København
The kettle has just finished boiling in the kitchen behind me and the snow falling in front of me has started to fall less. I will pour the water for my tea and return.
The portions here are not American so I have poured two cups with the same bag. I am in Copenhagen in an airbnb on the fifth floor of a building in Indre By. The Prime Minister of Denmark, Mette Frederiksen, is staying in the building immediately to the south of us. Her secret service is staying on the floor beneath us - one followed me up four flights of stairs a few days ago.
Us. I came here with Sylvia on December 1st. Or rather we started our journey on December 1st. It was a long flight and our bags were delayed so we had to trek back out to the airport at 8:30PM to pick them up. Those bags held us in limbo, unable to crash and recover and without energy to engage the city. We did get some good warm Thai food while waiting for our bags. She has just left for the seminar in Lund, Sweden, that we flew out for.
It is cold here.
The first and second of December were shot with travel. Maybe it is worth mentioning Lloyed who dropped me off at the airport and hated Tucson or the woman at the Beyond Bread counter who was doing every job behind the counter or the very long customs line in Frankfurt and the couple who asked to cut in front of us and then cut in front of us further on down the line anyway after Sylvia said no. I would prefer not to think about the actual transit, though. I expected it to be a poor experience and it was.
Let us begin on the third.
12.3.23
Post-bag-retrieval sleep was deep and 11 hours long. We woke and got our first Danish pastries from Taffelbay Bakery. They were cold and came with coffee which was warm. All of the pastries I have had here have been cold but otherwise wonderful. Perhaps we have been sleeping too late.
A smell of sweet roasting nuts strung the air on our way to The Round Tower and on our way were almost attacked by a particularly distressed pigeon. The roads near our building are cobbled and predominantly pedestrian.
The Round Tower was built because Christian IV was poisoned on the astronomer Tycho Brahe at an early age by a ruling council who held personal grudges against the man. Tycho’s place of astronomy was dismantled after his exile and the Round Tower was built for Tycho’s replacement astronomer. Notably, the staircase within the Round Tower is not a staircase at all but rather is a ramp suitable for horses which could haul heavy equipment up the tower.
While on this spiraling ramp, Sylvia named the full body garment that many children here wear a spacesuit. I just looked it up and they’re called snowsuits but I like spacesuit. We have been calling the kids we see ‘astronauts’ or ‘little astronauts’ as we have also seen a few adults wear them.
There was a green/red light system at the top of the tower to control traffic up and down the last leg of some narrow stairs (which were actual stairs). Green meant go and red meant wait as the up or down party funneled through. A father was saying, “green means go” repeatedly to their little astronaut. The little one would parrot him. “Green means go.”
From the very top we could see the flat we’re staying in. I can see tower topped tourists from the window at which I am typing. We could also see a broad sweep of the city. It is a beautiful place that asks for your happiness in subtle ways: walking, pastries, attention to design, community, and history or a connection to something beyond oneself. There are several large European churches around.
Before we walked the ramp back down to see one of those churches, there was a nook under a mistletoe inside the tower next to Green Means Go. The line up the actual stairs blocked entrance to the nook, but it was clearly an alcove designated for kissing, so I approached the women blocking the way and said while holding Sylvia’s hand, “Could we get in there to kiss?” They laughed in a way that I took as surprise at the directness of the approach mixed with an appreciation of The Move.
They moved and Sylvia and I shared a romantic kiss in an alcove at the top of Rundetaarn under a mistletoe in December overlooking the city of Copenhagen in its morning glory while shielded from the public by two women standing guard as if they held watch at the doors of the very royal chambers themselves. If there were a kiss on this trip that would have pulsed out some romantic force wave into the world, you would have thought it would have been this one, but it wasn’t. That would come later.
On our way to Christiansburg Palace we stopped by a furniture store with paper lanterns and a vault, a Lego store which had Lego plants like the one Sylvia made back home, an Original Coffee stand, a church with a massive organ, and our first Christmas market.
