Aram writing here.  On September 9th, my ex-girlfriend, Ariana Lamer, died of a heroin overdose.  She had just turned 22.  I think a lot of people looked past her quiet intelligence and talent, but those who knew her best could see what a special person she was.  She was also prone to depression and self-deprecation.  Ariana was never a squeaky wheel.  Sometimes it seemed like she wanted to conceal her abilities, and consequently she didn't get the opportunity to develop them.  She also didn't complain about her emotional damage. She probably didn't get as much help as she needed to see herself in an objective light, which would have been positive.  If you knew her, think kindly of her and her family.  I found out via Facebook.  The ordinarily tolerable banality of the News Feed seemed sick in comparison to the hurt that this caused.  It was not a good way to find out, although I guess there's no good messenger for tragic news.  Her death has affected me very strongly.

The final day in Copenhagen was spent mostly trying to get to Martin's boat. We followed Sofie's advice and grabbed coffee on Elmagade, a hip street in the Norrebro neighborhood. We were carrying our packs, so we didn't have the patience to wander looking for a nice place very long.  Coincidentally, the first place we found with free Wi-Fi was another location of Laundromat, the cafe we ate at in Reykjavik. We've been in the habit of buying bread and spreading peanut butter or good old Bright Morning chocolate spread on it, plus cheap fruits and greens from the ubiquitous Middle Eastern mini-grocers, so we haven't had to buy much restaurant food. When we buy coffee, it's usually an excuse to use the cafe's Wi-Fi.

We walked a long way into town, and got our train reservations to Berlin. Not far from the station, we bought vegan cinnamon rolls and chocolate-coconut rum balls. I was deliriously happy.


On Sofie's recommendation, we took a "harbor bus" toward the docks where we would bed for the night. The harbor buses are boats that run as part of Copenhagen's public transportation network. A lot of the buildings on the riverside were hard to identify as housing, commercial, factories, or otherwise.



By the time we got to the docks, it was sundown.  Martin was going to meet us after work.  We moved our bags on board and hung out, waiting for him.  It was a very small boat.



There's a padded bench, about the width and length of a couch, and a sort of triangular bedding area in the bow.  The area euphemistically described as a "kitchen" consisted of a tiny sink and single-burner camp stove separated by a narrow space from the bench.  There is no toilet.  In other words, it's much more compact than our van.  Yet Martin recently moved into it, and is taking on CouchSurfers.

After sitting in the boat for a while, maybe an hour, Jenna and I decided to leave Martin a note and go get some food downtown.  We grabbed some cheap falafel, and decided to give him a call, to see what was going on.  I guess we'd misunderstood him about meeting us at the dock, because he was at a friend's house, back in Norrebro.  We headed over there to hang out.   

Martin met us at the trolley stop.  "We're watching Braveheart," he explained.  "Actually, we are drinking schnappes.  Like, we drink when certain things happen in the movie.  Do you know this kind of thing?"

"Yeah," said Jenna, "Like a drinking game."

"What are the rules?" I asked.

"We drink a shot every time there's treachery, every time there's a kiss, and whenever the theme music plays," Martin said.

"I feel like that would be a lot of shots," I said, wondering how our host was managing to stand.

"I think we've drank about 20 so far," he replied.

We arrived at Martin's friend Kasper's house.  Kasper is a bearded, intense, slightly feral-looking hippie guy.  

Terrible picture, but here he is

He welcomed us in and introduced us to his friend Peter, and gave us a tour of the house.  This tour featured an examination of the inside of his armoire, which was wallpapered with photographs of his wife urinating on beaches and sidewalks.  "I take these because I am, how to say, pervert," he said, by way of explanation.  

"When Kasper and I lived together, these used to be above my bed," said Martin.

