ToDo: Invent Brilliant Title

There's this cute little sidebar in my Time Out: Copenhagen that just cracks me up.  I always insist on dragging it out and making people read it (even Danes and Swedes).  To facilitate my ability to do this via Google, I'm totally ripping it off and shoving it in right here.

The way in which the Danes rub along with rest of their Scandinavian brethren is coloured by one simple, historical fact: they used to rule all of them, had a fight, and then lost everything in the most humiliating way possible.  As a result, relations with Norway and particularly Sweden (who really rubbed the Danes' noses in it for a while), are understandably more complex than may at first be apparent.

No matter how nice they are face to face, and no matter how many splendid bridges they build across the Øresund, the Danes still gripe ceaselessly about the Swedes.  They love, for instance, to point out the drunken Swedish day-trippers from Malmö who stagger around Nyhavn's pubs and bars at the weekend ("They'd never behave like that at home", goes the Danish chorus), or the Swedes who booze cruise form Helsingborg to Helsingør in their Volvo Estates (rumour has it the cars are built around the dimension of 10 crates of Tuborg.)  The Danes take great delight in mimicking the Swedes' singsong accents, and require little encouragement to dish the dirt on what a bunch of dull, law-abiding party poopers their fellow Scandinavians are.

For their part, the Swedes still look down upon the Danes as chain-smoking, underachieving, woolly liberals, with similarly lax attitudes towards drugs and sex as the Dutch. They have an unshakeable sense of self-belief that the Swedish way is the best.

Even more damning within the Scandinavian fraternity is the accusation of 'being too much like the Germans', an insult that is hurled with equal conviction from all sides of the ramparts.  The Danes cite the Swedes' regimented social behaviour as evidence of their Teutonic mindset, while the Swedes point to the Danes' closer cultural links with Germany, not to mention their sausage fetish.  The Norwegians, meanwhile, stay quiet, grateful that no one is being horrid about them for once.

Norwegians know their place, and are more than content with it (as anyone would be with their balance of payments).  The relationship between Danes and Norwegians is more one of brotherly affection than regional rivalry.  Though the Norwegians are significantly richer than the Danes (make that, 'than most of the planet'), thanks to their North Sea oil bonanza, the Danes think of them as rather naïve, innocent, virulently nationalistic and, if we're really honest, mentally disadvantaged country cousins.  However, the spectacular Norwegian scenery is much envied by the Danes, who only have a couple of cliffs and a sand dune to keep their amateur photographers happy.  Danes feel at home with Norway's modest, inward-looking traditionalism and, secretly, covet their national costumes.

All credit to Time Out and the author, Michael Booth.

I'm not very good at earthquakes. 

The first I ever knowingly experienced I thought a truck was driving past.  Then I remembered that I was in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea, it had taken four planes and a helicopter to get me to where I was, and that the closest truck was a couple of hundred kilometres away.

About a month before I moved to the US (the first time), a 6.8 earthquake hit Seattle.  Fissures opened up in the ground and buildings buckled.  My mother rang me and told me I wasn't moving anymore.

Then there was that Icelandic one that I completely failed to notice.

This morning, I was woken at 6:20am by the earth moving.  I did what any reasonable person would do: I googled "earthquake Copenhagen" on my phone.  At least half the first page results were using the word metaphorically, so I figured that this area was seismically uninteresting, and that one of my neighbours must have been breaking the building in some new and interesting manner.  But apparently, I was wrong - it was 4.7, and the epicenter was 65 km away in southern Sweden.  The word is that it's the largest one to hit the area since they started measuring.

Hello Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Israel.  Hello Seattle.

I don't think the news that I'm moving back to Seattle is really news to anyone.  I've lived here in Denmark for two years and loved every minute of it, but it has felt a little like a holiday from life, and I need to try to be a grown-up.  So it's back to Seattle to work on that small operating system product we have.

In my time here, I've managed to see just about all of Europe that I was interested in.  (Southern Italy and Portugal are the only ones to elude me, but I'll be back for at least two weddings next year and I still might snag them.)  So when I leave Copenhagen at the end of the week, I'll spend a month travelling through the Middle East.  I'm going to try to post photos to Flickr during the trip so keep an eye out over there if you're interested.

