Copenhagen 1

(Lamb - Gorecki)

Copenhagen 1

Arrival, bicycles and bureaucratic mischief. 

Just 2 days ago, on a beautiful Sunday afternoon I said goodbye to my beloved Nijmegen. It was the cradle of my mind and responsible for who I am now. I thank you my beautiful city, until we meet again.

Yet, a little bit over 24 hours ago I arrived at CPH airport. Incidentally that means that I have survived the flight, I wasn't arrested or incarcerated in any way, and that even though I asked both the police, the customs and the airline there is apparently no trouble in having swords in your luggage. To my surprise it wasn't overweight either. 'Babette' as we named our toddler-wrapped-in-plastic luggage, seemed to have weighed only 19 kilograms at her time of death. And this ironically included the kilogram of very very squished marsepin in the bag. A picture of Babette and my hand luggage leaving home:

After arrival at my address (Gravervaenget in Copenhagen) I discover that my room is huge, my bed is terrible (work in progress), my razor was forgotten, I didn't have a towel, the kitchen was perfectly in order, my landlady was very stressed and worst of all I have a huge television but I haven't used a television in years. So I now have a second computer screen which luckily also has good speakers on it. So I'll be just fine. 

One of the first things any Dutchman would do is of course get a bike. And this is harder then it seems. First of all there is no such thing as a 'brakkie' in Copenhagen. Everybody seems to have super slick 'citybikes' which are in fact racing bikes. Everybody seems to have mega expensive bicycles. And nobody uses it to drive fast. So I decided to buy a cheap but qualitatively high bicycle, which incidentally has really fat tires. Yet I still overtake race-bicycles all the time :S

Then when picking up my international card I heard I had to go do some bureaucratic stuff. Which was no problem. The building wasn't all to hard to find, yet their opening times are, well, special. It seems that they have taken every possible interval between 9 and 17 hours of the day to be open for 3 hours and then mix these randomly over the days in the week... What the fuck Denmark? 

All in all, after purchasing all the stuff I had forgotten, a bike, a lock etc. I am already down almost 3000 kroner, which is about 400 Euro's. Luckily I only need to spend that once... Time to save so cash, this is getting

exhausting.