The apartment was a very cool place to be.  Kasper and his wife's collection of furniture was amazing.  One wall of the living room was entirely covered by a huge color photograph of a forest.  The schnappes being consumed, it turned out, were a variety of homemade concoctions being served out of cut-glass decanters - mostly empty, by this point in the evening.  There were chestnut, pine, elderflower, nectarine, apple, and chili schnappes.  Jenna tells me they were delicious.  Mercifully for her, there was only about half an hour left in Braveheart, so she only had to take five or six shots.

Martin with Jenna

We stayed there for a while after the movie, but Jenna and I were feeling a little tired and hadn't planned to be out very late.  When the group got up to go to another party, we told them we were going to split.  Martin decided to walk us back to the trolley stop.  On the way, he suddenly asked us if we wanted to cut through the cemetary.  We agreed.  Because the cemetary was closed, we had to hop the high wall, and hoist Martin's bike up and over.  Despite it being nearly midnight in a locked graveyard, it wasn't creepy at all.  We passed Hans Christian Andersen's grave.  Kierkegaard is buried in that cemetary as well, although if we saw his place of interment, we didn't notice.  In one of the aisles, we surpised a cat harassing a hedgehog.  The cat scarpered, but the hedgehog rolled up into a ball and stayed there.  I used to have hedgehogs as pets when I lived in Oregon as a kid, but I've never seen one in the open.  He was pretty cute.  Martin seemed unfazed.

Martin elected not to go to the party with Kasper and Peter, and instead rode his bike back to the boat while we took the bus.  He was already asleep in the triangular bed when we arrived.  The gentle rocking of the bay, and the sound of the powerful Copenhagen wind whistling through the rigging of the boats put us gently to sleep.

Jenna writing now.  We woke up painfully early on Martin's boat and packed up our things in whispers. We were tired, but were quickly rewarded with the crisp air of the morning and the scene of the sun rising over the harbor as we stepped onto the dock. We made our way to Copenhagen's main train station and got on a train to Hamberg, which was uneventful. There we changed trains, and arrived in Berlin shortly before five.

We had made plans to stay with Ellie Rea, an old friend of Aram's from Edinburgh who now lives in Berlin. On the metro ride to Kreuzberg, which is the area of the city where she lives, both of us were gazing with excitement out the train windows at the city we were passing through. The architecture was interesting and there was lots of inventive and colorful graffiti scattered around.


Berlin is different from the other cities we've visited in a few ways. Kreuzberg is very young and vibrant, full of people our age walking around. Secondhand shops, eco-friendly and organic food shops, cheap vietnamese restaurants, cozy bars and coffeeshops, and corner bodegas are plentiful. It immediately struck me as more a city like me than Copenhagen. I could feel why someone my age would want to live there, and immediately understood why several girls from my graduating class at Bard have moved here permanently. In comparison to Copenhagen, food is also amazingly cheap. Additionally, I had a large beer (not a bad beer, a very decent beer) for the exciting price of 60 euro cents, which equals about 80 cents USD.

Some Kreuzberg graffiti

Ellie works at a neuroscience lab. She is softspoken, sweet, and intelligent, and she was a wonderful host. On Sunday we spent the day together along with her roommate Alex and her friend Cheryl. We took the train to Teufelsberg.

Teufelsberg is German for "Devil's Mountain." It is a large fenced-off hill in what used to be West Berlin. The hill is mainly constructed of the rubble of World War II-era bombed houses. It is in the Grunewald Forest.

Eerily, what lies beneath Teufelsberg is the remnants of a Nazi training facility. Unable to adequately destroy the facility, the Allies covered it over with crap instead.

During the Cold War, an intelligence station was built and used on top of the hill by the Brits and Americans. Once the Cold War ended it was abandoned and, despite failed attempts to purchase and develop it over the years, it has remained so ever since. I think the government owns it now.



