Copenhagen Craziness!

I arrived in Copenhagen at 9AM on Wednesday exhausted from my crazy week in Poland, and also a bit sad to be leaving because I had had such an amazing experience, and I felt like there was so much more fun to be had with Gosia.

Prior to leaving Warsaw, I knew only that Emily was in Copenhagen for the day, and she was to leave on Thursday for a Scandanavian adventure, over which I was excited for her, but caused me stress for my own situation. I got in touch with our friend-from-the-Rome-hostel, Andrew, but he too was leaving for a weekend in Sweden, so it looked as if I would be on my own for the majority of my stay in Denmark.

After having a shower in a public bath (yay!) I headed up to Emily's campus to meet her for lunch. It was a nice time, cool school, cool people, etc. I then met up with Andrew for a bit, and when Em was done with classes, we walked along the Stroget (the largest pedestrian walkway in the world, and incidentally also the most commercial). Although Emily offered me her floor for the first night, I secured a hostel called "Sleep-in Green" near the center city, a vegetarian, eco-friendly place. I felt sure I would meet interesting people there.

Emily left for Sweden early the following day, so I showed up to the Sleep-in Green at around 7AM in the morning. I dropped off my stuff, had a yogurt, and took a morning walk up to the famous "Little Mermaid" statue in the spuradic Copenhagen rain. When I finally arrived, I found the crowd of tourists to be a much more impressive spectacle than the statue itself: a very small, naked half woman/half fish sitting on a tiny rock in the canal. Well worth the walk, I thought to myself.

By the time I returned to the hostel, it was lock-out time and I was rudly kicked out. I called Andrew from a nearby payphone, and we met up for the rest of the day, wandering down to Christania, a freetown outside of city center that was taken over about 30 years ago by squatters, and had fought hard to stay independent of the rest of Copenhagen. We walked into the town through alleys surrounded by beautiful, massive graffit-ied walls. Men stood in the middle of the street selling hash and weed, while gleeful tourists smoked huge blunts outside at the tables of nearby restuarants... truly a remarkable place. Plenty of music, weed, cheap drinks/food, free roaming dogs and friendly people. Apparently, all the money earned from the food establishments goes towards paying for the utilities of the communal residences, in which none of the inhabitants have to pay for rent. A socialist dreamworld, really.

The following day Andrew left for Sweden and I was officially on my own. I dodged out of the hostel early, avoiding an awkward Phillipino boy named Matthew slightly resembling Golum that I had met the night before. The day was good, I took a canal tour, went to the National Museum, ate some Danishes on the Stroget, and climbed another tower overlooking the old town.

That night, after some random intoductions, I tagged along to a night club with a group of four Italian boys from Torino named Gabriel, Roberto, and Faaabio, two girls from Indiana, Kate and Ana, and of course, Matt aka Golum the Phillipino boy. The night started off fun, but was highlighted with the romance that was inevitably struck between myself and the Italian Fabio. He insisted on paying for everything (every drink, every cover, every taxi), opened each and every door, refused to walk in front of me ever and asked me politely what I'd like to do before we moved anywhere. While normally I find this type of male mating behavior completely and totally obnoxious, this time, he had me entirely in a trance. For the few drunken hours I spent with Fabio, I was actively entertaining fantasies of marriage and Tuscan Villas and an Italian happily ever after. He didn't speak much English, but it wasn't much of a problem for me in the least. When he left for Helsinki at when we returned from the club, I wholeheartedly wanted to follow, but luckily stayed in Copenhagen dreaming about what could have been had I run off with my Italian lover. Le sigh. Some things just weren't meant to be I suppose.

The last day of my Copenhagen adventure was not nearly as exciting. Being half hung-over from the night before, the four of us remaining sat in a park for the day playing card games. We ate cheap falafel, napped and went to Christania for the evening.

I left Copenhagen the following day feeling more than ready to come to London. Although I loved almost everything about the city, traveling alone is just not quite as fulfilling.