The furniture store laid some groundwork context for Danish design which we would be studying closer at two Danish design focused exhibits. The paper lanterns there encouraged me to give my own project another shot when I get back home.
The Lego store did not shake me into nostalgia with a box of something I had in childhood. I tried to force it a little when looking at a Star Wars spaceship which I remember having a toy of, but I guess Legos have advanced thoroughly past my exposure years and years ago.
The coffee stand was unremarkable (cold pastries again) but the seating area was great for people watching. Sylvia and I saw an old lady try on this enormous green puffer jacket in a store. She had on a bright orange sweater underneath and I thought she looked awesome. Sylvia prodded me to go tell her directly, so I did. When I got back to our table, we had a conversation about fashion which continued off and on as we walked around the next couple days. One thing I noticed is that not many people here are wearing leather. I’m not sure if that because of a greater appreciation for animal wellbeing or maybe leather just isn’t practical in rain and snow.
The church was the less impressive of the two we went inside but it was the first and sparked a conversation about designing spaces to invoke feelings in people. This quasi mind control feng shui is something I am interested in.
Walking through the Christmas market, I took a picture of Sylvia with Danish Santa and got my first exposure of what these markets are. A collection of stood up shops selling sweets, sausages, alcohol, and Christmas baubles. Temporary tables are aligned in rows between the shops for eating and drinking while standing. There are no heat lamps in these Christmas markets, but I have to imagine some out there have them.
Taking a break to get some Chinese street food called Bingo.
It was alright.
We entered Christiansborg Palace where most people enter Christiansborg Palace: through the Hall of Giants. Two or three times the size of your average strong man and neck bent like Atlas, these marble statues served as columns and held up the second floor of the building. About their feet are Christmas and Christiansborg trinkets and tourists in blue plastishoe shoe coverings milling about. After purchasing tickets and depositing our coats, we approach a staircase room with a statue of a standing woman with a pitcher held above the head of a sitting man holding a bowl under the woman’s pour. This struck me for some reason.
I will skip the odd looking piano in the green marble room to talk about the throne room. Thrones for king and queen - queen’s on the right and taller and with griffon arm rests and king’s on the left with lions for arm rests. I did not see elephants on the throne, but we learned later on that Denmark royalty and persons of esteem belonged to something called the Order of the Elephant which holds more than just Danes in its ranks, the most recent additions being the King and Queen of Spain on November 6th.
What we did learn in the throne room tickled me so much - it was my favorite part of the Palace. The floors of the throne room were designed with a pattern which would direct incoming invitees directly down the middle of the room to the place where they would stand. It would then, more importantly, direct them to the door at the side of the room which they would have to back up to and out of as it was an expectation that you did not turn your back on the royalty when you had an audience with them. The pattern on the floor allowed you to navigate backwards safely by looking at the ground. What practical use of pattern! We would later see an exhibit on patterns in Designmuseum Denmark, but this detail about the throne room’s floor was more interesting than anything in that exhibit.
While on the subject, I will note that the pattern exhibit did get me to think about how interesting it was that symbolism is less often attached to patterns than it is to other forms of visual art. There’s an argument to be made that something like yin and yang might be a pattern heavy with symbology, but I would argue instead that it is a symbol which makes use of pattern. Maybe the tendency toward a distinction of this sort is why I might feel that patterns aren’t often symbols - if they were symbols I would think of them as symbols first.
And perhaps I’m wrong anyway. Flags are a thing after all.
Down the long throat of rooms to the throne, there was a particular family portrait of Christian IX which caught our attention. Specifically, the young girl who would become Princess Marie Louise of Hanover. In her youth - in this painting - she broadcast such a sense of carefree independence and maintained what some might call an IDGAF attitude that we were immediately charmed. She ended up marrying a gay prince who sued for peace at the end of WW1 and marked the beginning of the Weimar Republic with the proclamation of Emperor Wilhelm II’s abdication of the throne. Pictures of her later on in life make me feel like life doused the spark of autonomy I so appreciated in her picture in the Christiansborg family portrait. I hope her life was good behind the curtain of history and I hope she, in some way, played a role in the actions her husband took which led to the founding of Germany.