Technically, entering Teufelsberg is trespassing, but nobody seems too concerned. I'm not sure I fully understand the legal status of entering. We walked around the perimeter of the hill next to the fence, which was quite high and even barbed in places, untilwe found one of the spots where a previous explorer had cut a hole. We shimmied through, and then made our way down a steep hill in the woods until we reached a concrete path. Once inside, we saw tons of other people of all ages. On our way out, we exited through a much more "official"- looking entrance. The particular weekend we were there was unique in that Teufelsberg was open to legitimate and free visits by the public, as part of a Berlin Heritage weekend. At this official entrance, visitors were being made to sign a waiver releasing the owners of the property from any liability, should any injury occur to the eager explorer.

A lot of the floors on the remaining major surveillance buildings are missing their outer walls, so I suppose this was a reasonable precaution.

Two sides...

...of the same coin

This idea of opening abandoned spaces for exploration with the caveat of requiring a release of this kind appeals to me. There are so many interesting possible sites of urban exploration in the United States; at all of them, you'd be harassed by police if you were caught inside. If you're willing to take responsibility for your own safety, then why not? On the other hand part of the excitement of urban exploration is feeling like you've discovered a new secret place (though of course this is almost never the case). At Teufelsberg, it was the busiest weekend of the year to visit because people who usually charge for tours were giving them for free. Because of this, it felt a little like your typical tourist destination, which was kind of weird. I'm stilll uncertain as to who these people were. They all wore orange eople were. Most wore orange vests to identify themselves, but they didn't look like government officials: they were tattooed, dreadlocked, and carrying cans of spray paint. Are they affiliated with whoever currently owns the land? Are their tours normally sanctioned by the government, or only on this particular weekend? Are they an established group who have taken it upon themselves to profit from this site? We saw some tents and vans- do people live in Teufelsberg?



The other thing which confused me were occasional signs on certain areas of buildings forbidding one to enter. I thought entering the site itself was verboten; who was making the rules about what areas you could or could not explore once inside?

The major surveillance building we entered had been turned into a kind of art gallery. Graffiti art of small and enormous scale covered the walls, and some pieces were even actively in progress. Artists were working as we wandered through the building, which was huge and took over an hour to explore.




On one of the higher floors of the tower, we sat and watched the very end of a performance of "No Exit" by a German theater group.


At the very top of the tower was a large geodesic dome which I presume was the listening post part of the surveillance tower when it was in use. The echoes in there were incredibly loud and clear, and everyone was experimenting with clapping their hands and making noises. Then the theater group came in and performed an eerie, beautiful song in harmony. Everyone fell quiet for them.

We had a picnic on the grass, and then headed home. Ellie had to babysit, but Alex, Cheryl, Aram and I sat in a park in Kreuzberg for awhile, drinking beers and soda. We wandered around for awhile and got dinner together.


When we got back to the apartment, Alex made us a cup of tea. This solidified our sneaking suspicion of the whole day that he was, in fact, a fantastic dude. We ended our first real day in Berlin utterly satisfied.

The next day, we had intended to go to the Bröhan Museum, a collection of Art Nouveau, Deco, and Functionalist applied arts, painting, and sculpture. We hadn't read the hours carefully enough, however, and when we got there we realized it was closed on Mondays. With the help of a very friendly coffee shop waiter, we figured out how to used the public transport system to make it to the Botanical Gardens instead.





The Berlin Botanical Gardens includes a large and impressive complex of greenhouses. We wandered around outside as well, but most of our time was spent in this complex, simply because there were so many interesting things to see. Also, Aram has a thing for greenhouses.






In the afternoon, we met up with Ellie to take a swim at a large outdoor public pool. The day had been unusually warm and sticky, and it felt nice to swim. As we parted ways afterwards, Ellie pointed us in the direction of Yellow Sunshine, a restaurant serving vegan fast food. Here we were introduced to the vegan version of the famous and mysterious German-Turkish hybrid, the currywurst. As it turns out, currywurst is pretty much a regular wurst, with ketchup, except the ketchup has curry powder mixed in. Not as exciting as we'd hoped, but it was still good, and I can see them satisfying a certain craving at 2am.

