Mukhtars Fødselsdag

i want to move back to dk!

dagen

going to list my day. blog.

danielle and i went to various loppe shops. i picked up a danish-english ordbog, fem kroner, and a copy of ragtime, to kroner. looking forward to reading both.

then we bought pastries filled with whipped cream from fotex and ate them on the grass in front of kilen. then we ate limeade popsicles in the holger courtyard.

we papered two walls in my room, smoked an apple, and painted portraits of each other. danielle is a forest maiden and i am a tentacled creature.

then we went out and bought the most massive sandwiches. the man was upset at us for ordering separately and forcing him to toast sandwiches in two rounds of toasting. we ate them on a bench under a tree across from the blue dog cafe.

felt like we would explode,

so ate more limeade popsicles.

napped. for what turned out to be a 2.5 hour nap. i dreamt that i had a white cat which perched on my shoulder. woke up and it was danielle's head+hair on my shoulder.

finally made it to the hvide lam, an amazizng jazz bar next to nørreport station. it's on Kultorvet and began in 1807, "En gammel hyggelig bar". jeg dansede swing med en gammel dansk mand. i had a lot of fun. the bassist was paul (wallace?), one of the men i'd seen playing in the trio outside the bar a few weeks ago. manden som dansede jeg med sagde, this was paul's last night playing - he is returning to australia tomorrow after 30 years in copenhagen.

i biked home and stjernekiggede in the courtyard. lying on the picnictabletops is perfect. did you know that the big dipper is perfectly framed by the holger danske courtyard. this is going to be useful for me: http://my.execpc.com/60/B3/culp/astronomy/Spring/Polar.html

i'll use it tomorrow. i would go back out but i'm too naked to do so at the moment.

tomorrow will be a good day for a shower.

dinosaur times

i had my (roast beef, ran out of salmon) bagel outside of dalgas have this afternoon. balmy. i was alone and indulged in eating like an animal. i tugged on the bagel with my clenched teeth and sat momentarily with a leaf hanging out of my mouth. dinosaur time. i killed the bagel and realized as i was leaving that a young man on a balcony directly above me had been watching me in amusement. conclusion: all my embarassing moments are made public.

stays frozen, like the snow in shadow

Admittedly, I have not been impressed with Copenhagen's cityscape. The buildings are quaint, but not quaint enough to evoke memories of any other time other than this one. If they are modern, they are stark naked in the same way that all modernist creations pleasure in standing before you, unabashedly jutting out their irregular metal parts. Hardly shocking.

I woke up yesterday, sat on my heater and looked out of my window upon a snow-covered courtyard. Prints of footfall and bicycle trails led out to the street. I brushed the ice off of Alex's seat and handles with mittened hands. The falling snow buzzed everywhere in tiny tufts like Nabokovian midges, not gold but white. It fell so unassumingly that it was a wonder to see that it had enchanted the entire municipality of Frederiksberg. It fell into the waiting latticed arms of trees and nestled in the crooks of their branches. A dachshund in a light jacket waddled leg-deep in the white. I wanted to pay attention in my favorite class but I was distracted by the fact that I was sitting inside the tiny glowing holiday house within a snowglobe. Through the windowpane there was whirling. I liked the way the specks settled home in my hair and dissolved on my face. The rooftops of all the buildings were fairytale-fringed in a way that I resolved to live somewhere where there would always be snow like this.

This morning, the sun was in denial of the previous day's events and everywhere there were standing pools of water. The sweet season that warms all the hills.

bike woes pt 456

Today I woke up at an ungodly hour to go to the police bike auction.

ungodly = 7:45 am

The auction began at 9 am. Conveniently, the S-train began running at 9 am as well.

We arrived around 9:20 am. Apparently people were at the auction at 8:30 am to inspect the bikes going up for auction. Now, how do you get there at 8:30 am when the train isn't running and you clearly don't have a bike? I don't really know.

The auction was packed so tight that you couldn't see at all over the heads. We snuck up closer the front, where the auction was going on. In lightning-speed Danish. Good practice for my Danish numbers, bad for my ego.

The going rate was a low of 450 kroner and highs of 800-900 kroner. Being a foreigner from car-city, I have never practiced my instant visual bike evaluation skills, so it was pretty damn hard to judge the condition of the bikes from the few seconds that I had to view them.

I made a few bids but was always outbid (I'm cheap.) In the end, I made the executive decision to not buy a bike. I feared nabbing a shitty bike which needed, god forbid, repairs, at 450-600 kroner plus 23% tax plus 20 kroner to cut off the lock.

Repairing my injured bike (I'm thinking about naming him Alex - but don't hold me to that) will cost 450 kroner (yes, what I paid for him to begin with. eff) and he'll be functional (hopefully.)

I think the two of us are in it for the long haul.