Photo Montage

I know this blog's pretty much dead now, since my trip ended long ago, but here are two fun videos chronicling the whole thing.  It presents a neat view from two perspectives on the same thing.  You might need to rest your eyes before watching the second.

The end.

Well, that's it.  We spent our last day continuing our Copenhagen sightseeing.  We got a late start, since we didn't really need a big, long day of activity planned, headed to Christianhavn, another island of Copenhagen.  We were quite worried that we weren't able to get food today, but luckily our Aldi was open.  It was interesting to share our cheap sandwich-and-more meal construction strategies with another person, and see how our "simple" way of eating appeared to someone else.  The checkout guy was interesting too, he looked and sounded like a fairly stereotypical New Yorker, and said that Danes learn American style English, thus many have an odd Danish/New York fusion accent when they speak English. 

 

The highlight of our wandering was the Our Savior Church- a huge spiral tower that you can climb for 25 DKK- about $5.  We decided it would be worth it.  Copenhagen is a very flat city, so the tower afforded us a great view.  Our ascent was interesting too, up a number of increasingly narrow indoor stairways, culminating in an elegant, narrowing spiral on the outside of the tower. 

     

After that, we headed to Christiania, the autonomous land of the hippies.  Apparently the government, sick of the hippies dirtying up the parks, put them all in their own little area, a former army base, and let them basically run themselves.  It's a crazy place that feels nothing like the rest of Copenhagen.  It's also extremely heavy on the pot, and even more blatant about it than Amsterdam.  There are marijuana plants growing outside, and all manner of pot products just for sale on the street.  It was really weird.  

We sat by the impressive Copenhagen opera house to enjoy our last European sunset by the river.  Our last European sunset for who knows how long...  We've literally walked hundreds of miles this trip and met hundreds of people!  We've seen a bunch of different currencies and experienced a bunch of languages that we'd never be exposed to at home.

   

Tomorrow we're off to the airport for our flight home.  It's a 9.5 hour flight, departing at 12:20 pm.  We then proceed to fly against time, arriving at Dulles Airport at 3:00 pm.  I have a 6.75 hour layover there, much of which will be passed at Chipotle with Michael before I leave Dulles for Albany at 9:45 pm, arriving at Albany at 11:07 pm.  It's going to be a crazy day.

What's the USA going to be like when I get back?  Will it be different?  Will I feel differently about it?  I've never been out of the country for anything beginning to approach this long.  Will I quickly sink back into my old eating and spending habits?  Time will tell.

As I said, book me early, tickets are going fast!

Denmark redeems itself

OK.  I may have freaked out last night (rightfully so, still) about Copenhagen's prices, but it's got a lot of redeeming features!  Luckily, the most impressive thing we've discovered about this city is its beauty.  Luckily, this is free.  There's a lot of pretty architecture, a lot of pretty art, a lot of pretty parks, and a lot of quiant, colorful neighborhoods.  We had a great time today simply wandering around soaking it all in.  Luckily, we weren't attacked by Vikings.  Perhaps they've gotten over that.  Didn't see any ghosts either.

To combat our newfound poverty (we've discovered that Copenhagen is the third most expensive city in the world) we stopped in the local Aldi (described as "the Goodwill of grocery stores, or maybe more like Marshall's" by Michael) to pick up a loaf of bread, some meat, cheese, jelly, cookies, and condiments to live off of for a day or so.  That helped alleviate our financial woes somewhat.  We've planned on doing this every day, but realized that stores are all closed on Sunday.  We also planned on stocking up on food for Sunday on Saturday, but the stores close early on Saturday and we missed our goal.  We're either going to make ourselves very poor, or very hungry on Sunday.

From there, we commenced a walking tour of the city.  We finally managed to get a good map (for free) from our hostel.  Rather than provide an exhaustive blow-by-blow account of our walk, I'll just attach a bunch of photos of some of the highlights.  To learn more about them, click them and read the titles and/or captions.

     

   

     

   

Since our hostile doesn't have a kitchen, to get a hot meal for dinner each day we've turned to Burger King.  We figure we easily burn off the calories we gorge ourselves there, and thus don't have to worry about the fat.  Cholesterol really shouldn't be a concern at our age, not for four days of bad diet.  We drink a load of water, so the massive sodium shouldn't even be an issue.

Our hostile, in its ridiculousness, closes the common room (despite being "open" 24 hours a day), which prevented me from blogging completely last night.  Thus, we have two days' of bloggery crammed into one.