The next day, we did manage to get to the Bröhan Museum. It wasn't very big, but it held a lot of fantastic glassware, furniture, and tea service sets. Photos weren't allowed, but we saw lots of people with cameras hanging obviously around their nexcks, and some were even taking pictures, so we followed suit until we were yelled at. 

They should've just stopped making couches after this one

That evening, Ellie was kind enough to cook for us, and we had a great time eating dinner and talking with her and her boyfriend Florian. We got on the subject of the Amish and consequently Pennsylvania Dutch, which was interesting to hear a German's perspective on.

Our final day in Berlin was spent wandering around the Zoological Park, seeing the Victory Monument, and running various errands. 


I got a haircut, which I've been meaning to do for a while. It was interesting to try to have a conversation about what I wanted  with the German girl who did it, as I speak basically no helpful German. While her English was much better than my miserable German, communications were basically reduced to waving motions around my head. 

We bought groceries and cooked a thank-you dinner for Ellie and Alex that night. Alex made delicious vegan banana bread. We really couldn't have asked for better hosts.

Of all the cities we've been to so far, Berlin seemed like the only one either of us could imagine spending any extended period of time in. It felt less like a tourist city, like Amsterdam, and more like a city that you could just ahng out in. Kreuzberg was very hip, and you could see how it might draw comparisons to Williamsberg. It's very young, urban, fashionable. There's cool graffiti everywhere. Every bar, every bookstore, every cafe is a place you want to be. Because of this you can imagine it being compared to Williamsburg, but it doesn't have its head so far up its own ass, so to speak. Of course our opinion on its suitability to foreigners might have been heavily influened by the fact that we were staying in an apartment with three of them-- Ellie is from Edinburgh, Alex is from Yorkshire, and their third roommate Amy is from Ireland.We felt very comfortable in Berlin.

Henrike carved our names into a pumpkin the day we arrived.  Two weeks later, this is what it looked like.

I'm writing this in a smoky basement bar in Ungdomshuset, waiting for a punk show to start. "Holiday in Cambodia" just made its third run on the PA, followed quickly by the second round of "But After the Gig," probably Discharge's worst song, pre-1985. Jenna went out to a bar with our hosts, Sofie and Rikke, and their friends - we all came here for cheap eats, but they prefer reggae to crust punk. As always when I attend a show alone, I feel bored and self-conscious, although I'm told that this reads as tough and aloof to strangers. I don't feel tough. Being a non-drinker and a non-smoker, I don't have an activity with which to passively occupy myself and consequently my aloneness seems more conspicuous. I've already exhausted the ruse of rifling through the records at the merch table. I think I like shows better in theory than practice.

Ungdomshuset is inspiring, my social awkwardness aside. You may remember a minor news story a few years ago regarding enormous youth riots in Copenhagen, stemming from the forcible eviction of a "youth center." Police cars were torched, Molotov cocktails were thrown, and protestors were arrested by the droves. The youth center was Ungdomshuset (literally, "Youth House"), a building squatted for decades before the government determined that the space would be more beneficial as a parking lot. I'm in the new Ungdomshuset; the old one, despite the riots, is now a parking lot. Everyone seems to regard this space as a neutered replica. It may even be legal now, I'm not sure. Still, I just ate a bowl of vegan chili and a cup of coffee for the equivalent of $3.50, less than it costs to ride the bus, cooked in a communal, volunteer kitchen. In addition to community dinners, the house is a venue for workshops and radical political action.




Why can't the US support this kind of autonomous alternative youth community? It seems like the violence, authoritarian repression, and individualistic egoism that destroy cooperative ventures in America must be pervasive to our culture and way of life.

It was sad to leave our farm in the Netherlands, although as a memento, I got to keep the deep, seemingly indelible stain I developed on my hands from twisting the beet greens off of the roots. More materially, we also took a few pounds of striped and colored beets and a bouquet of exotic carrots to our hosts in Denmark.