Another thing of note in the room with that portrait is that Christian IX was considered the father in law of Europe because of how many royalties his family married into. His children were supposed to return every summer which I thought was a particularly clever way to integrate your family with the surrounding nations while preserving some kind of avenue to protect them should a need to act aggressively arise. With patience, he could wait to offend until his children were safe at home in the summer.
The other things in the palace were minor for me. A scratch on the wall in the dining hall holding some kind of story I would like to know about but assume that only the one who made the scratch does. Plates with images of mushrooms on them which I sent pictures of to my mother. A two room and two tier library with old books behind glass and crane sculptures emerging from the ceiling molding. There was a tapestry room that held modern tapestries which were not to my taste but which Sylvia enjoyed. Someone was quite ill in a bathroom prior to my use of it.
The bathrooms here are odd. Different, anyway. They often have both sexes together - but not always - and each toilet has its own room. They don’t have toilets in stalls but have full top to bottom walls and fully closing doors. The sinks are almost always too thin up against the wall and the faucets often get in the way of washing. This design might make sense for a stack city like this one but it makes for an inferior washing experience and I’m not sure the full room stall trade off is worth it. Let the water drip from my beard onto the sink after I rinse my face. Let me spit toothpaste without having to crane my neck like the bird sculptures in the Christiansborg library.
We set off for Nyhavn after the palace. Or we thought we did. I was navigating and became distracted by Olafur Eliasson’s Circle Bridge and then what we thought was the Black Diamond Royal Library but which was simply a beautiful office building on the opposite side of the water to the Black Diamond. We ended up meandering into Freetown Christiania, a hotel lobby, and then circled back in time to witness a drawbridge drawing for a passing tourist boat.
Eventually we did make it to Nyhavn and saw Hans Christian Anderson’s old home and, more importantly, the beautifully lit wharf and row of colored buildings. We also ate a pretty underwhelming and expensive meal there, but it was early enough in the evening that we were the only two inside the restaurant and were often left inside alone by even the waitstaff. It was warm, there were candles, and there may have been some kissing. The bathrooms were like freezers intended to store barrels of ice cream for months at a time. Sitting on the toilets must have been particularly unpleasant. On the way into and out of Nyhavn I was introduced to the concept of glogg. Such a wonderfully named drink that captures, I feel, what it is exactly. Assume you know what it is from the sound of it - you are probably right.
On the way home, we traveled through another Christmas market, saw fudge and whole candied tangerines, and stopped for hot cider. We then traveled through a large department store for warmth.
12.4.23
Long socks. Second pair of pants. Second shirt. Waterproof hiking boots. Long yellow scarf. Grey beanie with a poof at the top which covers ears and can be tied under the chin. Tie under the chin. Leather jacket which will draw looks which will be interpreted as ‘buffalo slayer’ even though there’s no way they know the leather is bison. Zip. Sylvia’s mittens because there’s no way driving gloves are going to be warm enough for the day. Thank you, Sylvia.
We were then prepared for the journey to the Danish Architecture Center (DAC) with a pit stop at a well rated breakfast/bookstore called Paludan Bog & Cafe. We did not know the tongue joy we had before us as we trundled down the five flights of stairs, but if we did the bracing cold air would have been nothing to withstand.
Please, let me tell you about this meal and this place. It was busy on a Monday during brunch time which already should tell you something considering it isn’t the step in and step out sort of eatery. It wasn’t even clear how to get food when you stepped into the shop. Books? Yeah, that’s clear enough - they were everywhere. Every wall was loaded full of them and not like the kinds of books you buy as decor. These books had meaningful ISBNs, prices, they were organized, and people were browsing. You could pick one up and take it to the… Hm.