I've mentioned before that George Bush was actually a small factor in deciding to leave the US, so it's going to look like I carefully planned to arrive back so close to the day he gets evicted, but that one is probably a coincidence.  Probably.

How's your Danish?  Anders is blogging about his move.

(Incidentally, lest you be concerned his hallway-mates will hate him as much as Danny and the upright piano, his office "drum kit" is about 15cm tall.)

Got asked at work "Can you go to a conference in Germany next week?"  I appreciated the copious quantities of advance notice and so acquiesced.

I'd never been to Munich (and had a hankering to see Bavaria) so went down a day early.  Munich failed to impress.  It was a rainy miserable day and Hofbrauhaus smelt funny.

But the next day, we hopped on a train and went out to Füssen.  I was very disappointed for about three quarters of the journey, but finally sighted alps.  Füssen was cute, but just a lunch stop on the way to Neuschwanstein Castle.

Disney ripped off Neuschwanstein when building Sleeping Beauty Castle, so it's all spires and romance.  Ludwig of Bavaria wanted a "real" Middle Ages castle, so he cleared an actual medieval castle to build it there.  Mainly, it was to impress his friend Wagner.

Two thumbs up for Hungary.  Budapest very cool.  Pretty buildings.  Scary Terror House.  Tasty goulash.

Got to see the Red Bull Air Race from Buda Castle.  A gorgeous day, a view over Buda and Pest, the Danube meandering along, all apparently insufficient.  Also had to see planes flying underneath Chain Bridge and in and out of big floaty witch's hats and loopdilooping in the air. *mrowr*

Danes are unreasonably fond of their flag.  Granted, it's quite pretty (and doesn't have a mess of someone else's flag taking up a significant quarter - always a plus in my book).  It's the world's oldest national flag, and apparently drifted down from Heaven and helped win some battle.  But they're unreasonably fond of their flag.

It's weird.  It doesn't really seem to be about patriotism.  There's a deep streak of irony through the Danish psyche that wouldn't allow that level of uncoolness.  It really truly seems to be about the flag.  They fly it all over the place and print it on all sorts of things and use it as a decoration.  In a key piece of WTF, it's apparently the way to indicate a birthday.  The damn thing is everywhere.

That said, this seems a bit extreme.

I'm an enormous L M Montgomery fan.  I've read many of her books at least twenty times, and not just because I was trapped in a town with a crappy library.  I best remember the day I met Charles by how much I freaked out when I discovered he was from Prince Edward Island.  It's Anne Land!  (Though, truth be told, I vastly prefer weird snobby Emily to goody-two-shoes Anne.  And arty Teddy is so much hotter than stodgy Gilbert.)  There was no way I was passing up the opportunity to PEI it up when I was over that side of Canadia.

I went light-house spotting through Nova Scotia over to Prince Edward Island, through adorable Charlottetown up to Anne's part of town.  Peggy's characterisation of PEI as "so cute I could puke" is apt.  I played Spot-the-Obscure-Montgomery-Reference: Ingleside Lodge Motel and Kindred Spirits Country Inn were topped by Shining Waters Family Fun Park.  Of course, I went to Green Gables.

From PEI (across the Confederation Bridge!), I meandered back through New Brunswick.  I stopped in at Shediac, because I had found it impossible to believe that it wasn't just Australians that built enormous fibre-glass versions of things - the Big Lobster set me straight. All trips must have a highlight, however, and this one was spontaneously dropping in on the incredible woman who is Charles' mother.  She is so cool.

Ed and Sean getting hitched was a lovely excuse to visit Eastern Canada.  They picked Halifax, Nova Scotia for the deed, so Marky-Mark, Kindy, Yammy and I converged there.  Mark in Dublin was actually geographically closer to Halifax than Kindy and Yammy in Seattle.  That Canadia is damn big.