The upside to leaving Henrike's farm is a definite improvement in my physical health. There is, as I mentioned previously, a great deal of life on the farm, both vegetable and animal. I am, unfortunately, asthmatic and severely allergic. Although it used to send me to the hospital every few months as a kid, my asthma isn't all that noticeable under ordinary circumstances, but working on the farm, with its myriad pollens, dusts, and danders, exacerbated my immune oversensitivities. I was sniffling constantly, despite daily doses of decongestants and anti-histamines, and I was so frequently asthmatic that I needed to start taking an inhaled steroid, which I haven't needed to do for several years. I'm just glad I had the foresight to bring it from the U.S.

Unfortunately, my daily medication didn't keep my asthma completely under control, and I was using my "rescue medication," an inhaled medication that acts quickly to open the airways during an asthmatic attack, multiple times a day. Consequently, I started running low on it. That's bad news, of course, because Jenna and I would be leaving the farm soon - too soon to have my mom send me another inhaler - and wouldn't be in any one place more than a few days until our farm in France. I decided to schedule an appointment with a doctor in the Netherlands. I didn't know if my crappy budget insurance would cover it or not, but I would rather eat the cost of a consultation and prescription than run out of medicine. On Tuesday, our last day in the Netherlands, I biked to Ens and had a brisk, businesslike consultation with a doctor, and ten minutes later, left with a fresh inhaler. It cost about $30 for everything; they didn't ask for my insurance information, and I didn't volunteer it. They probably wouldn't have covered an international prescription anyway. Perhaps because healthcare is a public business in the Netherlands, the doctor didn't do an unnecessary evaluation to determine if I was really asthmatic, which an American doctor would have almost definitely performed. Instead, he sensibly considered my mostly empty inhaler as sufficient evidence that I could be safely given a fresh one.

Henrike sent us off with an early dinner of waffles (she even made a batch of vegan waffles) with strawberry mush and creme fraiche, for those inclined that way. We took an overnight train to Copenhagen, which was uneventful.





We arrived in the morning on Wednesday. Our first requirement was coffee, which we satisfied at a sort of generic-looking shop across the street from the train station. Here, we were introduced to the $4.00 cup of coffee, followed shortly by the $8.00 bus ride (for two of us, but the point stands), and the $6.00 loaf of bread. Perversely, beer is as cheap or cheaper than in the US.

I've identified two ways in which the United States beats the pants out of any European nation I've thus far encountered. The first is in the attentiveness of our restaurant staff. There's no two ways about it: the service sucks here. There's no division of labor: the person who greets and seats you will also serve you, clear your plates, and probably fix your americano. Wednesday night was my five-year anniversary with Jenna. We went out to a really fancy vegan restaurant, Firefly Garden. The nouveau-cuisine dishes were of the type that cooks hope food critics will describe with adjectives like "playful" and "deconstructed." There were reductions Jackson-Pollacked around everything, edible flowers, all the food stacked up in little piles in the center of the plate, polished river stones as decorative garnish, etc.


As nice as the place was, our waiter forgot to bring water (we ordered it; it almost invariably costs extra, we've learned), left dishes on the table long after we were done, and had to be signaled to bring a check. He was a perfectly nice guy, it's just that the overall benchmark is low.

The second, more important, advantage that America enjoys over Europe is its cheapness. Everything is more expensive here, more or less depending on where you are. The indulgence of a vegan doughnut or an extra appetizer is a matter of $3.00 in Philly. Either could set you back $8.00 here. Will I ever stop being amazed at how expensive things are in Europe? Probably not.

As a correlary to this point, I think Europe's reputation for culinary supremacy is overstated, or rather, is completely irrelevant to me. As a poor vegan, I couldn't care less about Michelin Starred French cuisine. The food available to me at my price range is on par with American food in quality, but more expensive.

We decided to split our CouchSurfing time between two hosts. We had contacted a couple who were unable to host us themselves, but went out of their way to ask their friends if they could host us. They put us in touch with Sofie and Rikke, who were really nice folks and great hosts. Jenna and I decided to stay with them two nights, and then stay the third night on the boat with a dude named Martin. We, unfortunately, couldn't stay in the housing co-op, having already committed ourselves for all three nights.

