The Return: Part 1

I'm back.

To Copenhagen, and the blog.  Hopefully that'll go better this time around.

Anyway, I'm here for 14 months, working an IT internship, living in an apartment with two young Danes on the north side of Copenhagen, and just generally bumbling around the city.  Pretty sweet stuff. 


So I flew here. On a plane.

Look! Clouds!  The flights were pretty relaxing. I got some reading done, some napping, listened to a few podcasts, and watched some Sherlock.  Good movie, would recommend.

After landing at CPH, I collected my bags and box, and the stressful bit began: somehow getting a 55 pound bag; a 35 pound bag; a bike box packed with tools, a tent, and sleeping pad; and a carry on bag -- all onto the bike.  Oh yeah, and I had to put the bike back together first.

It's funny, I had actually planned to take a picture of it once I got it all strapped on, but once loaded that heavily, the bike had an annoying tendency to flip over backwards it I weren't actively pinning it to the ground, so... no picture. Just imagine it looking as awful and hilarious as you can - that's pretty much spot-on.

The Apartment

I finally made it to my sublet, a charming little apartment on the 5th floor of a building in the north side of Copenhagen, a district called Østerbro.  I have two roommates, who I thought were Danish, but it turns out they've just lived here for a few years, having immigrated from northern Germany, a few miles from the border with Denmark.  Am I still getting the 'authentic Dane experience'?  Close enough?  Anyway, some pictures: 

My bed. I did steal this from the apartment listing though, so it has the subletter's things on it.

My desk and a look out onto the patio.

 View from the patio.  All the buildings on the block form a sort of hyper-tall fence that creates a courtyard.  It's a pretty standard layout in modern Copenhagen, originating maybe 40 years ago when most buildings not actually on the street (inside what is now the courtyard) were torn down, in a massive urban renewal wave.  The remaining buildings are perhaps 100 years old, perhaps much older.

The living room.

It's a nice place, clean and recently updated.  It's a bit small -- the shower is the floor of the bathroom, leaving only the toilet and sink outside the curtain -- but mostly functional. As expected, it is rather daunting to walk the entire way up multiple times a day (there's no elevator), but it's a fraction of the stair-climbing I do at work, so I guess I'll count that as a win.

Here's a map: 

I live at the A, and I go just about straight south to get to work, somewhere around that big red dot.  I'll prolly get bored and write about the commute, specifically, some other time.  For now, I think it's enough to say I go between the A and the red dot  at least 10 times a week. It's about 6 kilometers between them, not bad.


The Job

The reason I get to live in the aforementioned swank apartment, of course, is that I've got a 14-month internship at DIS, the program I studied abroad with two years ago.

You might be thinking, 'Why Nick, why settle for an internship when you've got a totally awesome liberal arts degree?', but this particular one has plenty of perks that make the title more than worth it.  You'll get to hear more about those perks when they happen.

One quick example, though -- see this desk?  See how it's got two legs on it?  Yeah, those legs are motorized, so I can stand, sit, up, down, whatever fits my fancy. 

Anyway, so I'm here doing IT work for my internship, mostly.  That means, often, that I'm running around helping staff members with whatever stupid legitimate problem they've got this time.  Yesterday, I had to explain to one staff member why his USB stick, plugged into an ethernet port, wasn't working.

I'm also tasked with becoming the in-house expert on SolarWinds, which is a fancy monitoring program that monitors our entire system and alerts us when it's messing up -- or, it will once I learn to configure it.

In a few weeks, the department will be setting up two new buildings for DIS, which means I'll also get to learn how to wire an entire building.  Pretty bad-ass, I'd say.

And I repair personal computers as well, mostly software stuff but occasionally we replace some hardware too. Right now, my big project is re-imaging and generally repairing the roughly 20 spare laptops we have in the office.  Scintillating stuff.


The Not-Job

Now, I'm only working around 40 hours a week, so I've got plenty of free time.  The first week, I spent a lot of that getting a bank account, my immigration documents, all of that fun stuff.  Now that I have all that squared away, I've been able to spend more time doing fun stuff like biking around the city, sitting around and reading in the parks (Joe - I think your book put me over the weight limit, but I brought it anyway. And it's a fantastic read!)

I've also been working on setting up an alternate operating system for myself on my laptop, but that gets jargon-ny so I'll just leave it at that.