The Edding was lovely.  Ed looked like Princess Grace, Sean wore a skirt and it was a Catholic service so I knew all the words.  Apparently the modern term for a sporran is a 'junk bag'.

There was karaoke at the reception, which was damn entertaining.  Must have been the booze.  Highlights were the groom doing Prince's "Kiss" complete with falsetto, the bride doing Fergie's "London Bridge (Oh Shit)", and the Croatian doing "Blame Canada".  Mark and I deafened Kindy with our homage to Nick, "Anthem".

We inspected Halifax closely, and it was very pretty.  However, the most important discovery we made was at McDonald's.

Ugh!  Who would be silly enough to eat that?!

Uh oh.  Not a good sign.

Huh.  Mark.  How surprising.

So what did you do on the weekend?  Bumbershoot?  PAX?  Burning Man?  Nice, nice, nice.

I BOUGHT A BLUE WATERING CAN!

Me for the win!

Oh, we did this too:

Last weekend, after a few glancing attempts, I finally made it to Rosenborg Slot to check out the castle and inspect the crown jewels

Rosenborg is a funny skinny little castle in the centre of a park in the centre of the city.  It's a bit strange to look down a street and see the thing.  It's really far more royal than the four identical palaces a few blocks away that the Queen beds down in.

This is what I learned on my visit:

• Danes are ridiculously trusting.  I had suspected this due to the baby carriages (complete with occupants) left on footpaths outside shops and cafes while mums are busy inside.  I had it confirmed when the ticket dude told me I needed to check my bag during my visit.  (Apparently it's not to prevent me making off with the jewels - it's to protect the door frames.)  When I didn't have the 20kr ($4) coin for the locker, he offered one.
• The Danish aesthetic has improved.  I'm an enormous fan of the whole minimalist sleek beautiful Scandinavian thing going on around here, but it would seem it was a somewhat recent development.  As far as I can tell, prior design goals aimed for ugly or creepy.  There's a lot of stuff in Rosenborg that gets the double word score, including a significant portion of the crown jewels.
• The Danish royal family has gotten a lot better looking.  The current head of state looked alright before time and forty Greek cigarettes a day took their toll.  Half of her children are pretty cute and half of his kids are totally adorable.  Frederick III and Christian V were scary, and their wives were worse.  I figured that their painters needed to upgrade their version of Photoshop, before the terrible thought occurred to me that maybe they already had.

And then we went to Tivoli and went on all the rides.

From Helsinki, we caught the ferry across to Tallinn, in Estonia.  We spent most of the trip giggling about the sign that had directed us toward the gangway by saying in Swedish "Til Fartyget".

Tallinn has an adorable little walled old town.  We wandered around, and indulged in commerce.  Cindy scored the best Russian nesting dolls ever.  Yammy bought some gorgeous red pottery goblets that he insists on referring to as "chalices" or "grails".  I find that uncomfortably messianic.  Yammy also chickened out of the Medieval Torture Museum at the door once he realised that they'd be showing how the equipment was actually used.

We caught a bus from Tallinn to Riga, Latvia.  It left from the main bus station in Tallinn, which seemed to be called the "autobussijaam".  Someone, who shall remain nameless for soon-to-be-revealed reasons, became overly fond of saying this name.  Our bus had Wifi and Jammi spent most of the trip exclaiming about this fact on various internet sites.  Not the Soviet Union anymore, Toto.

If Tallin is Dubrovnik-y, then Riga is more Paris-y.  Broad avenues and such-like.  We discovered that most of the old and notable buildings had been pretty much rebuilt post-war, which de-notabled them in our books.

Finally, we ventured into northern Lithuania to visit the Hill of Crosses.  I can't do that place justice with words, but behold the photos.

Last night, we went to see a symfonikoncert at Operaen.

Operaen is Mærsk Mc-Kinney Møller's 500 million dollar gift to the Danish people and sits fairly spectacularly on the Copenhagen harbour across from the queen's house.  It's not quite the most famous Danish-designed opera house, but it's commanding from the outside, impressive on the inside and has an amazing view on a beautiful summer evening.