The first room didn’t have registers or a kitchen or a hostess station or even a sign saying please seat yourself. The first room had books and books and books and full tables of people reading, typing, and eating delicious plates of meats and carbs and fruits and oh my gosh the yogurt. Maybe they had a sign and I just got overwhelmed by the glory of it all. From the first room you can see up to a landing that looked like some VIP bookstore area where club members go to do book club things and where college students meet to maintain the facade that group projects are indeed group projects. Straight ahead and down it looked like there might be kitchens? There was tile up the wall and different lighting at least. Indeed, those were the kitchens and food came out that way but that portal held much more than food. A stamp of Hitler on the right lens of a pair of glasses, a book from 1833 that looks like the Necronomicon, a door with a pair of dentures, and more.
Left was another room much like the first, but when you turned the corner you could see a counter. Ah. Yes. This was where we ordered the food that came from the belly of the beast that was that building. Instructions were now visible and the first step was: Pick a seat.
Justin: The first step says we should pick a seat. We haven’t done that.
Sylvia: I’m sure it won’t matter.
We ordered. I don’t usually just get the normal default breakfast at places but I’m also normally getting pastries and the day before I basically only had bread and a sort of okay burger. So I got the normal thing. Bacon and eggs were the priority but the meal also came with bread, some triangle of cheese I skipped, mozzarella, peperoni, sausage links, a pancake (I think this was sourdough because it tasted like mom used to make), an orange slice, something that may have been honeydew but which was the best friggin’ tasting honeydew I’ve ever had and tasted so much better that I’m fairly convinced that it was not honeydew at all, and yogurt. My friend, the yogurt was sublime. A perfect layer of honey over the full fat yogurt supporting a single blackberry, a few blueberries, shaved almonds, granola, and this yellow berry that still had its leaves attached as garnish. I have never been happier eating yogurt before in my life. I must find a way to replicate this experience at home.
Oh! And get this, the food came with either a strawberry smoothie or orange juice. It just comes with it! Cautious about the amount of food we were getting, I got OJ but Sylvia got the strawberry smoothie which means I got to try it. We both also got coffee because to not would have been a crime against our future selves and each other.
Counter: And where are you sitting?
Us: Uhh.
Counter: What room are you sitting in?
Aha! See! I knew it! Follow the rules when you don’t know why they are there!!! Vindicated, I still endeavored to think quickly to get out of an awkward situation. Turning around I saw there was an empty seat right behind us.
Justin: There!
Problem solved. Except between committing to the spot and the order fully completing, someone else sat in the spot. Oh well, I quickly turned the corner in the same room and saw a table freshly emptied and I leaped like a lioness on a hobbled water buffalo. I slinged my leather coat over my chair to stake the table as my kill and to remind those around me what it means to hunt.
I still wouldn’t know how to communicate which room we were sitting in even if we had picked a seat.
After flagging Sylvia to catch her attention regarding our new spot, I sat and remained seated to guard what was rightfully mine as Sylvia headed back into the upstairs of the other room to explore the place a bit.
Food came absurdly fast and I shucked polite manners and dug in. I didn’t know how truly big the place was but it seemed large and I didn’t know how long Sylvia might be exploring. I’m glad I did because I had the opportunity after I finished to explore while she finished eating. Again, the food was amazing and it’s one of the best breakfasts I’ve had. But I will skip past that because I cannot write the taste and texture of that meal onto your tongue and instead I will revisit the portal we saw from the front which is where I went first.
Indeed, it held the kitchens. There were four or so steps down from that first room and to the left and back were the tiles and the throat that shot out kind people carrying kinder food. In the back right of this room was just a quintessential bookstore mess. Books were piled in stacks on desks and boxes and floors and around a computer and a register. This is where we would have bought a book if we would have bought a book. It looked like the set of Black Books but, in truth, less organized somehow. That room more than any other was the dream we have when we dream of a disorganized book wizard. And it had waiters coming and going through it as if it needed some extra thing to become more bizarre, less practical, and libra magicae.