I haven't been carrying my camera quite everywhere I go, so there's only 4 pictures of 'adventure' from these two weeks.  BUT if you imagine parks, and roads, and stuff, you'll get the idea of what I've been up to.

My first Friday here, I went to an Afro-Cuban jazz concert.  I'm not certain why, but it seems Copenhageners really love jazz.  So, from the 5th to the 15th, Copenhagen hosted this wild, city-wide Jazz Festival.  Most events had an admission fee, but this one did not.  Freakin' sweet concert.

These three pictures, I took on my way home from the concert.  I just kinda followed the waterline and took pictures of whatever caught my eye.

The concert hall, in the distance.

Some creepy statues, too.


End/Fin.

A Friend Visits, and a Field Study

Exciting post today!  We've got a visiting home-slice, a few classy beers, and a field study!  Yay!

First, a very special place!  I think I posted about this once before, but this time... it's at night!  October 21st, by the way.   You'll note, it looks pretty excellent.  Anyways, I figured that as one of those city livability enthusiasts, Alex would appreciate seeing this.  He'd been in the city for a few days with his class, and I'd been writing a paper, so as a break from that, we went for sightseeing and some classy brews! 

We met a guy while we were climbing, an amateur photographer from England.  He's living in Copenhagen now, and he's into a thing called BlipFoto -- if you're at all interested in photoblogging, look it up.  Alex made one, and he seems to be enjoying it quite a lot.  It seems to be a really cool community, too, all commenting on each others' travels.  At any rate, I ended up as the guy's subject for the day!  Pretty cool shot, I thought.  Kinda nerve-wracking though, as it required about 10 seconds with no hands on the ropes. 

I'd gotten some recommendations for Danish micro-brews from Prof. Patrick (I think I just might start calling him that...  Love the alliteration), so we went and tried out his top recommendation -- a place called Mikkeller.  The one above, it's called 'Vesterbro', after a tenement neighborhood of the city.  A light beer, it did indeed taste pretty great. 

I liked this second one even better, though.   It's a very dark brew, as you can see.  And I'm no expert, but I felt it had a somewhat fruity start, and a 'charred' aftertaste to it -- not conducive to quick drinking, at all.  I think they call these sipping beers.  Either way, it was quite good.  Expensive, though -- at most bars, a beer twice this size would cost around 25 kr, or $5.  These were half pints, and were 30kr each, or $6.  Worth it.

Alex!  He's got a fancy brew in his hands, himself.  The bar is located pretty near the central station, in one of Copenhagen's few 'sketchy' areas.  Sketchy for Scandinavia generally implies a couple of drug addicts and a relatively high percentage of minority residents -- which is to say, not all that sketchy at all.  I wouldn't take kids there after dark, since there's always the risk of seeing someone shooting up in the street, but the thing about drug addicts (except for those on meth or krokodil) is that they're generally pretty caught up in their own thing, and couldn't care less that you're there. 

...turns out one of the objectives of the blog is to open the readers to some new viewpoints!  Number one: most drug addicts aren't dangerous, except to themselves.

Central station!  It's a pretty big operation, with 13 platforms.  It connects 4 regional lines, 5 S-tog lines, and a host of inter-city services.  And, in 2018, it'll connect the new Metro line, too!  Lovely transit.

TRAIN!  In case you didn't know, I'm a train nerd.  This one's a regional, one of the ones I rode twice daily. 

On to the field study, October 24th!  For the livability class, we tried to get out and tour some successful interventions throughout the city -- this one's in Vesterbro.  Like I mentioned earlier, this was originally a tenement development, with pretty squalid conditions.  Oddly and unfortunately, it and some of the other tenement neighborhoods weren't really renewed until the 1970's.  But I'll talk a bit more about that in a later post, I think.  This field study wasn't really about the past, it was about the future! 

The above picture has a few really innovative things.  First, there's a graffiti problem in the city, like in most.  But instead of devoting a few hundred officers to do nothing but track down and arrest the artists (cough, cough, NYC), the city has been trying to bring their activities to the legal side of things.  Of course, 'tagging' is still rather frowned upon, and should be.  But that dragon up there... that's art!  Why criminalize it?  So they've actually commissioned some of the better artists out there to do murals in public spaces.  Looks great, it's incredibly cheap, and saves all sorts of police time.  Win-win-win? 

