The other week, I travelled with Sara to Copenhagen for a couple days, and boy is that city annoying when you don’t have a bike. I mean, the distances! The flattyness! The being-run-over-by-bikeiness! Other than that it’s rather pleasant, although the allure of moving there for a bit has diminished over the last couple of times I’ve been there, for some reason.
We stayed with photographer and all-round interesting person Kajsa Gullberg, which was terribly nice of her. Waking up to the smell of newly baked cinnamon buns was awesome, and would have been even more awesome if they’d been vegan; it was the pastry equivalent of cock-teasing. I did get to try oatmeal made with ginger though, which was really good.
I was a bit miffed when I couldn’t get vegan cake even in Christiania, bastion of alternative lifestyles that it is, when both Kajsa and Sara were stuffing their faces with banankage. The baker, probably knowing pretty well the tastes of his largely baked crowd, said he didn’t do vegan cakes “cause they’re crap” and I was this close to whipping out my phone and go all like Instructables Chocolate Cake, bitch! but thought better of it since the muscle-relaxed people behind me seemed rather eager to eat cake nom nom nom.
The city subway is all automatic, allowing you to sit in front and watch the tracks whizz by. Très cool. As an added bonus, any picture you take while in motion will come out as a wormhole tunnel / space anus combination, which looks fascinating.
Almost ten years ago I visited Gothenburg to cover the demonstrations against the EU ministers meeting. On the heels of that, in the fall of the same year, I visited Copenhagen during a workshop with Tone O Nielsen, this time as a participant in demonstrations and walks through the city. I didn’t pay attention to where I was at the time, my retention of street names being piss-poor at the best of times, but when we crossed a bridge and Kajsa mentioned that the building just across the wall was a prison, I realised that this was the place where I had marched with the black bloc, trying to push past the police to get to the people detained the previous night.
The push was half-hearted, and except the attempts at breaking up the demo by the police and their constant harassment, I remember freezing. The walk wasn’t all that long, but we were snaking our way through the city for the better part of four hours, and it was awfully cold. Once we reached Nørreport — iirc — there was collective release of pent up tension, and I felt exalted and happy. It’d odd how much you are affected by something as intangible as the collected stress and resolve of the people around you.