Let’s pause here and take a moment to appreciate the joy of a story that involves a wizard with an enormous collection of tomes which makes a mistake when carving a rune which results in a dimensional splicing that he can’t figure out how to undo. The restaurant that has been spliced into his library keeps working around the stacks he didn’t lose in the event but the public the restaurant brings in wants to purchase the books that are about. The restaurant staff directs the patrons to the wizard who is now quite harried because he didn’t ever intend for commoners to be in his library but he’s an opportunist at heart and won’t read most of the books anyway so he begins selling them. He gets to the point where he’s so busy selling and managing book stock that he abandons the attempt to undo his runic mistake and now just lives with plates of breakfast and once-breakfast being shuttled back and forth through his office and beautiful American women approaching him about Danish phrase books.
Anyway, that’s not even all this building has to offer us. The objects I mentioned earlier - the Hitler stamp and the door with teeth - are to the right of this office and down a set of stairs. There are two levels below the office (which was a level below the main room). There are pretty disturbing art sculptures hung every now and again. A lot of them have many nails in them and are a little bloody and are extremely disconcerting, especially as you descend into the cold and underground. The door and the Hitler postage were few details for many of these weird things.
The books in this first level down are mostly normal books and are in Danish. A level down further and the books get older. I found a 19th century collection of Locke’s works which complained about there not being a collection of Locke’s works before. I found sketches of Copenhagen in the same format of Swift’s A Modest Proposal. It had sketches of things that I could place because Copenhagen has done such a good job of maintaining some of its historical artifacts. I should have taken a picture of the Roman numerals to decipher how old that was. I have no clue what the 1833 book was. I am guessing it was written in Danish, but I couldn’t say. Not English. Those old books have covers with odd patterns that look natural, like tortoise shell or marble.
That place is worth visiting if you are in Copenhagen. It’d be the thing I put on your list if I was afforded only one to-do item.
From there we carried on to the DAC.
Did you know that the Sydney Opera House was designed by a Dane? I didn’t. This was the thing I learned at the DAC that really slapped me in the face about how prominent Danish design is. I knew the interior design stuff - the chairs and lamps and ceramics and what not - but the Sydney Opera House? That’s one of the top 10 most iconic buildings of the world (which I have seen from a plane, by the way, thank you very much).
I also learned about a project in flight that excited me. It is called The Whale and it is a museum for whales that is also supposed to be a great spot to actually see whales from! Hopefully that is permitted and built and is successful. The community it is in does not look particularly, uh… Let’s say that this is probably the only reason you would visit.
At DAC there was also a slide that we went down, a chair waterfall, a beautiful view of an open area in the city and pigeons flocking in circles for who knows why, a greenhouse like dome thing which had good acoustics, and a floor dedicated to city planning. The Five Finger Plan was interesting to learn about and, unsurprisingly, this city is expensive to live in and housing is a problem. Housing seems to be a problem in most cities. Where is housing not a problem, I wonder?
Also, bikes. Gah, it is so cool to be here and walk around and see literal piles of bikes everywhere. A walkable city is good, but I will more happily take a bikeable city. DAC had a corner of the city planning floor dedicated to bike friendliness and you can tell the emphasis the city places on encouraging and facilitating biking as a primary mode of transit. At one point in my life, I was advocating we get rid of cars and instead all ride motorcycles. Maybe shifting to ebikes makes a bit more sense. Bikes and ebikes seem to be mostly what they do here and, I don’t know, it seems like it works.
From the DAC, we walked to Tivoli but stopped at City Hall where we saw a bull killing a dragon (statue), a couple couples getting married, and (nearby) a VW dealer where I got to see and smell an orange VW Buzz. If I get another car, this is the one I want to get.
We also saw an art installation at the Dante Plads which involved four metal man-pig statues with long trench coats surrounding a huge middle finger pointed at, I’m not sure, the Glyptotek or the Christiansborg palace? Seems weird if it is pointed at the Glyptotek but, unless the Danes flick people off palmways instead of knucklesways, I don’t know what to say. Thankfully, we have not yet incurred a middle finger in our time here.
Tivoli. A magical wonderland of lights and Christmas vibes. Somewhere between Disneyland and, I don’t know, a place worse than Disneyland. It’s the 3rd most visited theme park in Europe and it’s easy to access from the middle of Copenhagen. Our time there was very good until our feet got very cold.