Oh, and they've taken steps to accommodate a marginalized city group -- skaters.  Most cities, and Copenhagen is still often guilty of this, push them off to the side and provide nothing for them, or otherwise a small park in a rather undesirable or useless area of the city, forcing them to improvise.  They're also rather fond of using inferior materials, such that they wear down under skating use, thus providing the city with an excuse to kick them out.  No so, here.  These concrete steps are incredibly strong, and can take as much grinding as anyone's willing to throw at them.  Great progress!

Look!  The rock!  But seriously, there's just a random rock chillin' in the sidewalk.  Pretty cool stuff.

Finally, the inside of one of Copenhagen's famous institutions -- the courtyard.  Much of this bright, green inner space was tenement housing prior to ~1970, making this a major improvement.  It's a really cool fusion of public and private space, since it's open to the roughly 140 families that live in the surrounding buildings, but generally gated to everyone else.  Really helps to negate the primary argument against raising kids in the city, too -- it's an incredibly safe community where you know most of your neighbors, and it's at least as awesome as a suburban backyard.  Shame we haven't got any in the States, yet.

England Part II: Totnes

Two blog posts in a week?!  Wow, that's impressive.  Also, it gets dark rather early here in Oslo (where I'm writing from, not writing about), so I've got a bit more free time.  I'm also nearly finished planning out the rest of my trip, so that helps too!

 Were you aware that Dawlish is a town in England?  I thought it was just a character from Harry Potter... Well, turns out it's a town, and it's got some mad-crazy tidal flats!  We're journeying along the southern coast here, and the tide's out.  This part of England sees ~9 meter tides, which is pretty incredible to think about.

We made it!  And, in true Danish fashion, our first activity was food.   Good food.  I'm still not certain what all of it was, but it was all fantastic, and all was about as local as possible; there's not even any sugar in there!  Still tasted great though, so it's all good.

Second task: watch Bill McKibbon speak at the local church.  He's the guy on the right.  If you don't know who he is, you've clearly not been following national or environmental news; he's a leader of the anti-Keystone movement, and managed to get himself arrested during the protest.  We weren't certain we were going to be able to see him speak, because he was almost barred from leaving the US -- turns out that potential convicts aren't allowed out very often.  Thankfully, the judge kinda rolled his eyes and let him make the trip.  Yay!

 FOOD!  If you hadn't yet noticed, today's post is roughly half food-related.  Here's lunch!  It's a pasty, from a place called Riverford -- you'll hear about them later.  For now, just think about how tasty that looks.

But before we move on, a tidbit of informations: though you've probably heard of 'Cornish pasties', this isn't one of them -- even though it's the exact same thing.  This was prepared and cooked in Devon, not Cornwall.  In Europe, they've got a thing called Protected Geographical Indication, or Protected Designation of Origin, status, meaning that certain products can only be considered real, or 'legit', if they're actually made there.  Prosciutto di Parma, Parmigiano-Reggiano, and a bunch of others are examples.  Yay information!

 Here, we get into the meat of the visit: Transition Town Totnes.  It's an initiative that has spawned a couple hundred duplicates across the world.  The basic idea is that, as Peak Oil hits and energy becomes more expensive, these communities will be insulated from the price shocks by the steps they've taken to reduce their dependence on fossil fuels.  One of their big initiatives, and you can see it in this picture, is the expansion of productive green space in the town.  This is a corner of a small park.  There's quite a lot going on!

This one's even better!  They've also got a bunch of allotment gardens parceled out on a hillside near the edge of town.  They're quite popular, and I think there's even a waiting list!  There is one problem, though -- because they're Brits, and because the access is on top of a pretty steep hill, they invariably drive there.  So that's a problem...

This one's pretty exciting, too -- it's a shoe-maker!  Cobbler?  I dunno.  Point is, they make shoes.  They're apparently super awesome, and they're custom-measured to your feet.  I believe they're made from mostly scraps and leather that wasn't quite good enough for the luxury purse folks, so it's even pretty sustainable as well.  My sustainability professor has a pair of these, they've supposedly lasted her 7 years so far, with only one re-soling operation -- and still going strong.  Pretty impressive, I'd say. 

Beer!  There's a small pub down the street from the B&B where we stayed (we filled two whole operations ourselves, it was pretty impressive), called the Albert Inn.  This one's Realitivity, I think.  Relativity, but British, so they spelled it wrong. 

And the other, Albert Ale.  Ales are pretty great, it turns out. 