The program was Wagner, Wagner, Strauss.  The middle Wagner had a wailing woman.  She was disappointingly not a fat German in a horned helmet, but instead a hot blonde with an apricot satin dress and insecure body language.  The Strauss was Ein Heldenleben which, rather embarrassingly, I'm familiar with thanks to a Jilly Cooper novel.  The conductor was very exciting, cavorting about in a most entertaining manner, but I wish they'd given him a little platform that didn't squeak.

During the slow bits (rare, as Strauss and Wagner seem to do really loud and really strident really well), I played High School Politics with the Orchestra members, picking the brain, the princess, the criminal and such-like.  The trumpeters who wandered off in the middle of the third piece and popped back for the end were totally the stoners.  My favourite was the emo percussionist who sat folded in on himself in the middle up the back, hating the world and being all "fuck this orchestra shit" right up until he got to crash his cymbals, when he became master of all he surveyed and more than a little over-dramatic with his flourishes.

This is my new favourite Danish word.

I'm envisioning great fountains of promiscuity.

How much does my family rock?  Why, they rock large amounts, thanks for asking.

Recent evidence: this is just the snack portion of my birthday package

Thanks, Most Excellent Mother and Most Excellent Sister!  (And thank-you too to Most Excellent Nephews, once I figure out what in hell you sent me, and how to stop it making that noise.)

Copenhagen is the most amazing place under good weather.

Knowing Saturday was going to be nice, Bridget and I made some plans.  We briefly considered tackling the crowds and smell out at the Roskilde Festival, but decided instead to head up to Humlebæk and go to Louisiana.

Louisiana is named, not because it aspires to be murky and Southern, but because the original owner of the property apparently had three wives...all named Louise.  (Far worse than too many Alexs.)  It's a museum of modern art ("museum for moderne kunst") and has a fairly nice collection including some Picassos, Pollack, Lichtenstien, Warhol, as well as many Scandinavian artists. It currently has an exhibition on the architecture of museums which, while a little recursive, was still totally fascinating.

The real star of Louisiana, however, is its location.  It's right on the shore of the Øresund and when the weather is good, it's spectacular.  The view even distracted me from the Rothko.

We rounded out the day with some splashing about in the Baltic, a bicycle ride to an excellent local sushi place, and some good white wine.  It's days like this when I wonder why anyone would live anywhere else.

We escaped to the West via train from St Petersburg.  Helsinki, while not the most exciting of that unexceptional genre of Nordic cities, certainly did awfully well from the comparison.  It was nice to be able to drink the water and flush the toilet paper

We just sort of strolled about for a few days.  They have a chuch in a rock.  Their chain of liquor stores is called "Alko".  I had a birthday.  We shopped a lot, as I searched out tourist wares referencing Finns (for one small nephew who was fascinated with the idea of a land of hims).  We caught the ferry out to Suomenlinna and wandered around in the rain; Yammy laughed at my rain hat until he got rain in his ear.

It was all rather lovely, and not at all grim despite my mother's research and subsequent predictions.  But we couldn't leave fast enough, because although I'd never heard the real version, due to somebody's continual repetition of it, I had Monty Python's damn "Finland" song stuck in my head and worried it would become permanent.

Yammy's fun to take travelling.  He's easy-going, flexible, puts up with my crap, appreciates the afternoon nap break, can peer over the crowd to find things.  I figured he'd be a good companion for a trip around the Baltic, even if he wouldn't be as useful language-wise as he had been last summer during our jaunt around the Adriatic.

Turns out he was totally handy. His Cyrillic education may have terminated in Grade 4 due to a certain secession, but being fluent in a Slavic language was ridiculously helpful.  It was funny to watch - he'd slowly sound out a word, then try mapping it to Croatian.  That worked most of the time, but otherwise, he'd try English, then the French/Romance connection via Italian, before finally giving Latin a go.  I'd make him read stuff just for the entertainment value.  "What's that say?" "How about that?"  "And that one?" 

They should put it in Lonely Planet: When travelling to Russia, take a Slav.