Walking in, we were infused with a strong-but-not-too-strong pine smell which aptly set the stage. Christmas tree after Christmas tree as well as Glogg stands, glass ornament huts, some wild pretzel kiosk which coated full sized soft pretzels in some icing or yogurt, an an Arabic themed hotel were all just at the entrance of the place.
The shops underwhelmed us, if we’re being honest. We were hoping for that to be the place where we bought Christmas gifts but the best things we found were Jellycat stuffed toys which, as it happens, was the brand of stuffed animals I bought folks last year. There was an ice rink that felt about as real as the shops - white squares around a Christmas tree which technically allowed kids to skate around. It was clear that it was not real ice, though. They did have these cute little blue reindeer and seals which acted as supports for the little astronauts out there to learn their footing. We did not skate.
Before the shops, we sat down in the middle of some food kiosks. We did not sit under a heat lamp, but we (I) did stare at a particular kiosk that was serving some odd pancake treat. While I was working up the gumption to order one, we ran into several peacocks. The first was female, the second was your average male peacock, and the third was a male that was maybe a third white. Sylvia and I talked about what it would have been like to have kept track of all the types of birds that we had seen in our lives and would later have a similar conversation about trees while walking over a frozen lake.
I did end up ordering a pancake treat which was grilled and then filled with cinnamon sugar and then folded up. Yes. Yes it was good. I also got hot chocolate which went straight through me and I had to pee twice, basically back to back. The bathrooms had air hand dryers which were particularly hot and welcome reprieves from the cold. We could not hand dryer our feet, though, and so completed the Tivoli circuit and stepped into the food court where we got our own foods and sat next to Chicks by Chicks - a chicken restaurant staffed by, you guessed it - chicks!
After eating, we locked arms and headed back to the flat. Sylvia stepped out to get some herbal tea and then she delivered her seminar to me for practice. She is quite a good communicator and is raising a data-backed issue with the granularity and available components used in the world’s largest climate models. Later on, when she delivered it to a real audience, it would go well. Go Syl.
12.5.23
This day had just as many hours in it, but had less content. Syl went for a run in 30 degree weather because she is one of those people. I went out for a pastry run in 30 degree weather because I am one of those people. The raspberry danish was delectable and superb. Leagues ahead of the raspberry danishes from Safeway that sometimes make their way into church on Sunday mornings. By comparison, the Safeway ones shouldn’t even be called danishes. Call them, I don’t know, Safewayishes or sugar bread with sugar gelatin. I bought two more later in the week.
After our runs we walk through the Rosenborg Castle gardens and saw the royal guards with the fuzzy caps play some music and march in the other direction. We didn’t know at the time, but they went on to march through the street by our flat. The gardens were beautiful despite being mostly leafless. The paths were outlined in snow but it wasn’t something you had to walk on if you weren’t intentionally trying to make use of your waterproof boots. Crunch crunch crunch.
There was a playground in the gardens where all of the play things were made out of wood except for this huge metal dragon’s egg standing unnaturally upright. It was a sculpture and had a crack near the top with an eye poking out. I assume it was a dragon because wooden sculptures of dragons sprawled out around the egg for children to climb on. There were a series of stumps and then a series of posts. There was a moat and a bridge. It was simple but quite well done and it looked like the kind of thing that I would want to play in. I did want to play in it, in fact, and Sylvia and I had a little bit of fun in the posts and I remarked that the space seemed kind of ripe for holding a pretend ritual.
The Designmuseum Denmark had several exhibits which I’ve captured in my journal but which I won’t recount fully here. The temporary exhibit was Fashion for a City. A designer (I don’t think I ever noted who it was and artist names rarely stick with me anyway) created an outfit for the major regions of Copenhagen. It was a creative way to convey an interpretation of the spirit of each of these places and was one of the few exhibits where I really ended up appreciating the artists explanations playing in video form alongside the work.