The next day, we went adventuring!  We took a small bus and another car up to Dartmoor, a sort of national park.  It's a pretty spectacular place.  It's a pretty big climb up there from the lowlands, and the first thing you notice is that it's crazy windy.  And cold.  It's cold up there.  I'm not really certain exactly why we went all the way up there -- it took about 45 minutes to drive there -- but I'm glad we did, it was beautiful.

See?  Beautiful.

Still pretty awesome.  Oh, and nestled amongst those rocks, we sat down and had a discussion session on various environmentalist theories and constructs.  So that was fun, too!

Even the bits without rocks are great!  Doesn't hurt that there's a lake, I suppose.

Here's the part I was really excited for: food.  I wasn't kidding when I said this is basically a food post.  Anyways, so after the Dartmoor visit, we went to check out Riverford Farms.  It's a giant 'veg-box' scheme, the largest in the world.  Basically, it's a CSA (community supported agriculture) writ-large.  There are both positives and negatives to growing the scheme so large, but I'm choosing to focus for now on one thing: the field kitchen.  They've got basically the best food ever.  I mean, seriously -- roast duck, some amazing scalloped potatoes, fantastic beets, a squash salad, and some other stuff, too.  Grand stuff.  I liked it so much I bought the cookbook, something ~50% of our crew did.  

We're having a splendid time, you can see!

This here, this was the clincher.  It's Sticky. Toffee. Pudding.  Don't ask me what it is, because I'm not really sure.  Something involving plums?  I dunno.  At any rate, it was the best thing that's ever happened to me.

That was just an excellent day, really.  After lunch at Riverford, we went to an old estate turned non-profit vineyard.  It's located right at a bend of the river Dart -- that's actually the order they say it over there -- so of course it's quite beautiful. 

We didn't spend much time up there though; instead, we headed down to the river.  I must say, it was even more beautiful from up close, so I wasn't complaining.  This was a sort of wrap-up night, and we ended up staying from ~2 till ~10.  We had all sorts of fun reflection time, and a "date with nature", which was -- to say the least -- interesting; the goal was to go alone and find some piece of nature that we could just kind of sit and watch for half an hour.  Odd, to be sure, but an interesting idea nonetheless.  I got to know an oak tree, leaning over a bend in the river.  We're good friends now.

Finally, exciting part!  Food.  Yes, food again.  We built ourselves a fine little campfire, and got started on some sausages -- locally raised, of course.  We had some salad too, and a few other things.  Great stuff! 

Oh yeah, and that guy with the grate, he's Hal.  He lives in Totnes, and he's one of the trainers for the Transition Town movement.  Cool guy. 

The next day, we took the train back towards London.  We stopped first, though, at Windsor Castle.  It's a pretty amazing place, though I must question how useful it would have been in an actual war, post-1740s.  It was largely stone walls, rather than earthen works, and would have fallen apart even more quickly than Minas Tirith under cannon fire.  This is but a small part of it, it's a very sprawling compound. 

Here's a bit more of it.  This shows just how sprawled it really is; you can see no more than 1/5 of the compound, and it's quite an encompassing shot.

The church!  All self-respecting royal castles have a church, I'm told.  The church here is St. George's Chapel, and it's a pretty fantastic building.  Pictures weren't allowed inside, but you can see just how ornately it was built.  This particular construction style uses these things called 'flying buttresses' to hold the weight of the roof; if you look, you can seethat the wall is actually two, spaced by about 15 feet, with diagonal stone structures connecting the outer wall and the inner.  Without these, the triangular shape of the roof, and the immense weight, would cause the walls to fold outward.  Kinda cool, I think.

And of course, what church would be complete without a unicorn statue guarding the front entrance?  The horn's a bit tough to see, but it's there, I promise. 

Finally, we went for tea after the Castle.  The thing about British Tea, though, is that it's not just tea.  There are cakes, too!  Loads of cakes, or biscuits, or whatever the Brits call 'em.  I'm not sure whether it's standard or whether there was an error in ordering, but we ended up with about 2 of these trays for every 3 of us.  It was the best thing, especially those ones in the middle. 

After that, we hopped on a bus and headed back off to Heathrow, flew SAS to Copenhagen, and went home!  Great trip.  I know I didn't count or delineate between the days very well, but there were 6 nights, 7 days in total. 

And now, I'm... still more than 2 months behind.  Oh well, we'll get there.  Finally, I'm actually in Bergen now; between beginning and finishing this post, I took the train from Oslo to Bergen.  More on that, of course, soon.  Though if the past is any indication, it'll probably be a few months...