After coffee, we walked to the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek. Originally a private collection of Carl Jacobsen, the heir to the Carlsberg Beer fortune, it houses a massive collection of ancient and classical Mediterranean statues and artifacts, along with a collection of 19th-century art. In 1882, Jacobsen opened his home to the public, but in 1888, he donated his collection to the state, on the condition that a suitable building would be erected. The museum is exquisite, prominently featuring a winter garden, enclosed in a vast glass dome. The workmanship displayed in the marble floors, stained glass windows, and carved wainscotting is probably unavailable at any price today.








Due to its proximity to Tivoli Gardens' roller coasters (how expensive must that tourist trap be! They're spendy in the US; one shudders to think what a park concessions corn dog costs in Denmark), the Glyptotek has the quirk of having the sound of screaming people echo the halls.

Kneeling Barbarian, Rome c. 20 BC

Melpomene, Monte Calvo 2nd Cent. CE

Cuirass Bust of Caligula, Rome 37-41  CE

King Amenemhat, Egypt c. 1800 BCE

The 19th-century art was biased towards sculptures, including a really large collection of Rodins, but there were also a few galleries of French and Danish paintings.

Toilette After the Bath, Degas

Reclining Tahitian Women, Gauguin

Ophelia, Agathon van Weydevelt Léonard

Resting Model, Constantin Hansen

View of Mont Blanc, Signac

Bronze study, Degas

Perseus Slaying Medusa, Laurent-Honoré Marqueste

Young Girl Braiding Her Hair, Berthe Morisot

Danaid, Rodin

We saw Christiania on Thursday (today, the 6th, as I write this). Christiania is one of the main reasons I wanted to get to Copenhagen, even though it's a detour far north of the rest of our European travel. It was a fascinating experience. Christiania was formerly a naval base, which, having laid vacant for some years, was occupied in 1971 by counter-cultural types and declared an autonomous zone. It's been continuously squatted since, and many new buildings have been built by residents. Its history is marked by conflict, both internal and with the municipal government. Christiania has a booming and very visible soft drug economy, in direct contravention of Danish law, which has been tolerated to greater and lesser extents by different local governments. Hard drugs were, for a time, a major problem for the community; additionally, Christiania residents were, for a while, in a state of war with a biker gang who sought to take over the drug distribution in the area. Drug conflicts have led to several murders since Christiania's inception. In short, Christiania has its problems. On the other hand, the residents have responded very effectively to these problems, fixing them without recourse to outside authorities. Now, it's a safe, even touristy, attraction. It was quite busy.






Christiania is a mixture of the stone barracks which were there when it was first occupied, and the houses and shops erected by subsequent residents. There are art galleries, bakeries, restaurants, grocery stores, vegetable stands, an indoor skate park, a hardware store, and a bike factory. All the buildings are cheerfully graffitied. The main street is Pusher Street, so named because it's the center of the "Green Light District," the drug marketplace. Several years ago, the government asked Christiania to make the drug trade "less visible." The dealers responded by covering their kiosks in camouflage netting. There are no photos allowed in the drug-dealing zone. Outside of this area, Christiania is mostly residences, customized in unique and whimsical ways. Happy, oblivious dogs run free. The atmosphere in Christiania is very different from the rest of Copenhagen: it seems to strive for a happy, sun-dappled hippie vibe, akin to a fine summer day in Vermont, but it falls short of this pleasant serenity. Behind the bold, primary-colored houses and dreadlocks and overalls, there's a hard edge of distrust and a willingness to fight. The day-to-day living of the residents is more interesting to me than the cafes and market stalls. I have a lot of questions. For instance, what kind of people choose this life? Do most community members work inside Christiania? Is Christiania's internal currency actually prevalent among the people who live there, or do they prefer the kroner? Are food and other goods free to residents? If not, is it really a commune?