The Future Is Present was another exhibit in the museum and one I liked a good bit. One piece suggested that we would be seeking work which fulfilled and which aligned with our life more than work simply to pay bills. Seeing that notion stacked against the housing crisis information presented at the DAC the day before caused me to reflect a bit. I would love to claim optimism here, but I have a hard time seeing how we get from the current work context we find ourselves into a work utopia like the one suggested in The Future Is Present. Maybe in 2050, but in 2030 I think we’ll still be figuring this transition from present to future out. That future is certainly not present.
In the cafe I had an open faced sandwich. I think this was one of the few non-pastry food items which was particularly Danish. It was good but could have used another piece of bread. I bought a lava mug with blue and red specks from the gift shop.
I’ll also take a second to say that this building was the only building I entered where the sinks were at all reasonable. Copenhagen needs to up its bathroom sink game. They are uniformly too thin and the faucets are frequently placed poorly. It’s impossible to spit toothpaste into them without angling your face like a sideways fish or bumping your forehead into a mirror.
After buying the mug, we took the metro to Fredericksburg Gardens. At the garden gates the was a real ice rink and so many little astronauts zipping around. Sylvia called out an expectation of all skating rinks around the world for there to be 4 teen boys going too fast around the rink and terrorizing everyone else. It did not take long to identify the obligatory squad of boys.
Inside, the garden was a quiet Narnia. There was a wide creek that ran through it which had frozen over. We saw paw prints from dogs, hoof prints from deer, and talon prints from some huge bird. A crane or a heron, maybe. At the far end of the gardens there was a huge yellow hotel up up and up a hill. It looked straight out of a Wes Anderson film. We climbed the hill to the top and took Jojo’s picture for his travelog album. Jojo is Sylvia’s backpack friendly elephant who has seen more of the world than I have.
Before the garden I had gotten a pebble in my shoe. This was unpleasant but it was cold and taking off my shoe to address the offending pebble would have been more unpleasant than simply trying (and failing) to keep it in the front of my waterproof hiking boots. Where on earth did that pebble come from? There’s practically no gravel here in Copenhagen and even the gardens were either dirt or boulder with no mineral size in between.
The pebble did not come out of my shoe until we reached a small bookstore down Fredericksburg Alle. It was no Paulden Bog Cafe but it was on Sylvia’s list of things to check out. She mentioned she thought it was larger. I did a quick walkthrough and picked up Babel by R.F. Kuang. Feeling as if I had gotten my bearings in the place somewhat, I stepped outside to address the rock on a convenient empty chair by the door. There were a lot of empty chairs outside in Copenhagen. This one, for about a minute, was not.
We did not spend much more time there and then zipped down to an artist’s shop called the Shrig Shop. Unfortunately, it was closed by the time we got there. It was about 6PM. We still had a lot of fun looking in at the posters and books and cards through the shop windows, but I could tell Sylvia was bummed at not being able to buy anything. Even the walls of this shop were entertaining. Check it out!
What about the kiss that sent a romantic pulse of force into the world, Justin? When are we going to get to that? Well, I can tell your patience is being tested just like Sylvia’s was leading up to the thing. Walking to the bookshop and the Shrig Shop and around Federicksburg generally, Sylvia asked a few times if I wanted some hot chocolate. I was cold but wasn’t particularly feeling sweets and it was a bit late for caffeine, so I said no but if she did we could hop into a shop for it. She didn’t either. Odd. Why would she have asked me if I wanted hot chocolate if she didn’t want anything? I assumed it was just a ploy to get out of the cold because, well, it was cold. I wanted out of the cold. But I didn’t want a hot chocolate. I think she asked me something similar once or maybe twice more. Eventually, she broke down and told me she had a present for me and that she wanted to find a good spot to give it to me. Not knowing what it was, I gestured to some outdoor seating along one of the restaurants - a set of those perpetually empty outdoor Copenhagen chairs. She didn’t say no, but she gestured at a place ahead with a green striped awning and a service window to the street. Okay.