England! ... 2 Months late.

Yeah, about that.  Turns out that blogging is harder than you'd think.  Especially when there are trips to plan, hay bales to play tag on (that's for another post, sorry!), fireplaces to sit by, and bike rides in the rain.  So clearly, I'm not agonizing over my blog-fail too much.  Eh well.

October 2-8.

Today's all about England.  Specifically, London.  We had two different stops in the trip: this and Totnes, a town in Devon. 

So.  England.  We flew out of Copenhagen's airport pretty early, meeting there around 8:30.  We flew to Gatwick, the smaller, cheaper airport, on EasyJet.  I'm told it's much better than RyanAir, but I haven't got much to compare that to.  Either way, it was a decent flight.

So. We took a hired bus from the airport to our hotel, the Royal National, got all settled in, and left -- we had a bike tour scheduled!

  

ENGLISH PHONEBOOTH!

This is near the beginning of the bike tour, it's Hyde Park!

A theater, I think?  I'm not really sure, it was so long ago.  Either way, it was pretty attractive.

Riding down the commuter-ish bike/walk trail along the linear park near Hyde.  Our tour tried to stay off the road where possible -- it's rough conditions out there.

Some old gate-looking things.  Most of the gates/walls in the city were never actually functional, oddly enough.  They're mostly ornamental.

Here's some lovely London traffic!  We're approaching Charing's cross, and traffic starts to pick up.  We're sitting in the middle of a scary-looking three-way intersection, wondering how we made it so far, and how we could possibly cross the rest of the way.  London traffic is scary.

This gate has, like a lot of the gates around here, never been useful.  It was built to commemorate some famous dude, and was funded by another famous dude.  As a condition for the funding, he apparently insisted that his son feature in the piece.  So there's an angry dude on a rearing horse, and a 5 year old kid crouching behind, just kinda tossed in there.  That's pretty neat.

This is Nelson's Column.  Totally awesome story behind it, too -- you should look it up on Wikipedia, Admiral Nelson was pretty intense.

Look!  A lion!  Like Nelson's column right behind it, this is in Trafalgar Square.  We're still on the bike tour, just kinda left them in a median somewhere. 

I'm told this is the above-ground location of the main military bunker during WWII!  Churchill and his friends gathered here, they say, to plot heroic deeds.

Double-special bus at night!  Also note the traffic-calming aspects of the built environment.

The subway stati-Tube.

Also the Tube?

We went to a great little restaurant for lunch.  I forgot to take pictures of the other courses, but this was dessert.  Strawberry frozen yogurt on the bottom, a caramelized, dense marshmallow on top, drizzled with raspberry sauce.  Amazing.

After lunch, we went to a "Green Gym".  These are small plots of urban land, usually along rail or highway corridors, that are rehabilitated and cared for by residents who can gain nothing from a conventional gym; this is generally overweight people, those with disabilities, and the elderly.  They've got a non-profit organization working with them to train them in outdoors skills, to try to break the barrier to participation in outdoorsy activities.

Saint Pancras Station!  It's a pretty magnificent place, to be sure. 

The modern inside of St. Pancras. 

From the ground floor.

I realized that it was our last night in the city, and I hadn't had fish and chips yet!   So I got some.  They were kind of horrible, actually.  Too near the train station, too touristy, I think.

The side of King's Cross!  The two stations are actually right next to each other.  I'm not really sure what the reason for that is, but King's Cross is under construction.  I went in of course, trying to find Platform 9 3/4. 

Getting close!


...Damn.  Construction. 

That night, we went to see Priscilla! Queen of the Desert.  It's a fantastic musical, really well acted and performed.  I'd be careful about going to it if you're queasy about homosexuality and not willing to reconsider -- though I would recommend reconsidering.

Went to a museum!  This is the British Museum, hosting all sorts of things they stole on their conquests back in the days when the sun never set. 

Some nifty-colored cup.

Oh yeah, and the Rosetta Stone.  For some reason I always imagined it was round.  It was still really amazing to see though.

Paddington Station! Yay!  I checked; the Danes do know Paddington Bear. 

Some sort of Beer!  I think it was Old Speckled Hen, but I'm not really certain.  We got this at a pub across the street while waiting for the train platform to be announced. We got back just in time, and headed off to find our seats.

And then we were on our way to Totnes!

Thus concluded the first half of the trip!