I thought a lot about The Dispossessed when walking through Christiania. In that novel, LeGuin imagines a post-revolutionary society, where anarchism is orthodoxy. The story takes place seven generations after a group of settlers breaks away from their capitalistic home planet to form an agrarian libertarian-Communist society on a satellite moon. The various mechanisms of communal labor and resource-division have been reified in the fictional society.

Christiania is possibly Western society's longest-lasting example of an autonomous collective. It, too, has something of the inertia of orthodoxy behind it. What struck me was how normal everything seemed: the people of Copenhagen simply accepted that, within their city, there was a secessionist anarchist commune, and it's the place to go to buy hash and loiter. It did not seem revolutionary, or even different in any substantial way from the shops and houses around it.

Because of its status as a tourist destination, Christiania's anti-capitalism is muddied. It's true that there are no private vehicles or houses in Christiania, but so much of the economy is based on selling things - mostly drugs, really - to outsiders for profit. Even if that profit is reinvested into the community as a whole, it reflects the interdependence of Christiania on the capitalist economy outside its gates. I wonder to what extent the legalization of marijuana in Denmark would disrupt Christiania's economy.

Recently, the government has been trying to leverage Christiania residents into buying (at a very low price) the land that they've been inhabiting since 1971. Additionally, plans are in the works to build privately-owned condominiums in the area. These are bad signs for the integrity of Christiania's future. Still, it's also important to recognize that the government's desperation to introduce private enterprise and ownership into Christiania is a symbol of the commune's success. If it didn't represent dangerous ideas, the powers that be wouldn't be so eager to destroy them.

The show is over now. Being a wallflower paid off in one way: I somehow avoided being asked to pay. Three bands played; I enjoyed each of them to a degree. The second band - I think they were called Instincto - played melodic d-beat, with characteristic dramatic Tragedy-style chord progressions and goofy "epic" lead breaks. I was all, "Oh, what's up? Is it 2006 again?" And 2006 was all, "Yeah, it is. We're having a great time over here." Played out as that style is, I found myself grinning and bobbing my head like an idiot. They were from Barcelona, which makes sense, because both Ekkaia and Ictus, the bands I consider paradigmatic of melodicrust as a genre, also hail from Spain. The final band was local, kind of a UK '82 outfit, and got the crowd all stirred up. The circle pit got pretty violent, but everyone seemed to be going out of their way to take care of me - something people do frequently (but unnecessarily) when I'm the smallest guy in the pit.

After the show, I met up with Jenna, Sofie, and company at the bar. It was fun. Sofie's friend Katrine, who's a bartender there, insisted on getting me a soda. Everyone was pretty drunk. I talked politics with this really nice skinhead guy, Matt, for a while before heading home. His friend Peter was comically drunk - at the stage of mental devastation in which the will to speak is active, but the physical mechanisms of communication are just out of reach. He broke a glass, lost his hat, and spilled beer across his crotch within minutes of my arrival at the bar.


Copenhagen is a windy, serious city. A Gothic, stentorian atmosphere rules the dark Scandinavian streets and minimalist buildings in this city, where Kierkegaard appropriately rests his bones. It also brings to mind another famous Dane, Hamlet. Copenhagen seems exhausted, cynical about its own prospects, vaguely in decline. Because it is our second urban stop on the Continent, Copenhagen invites comparison to the first, Amsterdam. While Amsterdam flaunts its beauty and narcissistically courts the tourist trade, Copenhagen goes about its business, playing its cards closer to the chest. The less buttoned-up parts of Copenhagen don't quite match Amsterdam for revelry; Christiania is full of sensual pleasures, like the Red Light District, but could hardly be described as "carefree." Both cities are characterized by extreme affluence, but while Amsterdam's moneyed elite live ostentatiously in 16th-century canal houses, Copenhagen's wealthy remove themselves to distant, blemish-free cubes of modernism. Copenhagen lacks Amsterdam's gloss, but is perhaps more profound; I wouldn't say I liked Copenhagen better.