Being in Russia itself felt like a big deal.  The visa stuff certainly helped and the funny picture characters; there was just such of sense of being on the other side of the curtain.  We spent a lot of time saying "Dude.  We're in Russia."

St Petersburg was brilliant.  The city's population is one of its most interesting aspects.  We had been warned that we'd see a lot of men wearing their sunglasses on the backs of their heads, hooked over the ears.  Disappointingly, we didn't see this at all (at least, not until just one instance on our very last day), but the prevalence of mullets certainly compensated.  There was also significant representation by the marvelously badly dressed.  (Incidentally, when I was taking a few brief notes for this post, Yammy wanted me to include commentary on how some wardrobe choices made distinguishing between socio-economic tiers and occupations challenging, but as he did so by pointing to my page and exclaiming "Whores!", I'm going to decline.)  

Our hotel was fairly centrally located.  Basically, if Catherine the Great was still living in the Winter Palace, she would have been our neighbour.  On our first afternoon, we went for a walk.  We meandered down our street, under the arch and into Palace Square.  They were constructing a big stage there, so we figured it probably had something to do with the upcoming White Nights Festival.  When I finally noticed the name on the billowing banner, I started to laugh in disbelief.  You see, Yammy is a little bit of a Pink Floyd fan.  He flew to LA specifically for a David Gilmour concert, so it seemed almost ridiculous that we happened to be in St Petersburg, staying about 50 metres from where Roger Waters was setting up shop.  It became even more ridiculous the next night when somehow we just strolled past the security, into the square and caught the whole concert.

Me, I really only know the words to "Comfortably Numb" thanks to the Scissor Sisters and Dar Williams, so I wasn't the core fan-base, but it was still pretty damn sweet standing in midnight twilight, looking up at the Winter Palace, listening to Roger Waters play "Another Brick in the Wall".

We wandered all about St Petersburg.  The Church on Spilled Blood was a highlight - ice-cream-cake onion domes on the outside, bright mosaic cartoons on the inside.  We tried to go to Peterhof, but after making us sit in a boat on the Neva for two hours, they decided that as Medvedev and his International Economic Forum friends were there, we shouldn't be.  It was just like our Venice Three Hour Tour.

Of course, we did the Hermitage.  As with visiting any museum housed in a re-purposed building, we spent a lot of time backtracking, mainly down two corridors - one where our guidebook promised we'd find a portrait of Catherine the Great dressed as a dude (we didn't) and the 1812 Gallery.  This latter is filled with over 300 paintings of officers and heroes of the Napoleonic Wars.  I'd like to say say we spent our time there acknowledging their courage and sacrifices, but mostly we made fun of their hair.

Still, I'm disappointed that I missed the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography - it apparently has Peter the Great's collection of deformed babies, which sounds fascinating.  Yammy baulked - he doesn't like to be described as "squeamish" but then he also doesn't like "whinging little girl".  Apparently the correct term is "hypersensitive to the idea that people have squishy insides."  This son of a surgeon made me go to the Nabokov Museum instead.

I've had trouble writing this post.  Two main reasons, I think.  The first is that Iceland pretty much defies description.  It's weird and interesting and incredibly unique.  (So unique that apparently it can give an absolute qualifiers...)  And it's very pretty.  Smells funny, sort of boiled eggs and fish, but very pretty.  We saw glaciers, waterfalls, volcano craters, lava fields, pumice beaches, thermal vents, geysirs and the odd continental rift.  And we avoided eating puffins or rotten shark (though I hear the latter is quite tasty).

The second reason I'm having trouble with this post is that I need to admit something that I'm not very proud of.  When we were in Reykjavik, an earthquake clocking in at a mighty 6.3 on the Richter scale hit about 50 kilometers away.  And we didn't notice.

Here's the thing.  Poland is there.  I'd never been there.  So I went to Poland.

I didn't really want to go to Warsaw, but that's where the cheap flight went, so so did I.  Warsaw is...um...there.  Though I want to know why they (and Prague and Barcelona) get a Sephora and swanky posh Copenhagen misses out.

