beautiful city with a great vibe to it. Apart from touring alone, or with Michael, I also met some locals and got to hang out and discuss Copenhagen life with them. They believe Copenhagen is like a giant small town, which was also evident from seeing people on the street that I saw the night before in the club, etc.

First things first - Danish girls are so incredibly beautiful, it's hard to cope even. You can really freak out - "What the hell?! That one's even better looking than the last one, and I thought the last one was already the best looking Dane", and so on. Not only that, but they are down to earth and friendly... willing to start conversations with anyone really. Danes also speak perfect English, which was a welcome thing for me, since Germans don't generally tend to have a good command of the English language. When I asked some Danes about this, since obviously they're not speaking English every day or all that often, they say it's all about TV - most of their TV shows come from Britain or the US and are simply subtitled in Danish, but essentially, they are watching all the same TV as we English native speakers. This is quite a contrast to in Germany, where they overdub all foreign productions into German, which is rather annoying because you lose that emotion of the original performance, but whatever - totally different topic than I intend to write about here.


Copenhagen was never bombed or destroyed in WWII, so all of the old buildings remain intact, yet of course there are additional building developments that allow for modern architecture as well, so there is a good mixture of old and new. The city is on the water, so there are harbours, canals, and so on that make it a nice experience walking through town.







However, if you don't want to walk through town, you don't have to. Another cool element of Copenhagen is that they have "City Bikes", which basically work exactly like the Grocery carts at the supermarket - put a coin in as a deposit, and it unlocks from the various pickup/dropoff points around the city, then you can bike around town, free of charge. A very nice service, and well thought out - the bikes have been designed to have a low-top speed, such that if you try to go faster you just waste a LOT of energy and don't get much further, making them really impractical to be an item worth stealing. When you're done just return it to a dropoff point, put that key thingy back in the coin holder, and out pops your coin. Another example of clever Danish design. (The Danes are best known for their furniture design I would say)










Copenhagen also has another interesting and somewhat famous element, and that's called the free town of Christiania. Christiana is basically a hippy town, which was an area of town taken over by hippies in the early seventies, and through various political processes, has been recognized as a "free town", with it's own mini-government and administration, and an official population of 700 or so. Basically a fine example of the general level of liberal tolerance that I would say Danes are pretty well known for. (Now let's go have sex and offend the entire Muslim world! Denmark was the first country to legalize pornography.) Michael and I enjoyed a good game of backgammon to a bottle of Sprite, as they don't serve beer at the bar, and everyone outside was smoking big joints or pipes. Everyone but us.




What I did find troubling however, was when we were out the other night, people were asking me if I was German, and that was based on how I was speaking English!! But of course, maybe it was due to the way I was dressed because on that night I would have to say I was dressed stereotypically Berliner-style. Copenhageners tend to get a little more dressed up, where Berliners are often dirty little street punks with the motto "Ugly is beautiful" (That sentence wasn't really true). But man, I wonder if my accent has changed so much from being in Germany so long. I mean it certainly happened after being in Scotland for a year. ("Who'ye callin' a c*nt, ye c*nt?!")




And of course, the Danes are famous for their beer, most famous amongst them being Carlsberg of course. I've certainly had a good amount of that in these past few days, along with Tuborg which I thought was a competitor but in fact also belongs to Carlsberg. We were at the Carlsberg brewery and did a short tour. Really amazing history, and the founder J.C. Jacobsen was really a visionary. His ideas back then (1870's or so) revolutionized brewing, and he had always invested alot into research and development, but in good altruistic style had never the intention to use this information for competitive advantage, rather published his research findings for all to make use of. What a man - he was so right - we should all be drinking the best beer possible! Anyway, it's undeniable that the Carlsberg brand has had a tremendous effect on the Danish identity, as well as its economy.



Speaking of the Carlsberg brewery, I'm staying in it right now! An old building that belonged to the brewery was at some point sold and converted into flats, so the flat where Michael is staying once used to be a building from the old brewery. Pretty cool I think. A very small but cozy flat.

I'm sitting in the airport right now waiting to fly back to Berlin. What a trip it was! Unfortunately relatively expensive, but thankfully had a free place to sleep. No matter, Copenhagen is definitely worth the visit. Many interesting museums as well, though on that topic you're not missing much if you don't go to the sex museum. Either I'm completely morally corrupt and therefore found it uninteresting, or it actually was seldom engaging. Anyway, for that price you're better off trying to find a cheap whore and asking her to speak Danish, or even the light version - invite one of the innumerable beautiful danish girls out for a few drinks. Surely one could learn more about sex from the danish perspective than going to the museum. Though, all bullshit aside (if that's possible for me), there was an interesting part about "the sex lives of the famous", that is, mainly stars from the 30's-50's. Apparently Gary Cooper was hung like a horse and could go all night, whoever he is, Charlie Chaplin's "minimum age limit" was 12 and loved deflowering virgins, and Marlene Dietrich when naked had really strange, horrific, unnatural skin, and was predominantly lesbian, though technically a switch hitter. Adolf Hitler is alleged to have had really perverse sexual tastes, although none of these have been convincingly proven. In addition, most of his ex-lovers either committed suicide or were killed by the Gestapo in order to "protect his discretion". Let that be a lesson to all of you - make sure you foster a good, healthy attitude towards sex with your children, or they may turn out to be seriously disturbed in other aspects of their life. Funny however, it occurred to me as they were showing "Weapons of Ass Destruction" or some "similarly artistic" anal sex porno on one of the screens, that as a computer science student, I could at some point do a research project on parental control software that could limit the amount of smut and filth that a child is exposed to on the internet, and perhaps develop some software that first makes it easy for parents to inform themselves of the types of things that their children could easily be exposed to without such technology, and then make it easy for them to install and setup such software. I mean, I don't know anyone my age or younger that hasn't been at least partly warped by what's out there in cyberspace. I mean to say, what I know in this field I didn't learn at church.



Wow, this entry's getting way too personal. Anyway, time to go I think... time to board the plane. Copenhagen gets a big thumbs up, and I would definitely be happy if I were to one day find work there for 6 months or something. Luckily I never had to experience the bad side of the weather, as it was sunny and warm the whole time.


Hihi. (Danish for goodbye is hello twice. hi hi.)