We went inside to find it was an odd local coffee shop but which didn’t have any herbal tea listed on their menu. Sylvia asked and they did have herbal stuff so she ordered while I slipped down a spiral staircase into the frozen wastes of Copenhagen’s underground to pee. I came up before she had completed the transaction and I awkwardly slid into a seat along the window. What does she have for me?
Hot cups of water and dry bags of tea landed before us. We dropped our bags into our cups and made eye contact. I smiled. She pulled up her backpack. I had rooted around in that backpack earlier for my water bottle and to pull Jojo out. I didn’t see anything out of the norm when I did. I must have been blind.
She pulled out a spiral bound book about as thick as the table we sat at. It was titled Pilgrim Text: The First Year by Justin C. Hicks. She had collected my first year’s worth of poems and AI art and had a print shop physicalize my work. This meant a lot to me. Not just that she did this thing but that she has been a continuous and attentive audience to the work that I have posted. She has created a context in which I feel the work that I produce has value and is being witnessed and not simply shouted into a void or a churning mass of swiping thumbs that shreds my work with each fat nailed gesture.
There are many things that I love this woman for, but that she has been an earnest audience is certainly one of them. Saying several times that I appreciated it but not feeling that my spoken words captured the glow that was ballooning inside of me, I leaned across the table slightly awkwardly and kissed her. It was not a sexy open mouth kiss and it was hardly longer than a peck but the moment our lips touched the waitress dropped a glass which scattered small light refracting jewels of glass around our feet and table. I’m sure outside there was a gust of wind that knocked off a hat and I’m sure, too, that someone nearby stumbled without knowing why. I would bet that adults within a 1 kilometer radius blushed and children giggled. The temperature outside must have raised a full degree or two. The pigeons flocking by the DAC the day before, assuredly now sleeping on a roof above some heated room, suddenly took to wing, woken by the thrill of such a kiss.
It’s a shame about the broken glass, but the sudden jolt we shot through the place couldn’t be helped.
(We got porridge after this and then went home but ending the day’s entry here is better)
12.6.23 & 12.7.23 & 12.8.23 (Epilogue)
Sylvia left to give her seminar in Lund and I stayed. I mostly stayed in the flat and wrote or drew, but did go out for food both days. There was the Bingo street food I mentioned here. I didn’t interrupt the narrative when I stopped for dinner or when I did other things because writing this all down ended up taking a lot more time than I was expecting. Both nights I had four different kinds of empanadas from Laboca - an Argentinian restaurant near the flat. I went to Paulden Bog Cafe again on the seventh and bought Nolan a book about the Roman empire from 1799, written in Danish. The smoothie (today) was mango and I did get the smoothie. The yogurt was as good if not better the second time.
Sylvia arrived late(ish) in the morning on the eighth, but I bought extra pastries on my way home from the second visit to the Shrig shop on the seventh (after Paludan Bog) to buy a poster and many postcards for Sylvia as a surprise. So I ate of the extra pastries after waking up early to check in for my flight. Then we were reunited and decided to go for porridge for lunch at the same collection of nearby restaurants where I got my empanadas and my bingos. From there we went to the David Collection which is a free museum close to the Rosenborg Castle. It is free but the quality of it is way beyond free. The top two floors are dedicated to Muslim art and history. It is designed so that you start at the top and work your way down, following the history of Muslim people from their start to roughly the 1850s. The design of the place - how it asked you to navigate through it - was superb. Best museum layout I have experienced, even if it required a little bit of docent guidance to really get the fullest from it. The building seemed to contain endless content!
We packed, went for spaghetti, walked by a huge pink event room and another glass/decor store that was tastefully maximalist but still definitely maximalist. Then we returned home, finished packing, and prepared to exit the little flat that had been our home.
Saturday, Sylvia went on to Germany via train to visit old contacts and I went home. The trip was easier than the one to get there and my bags were not delayed.
Even now as I reflect the day after and the day after that, I am churning with the growing glow of having traveled. It is generally not a thing I enjoy doing, but I do quite appreciate having done it. I am living in the space of having done it now and, from the comfort of the kitchen in my home after a day back at work, I am smiling.