I then caught the train to Kraków.  The trip was in turns interesting, dull, gross, creepy and educational. These were due to, respectively: crossing a great swathe of Poland, an overabundance of grey Communist architecture, the lunch choices of my fellow passengers, the weird dude who alternated between scratching himself and embroidering, and the little girl who taught me to count to ten in Polish.  The little brat already knew how to do it in English, and didn't seem interested in Danish, French or Italian, so the tutorial remained unidirectional.

The return trip a few days later wasn't much better though it was enlivened by the Window Wars between the Old Italian Ladies and the Young Polish guys.  I sided with the young guys, I wanted the damn thing open, but they lost my support when they finished their bottle of vodka and started to sing.

Kraków was fairly lovely: buildings, castles, cathedrals and such-like.  I quite liked it.  I went on a trip down the Wieliczka Salt Mine which was fascinating.  We trailed along three kilometres and down 130 metres, but only covered about 1% of the whole.  The bored salt miners spent a total of about 700 years digging away down there, and carved all sorts of weird stuff including three chapels and a rather accurate Salt Pope.

I also went to Oświęcim, which is a bit better known by its jaunty German name. Aucschwitz.

Charles' dad died on Tuesday.

I'll always be disappointed that I didn't meet him.  Anyone who's ever chatted with Charles about them (or just met Charles and extrapolated) knows that his family is topful of interesting characters, and it seems his dad firmly represented. 

Admitted to the Order of Canada, he was born in Pakistan, met his wife in Greece and ended up President of the University of Prince Edward Island.  He is described in his obit as "a classicist, an historian, an archeologist, a philhellene, a teacher, a university administrator, and a tireless champion for Maritime heritage preservation", but I love the comment "To call him eccentric would be understating the case".

We should all be remembered so well.

When I got my new Aussie passport, I bitched and moaned about the fancy RFID chip.  I lamented my compromised security and bought it (though not me, strangely) a tin foil hat.  I shut up after the first time I swanned through Immigration in Sydney in about three minutes.

Similarly, I would mildly grumble to myself about living in a Schengen country and the barrenness of the pages of that fancy passport.  It's not brag-worthy! 

This week has been my Sydney Immigration Line Moment about open borders.

So I'm doing a grand Baltic tour next month and need a visa to go to St Petersburg.  The Russians don't make this easy.  You have to be issued an invitation, write a letter, fill in a form, provide proof of medical insurance.  It's not fun.  Then you have to give all this over to the Russkies for them to ponder for two weeks while they decide if they're going to let you have four days in their country spending money.

The two weeks requirement was about the sixth problem encountered.  With all these public holidays, and my common weekend pastime, it was a bit tough to find a 10 business day period when I could do without my passport.  Things got timed a little fine.

About the twelfth problem encountered is that the Russian consulate in Copenhagen doesn't accept visa applications by mail.  You have to go there in person. This isn't such a big deal for me, it's a vague detour from my morning commute. (It's rather close to Dennis' place, actually.  I guess it really is Embassy Row.)  Rather a bigger deal if you live in Jylland.

Problem eighteen is that they only have limited consulate hours.  On Tuesday, I rocked up about an hour before they were due to close (which is at the grand old time of 11:30am), forms in hand, all ready to do my in-person equivalent of a mail drop.  I waited.  And waited.  I didn't even get off the footpath and into the driveway.

And so I learned my lesson.

On Wednesday, my progress was much better.  I arrived half an hour before they opened, waited for three hours, and made it so far that I got to be the first person that they turned away when they shut up for the day.   The guy from Jylland behind me had to change his flight and book a room.

And so I learned my lesson.

Today, I turned up an hour and a half before they opened.  The coffee cart driver who comes by the queue now considers me a regular.  After spending a cumulative total of seven hours waiting, they let me in the door, I dropped off my papers, paid my cash, and left.  It would have been less than seven minutes.

And I get to go back again and line up to pick it up!

Meanwhile, Yammy has been gloating about receiving his visa already.  He just chucked all his stuff into the mail, made a few pointed remarks about being their Slavic comrade, and called it done.