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This is a people unafraid of their history.
What would be jealously guarded at home, with guns and red tape and million-dollar security systems, is comfortably covered in a hundred years worth of graffiti. It is used, lived in, built onto. I walked through a school building that has been here for over two hundred years, yet is joined with a modern glass-and-steel skybridge that, somehow, has been designed to be attractive in ancient surroundings.
All the furniture here looks like it came from an Ikea catalogue. Even in the low-end hole-in-the-wall greasy spoon cafeterias, stunningly beautiful interior design pervades. This city radiates good taste, at least compared to what I am used to in America.
Everyone has their own unique sense of style, without appearing to adhere to any particular subculture. Grunge never made it here. There are no street rats. It's incredibly refreshing. I have not seen a single goth, raver, skater or hippie. The people are... themselves.
Virtually everyone I have seen, young and old, has been thin. I feel big, awkward and fat here. It's interesting... Americans really are very overweight.
I climbed a 400-foot cathedral today, wrapped in a spiral staircase made of gold leaf and copper plate, and looked out on a city of ancient tenements with red tile roofs, with the occasional piercing spire of church or government palace.
My second cousin Nils has been my tourguide to downtown København, and he has given me exactly the tour I have wanted. He has showed me the high places, and the low places, the meandering cobbled streets and the little cafes where we sat just out of the rain and smoked French cigarettes and talked about journalism, photography and philosophy. We covered everything from how to become an international photojournalist (which is what Nils does for a living) to a discussion of how transhumanism will be the magic bullet that finally kills postmodernism...
It has been a lifelong dream of mine, to sit in one of these little cafes in northern Europe, and have a conversation like that, philosophy falling with the rain under steel skies and rising with the silverdrift smoke.
Everyone speaks perfect English. I am horribly ashamed of my monolingualism.
Nils's family is delightful. He works, as I mentioned, as a photojournalist and relief worker, traveling to Africa several times a year. He flies in low in an old DC-3 cargo plane, dodging the Russian-surplus MiGs of the hostile local government, to bring aid to the people in Sudan and Mozambique and Somlia, take pictures and write stories.
His wife is a Sudanese princess, who lives in exile with him here in Denmark. The Muslim government in Sudan, in collusion with the oil companies, is doing its level best to exterminate the Christian minority and the pagan tribes. She also works in the human righs and aid relief field, and has spoken to the UN General Assembly on the subject a number of times.
Their daughter will be a very beautiful woman when she grows up. You can see it already in the lines of her face and the light in her eyes, and the enthusiasm and energy with which she attacks life. She already speaks French, English, Danish and Shilok (her mother's native language) fluently.
You have this sense that everyone here is just as interesting and intelligent, as well-traveled and cultured yet caring and hardworking, as Nils and Agyedho. As if people really do things here, rather than just talk about them, something I have had a level of frustration with back home...
Tonight I will sink my teeth into København night life with all the enthusiasm of an inveterate party animal.
Underworld is the perfect soundtrack to any city. This one is no exception.
What would be jealously guarded at home, with guns and red tape and million-dollar security systems, is comfortably covered in a hundred years worth of graffiti. It is used, lived in, built onto. I walked through a school building that has been here for over two hundred years, yet is joined with a modern glass-and-steel skybridge that, somehow, has been designed to be attractive in ancient surroundings.
All the furniture here looks like it came from an Ikea catalogue. Even in the low-end hole-in-the-wall greasy spoon cafeterias, stunningly beautiful interior design pervades. This city radiates good taste, at least compared to what I am used to in America.
Everyone has their own unique sense of style, without appearing to adhere to any particular subculture. Grunge never made it here. There are no street rats. It's incredibly refreshing. I have not seen a single goth, raver, skater or hippie. The people are... themselves.
Virtually everyone I have seen, young and old, has been thin. I feel big, awkward and fat here. It's interesting... Americans really are very overweight.
I climbed a 400-foot cathedral today, wrapped in a spiral staircase made of gold leaf and copper plate, and looked out on a city of ancient tenements with red tile roofs, with the occasional piercing spire of church or government palace.
My second cousin Nils has been my tourguide to downtown København, and he has given me exactly the tour I have wanted. He has showed me the high places, and the low places, the meandering cobbled streets and the little cafes where we sat just out of the rain and smoked French cigarettes and talked about journalism, photography and philosophy. We covered everything from how to become an international photojournalist (which is what Nils does for a living) to a discussion of how transhumanism will be the magic bullet that finally kills postmodernism...
It has been a lifelong dream of mine, to sit in one of these little cafes in northern Europe, and have a conversation like that, philosophy falling with the rain under steel skies and rising with the silverdrift smoke.
Everyone speaks perfect English. I am horribly ashamed of my monolingualism.
Nils's family is delightful. He works, as I mentioned, as a photojournalist and relief worker, traveling to Africa several times a year. He flies in low in an old DC-3 cargo plane, dodging the Russian-surplus MiGs of the hostile local government, to bring aid to the people in Sudan and Mozambique and Somlia, take pictures and write stories.
His wife is a Sudanese princess, who lives in exile with him here in Denmark. The Muslim government in Sudan, in collusion with the oil companies, is doing its level best to exterminate the Christian minority and the pagan tribes. She also works in the human righs and aid relief field, and has spoken to the UN General Assembly on the subject a number of times.
Their daughter will be a very beautiful woman when she grows up. You can see it already in the lines of her face and the light in her eyes, and the enthusiasm and energy with which she attacks life. She already speaks French, English, Danish and Shilok (her mother's native language) fluently.
You have this sense that everyone here is just as interesting and intelligent, as well-traveled and cultured yet caring and hardworking, as Nils and Agyedho. As if people really do things here, rather than just talk about them, something I have had a level of frustration with back home...
Tonight I will sink my teeth into København night life with all the enthusiasm of an inveterate party animal.
Underworld is the perfect soundtrack to any city. This one is no exception.