We also met a new companion at our hostile, a Canadian guy named Rob, who joined us for some of the Copenhagen Pride events we attended today.  Never having been to any such thing before, it was a really interesting time.  A lot of it was conducted in Danish, but as one could expect, the overarching theme was equality, acceptance, and recognizing those individuals who've worked for such things.  Denmark's a very progressive country, and it was interesting to see everyone, gay and straight, interacting like it's no big deal.  This even extended to the parade spectators and the participants at the huge dance held in the town hall square.

 

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark

Shakespeare may have known that something was afoot.  I've figured out what it is: The prices!

Holy ham, it's expensive!  It's literally twice the cost of the USA.  Here's the first example we've found, and probably the best:

In Burger King in the USA, the normal size (small? medium?) Whopper value meal costs about $5.75.  That to me is a fair enough price for a fairly large amount of food.  In Burger King in Copenhagen, the exact same meal is 57 Danish Kronor.  Based on the current exchange rates, that's almost twelve dollars.  TWELVE DOLLARS!.  Fast food is still the cheapest food there is here.  Even a packaged sandwich in a convenience store, which usually runs about $3 (the equivalent thereof) is about $7.  That's absolute bank-breaking madness!

Ordinarily, when faced with prices such as this, we'd head straight to a grocery store and pick up pieces of a meal to assemble ourselves- generally pasta, sauce, meat, bread, and fruit.  Not so this time.  Our hostel, "Sleep in Heaven," has no kitchen.  Not even a refrigerator.  It's really more like "Sleep in cement."  This place is clean and friendly enough, but the building was clearly something industrial.  Our room has hugely high ceilings, block walls painted white, and a concrete floor painted gray.  The bunks appear to be military surplus beds, stacked on top of each other and bolted together, with a piece of plywood affixed to the collective headboard to add some stability.  An aluminum ladder bolted to one end completes the ensemble.

We're most likely going to be wandering around Copenhagen, and paying for as little as possible.  It seems to be a wonderful city, and I'm sure it would be if I had $7,000 to spend just here.  Sadly, we're back to our lifestyle of incessant counting- counting the most calories to be purchased for the fewest pennies.  

This final, Scandanavian leg of our trip will certainly help us enjoy the comparatively moderate prices of the USA more once we're back!

Sweden: Still no Meatballs

We didn't try so hard to look for meatballs today, so maybe it's not Sweden's fault.  

Today, we gave up on Marc's camera (and iPod and bag...) as gone for good.  Alas, but such things happen.  There are, unfortunately, people who won't leave things that don't belong to them alone.  This sort of shaped a good portion of our day.  Marc and one of the hostel staff consulted fairly early on a plan of attack, which culminated in Marc's heading to the police station to file a police report (later to be submitted as part of an insurance claim).  Michael and I headed quickly to a grocery store, picked up some breakfast, and then set out to spend some time exploring.

 

We didn't stray too far from the hostel, or from the main sections of Stockholm, since we had no idea when Marc would wrap up with the police and rejoin us.  We wandered through the city, stopping here and there as it pleased us.  We eventually wound up in a giant, Macy's-esque department store called NK.  Marc eventually wound up meeting us here, regaling us with his story while Michael and I sat on massage chairs.

Our walk continued after our threesome regrouped, to another store where we found dinner for ourselves.  We carted this for a good few hours across the city until finally arriving near one of Stockholm's amusement parks (speaking of expensive- you pay an admission fee to the park, and then you STILL have to pay for the rides!) on the water, where we sat and ate.

A leisurely loop through a park completed our day.  Tomorrow we're heading off to Copenhagen, the last city of our two-month excursion.  By this time next week, I and my newly-callused feet will be residing in the Capital Region again.  Make your plans with me now, while I'm still free!

   

Sweden: devoid of hilarious chefs, meatballs, and candy fish

Sweden may lack important things America has come to expect from it, such as the Swedish Chef (of Muppet Show fame), Swedish Meatballs (I swear we'll find some eventually), and Swedish Fish (the... interesting... red gummy candy), but what it lacks in stereotypes, it makes up for in character.  

Stockholm can trace its roots as a city to the 13th century, but there's not a lot of that still evident.  Aside from one island that was preserved in old(er) style, much of the city was modernized in the second half of the 20th century, a task that was accomplished by knocking a lot of stuff down and rebuilding.  Thus, we see an interesting mix of architecture, from classical buildings here and there, to the boring people-boxes of the 1960s, to ultramodern office buildings that seem to be made entirely of glass and stainless steel.

In addition to all that, Stockholm is a very cool city.  It's another quiet, progressive Scandanavian with a high standard of living and an even higher cost of living.  We didn't do much on our first day in the city, since we were all exhausted from the sheer effort of waking up at 5:30 AM to catch our flight out of Berlin.  We arrived at the hostel, napped, then went to [pay outrageous prices in order to] get dinner from the grocery store.  Luckily the hostel has a nice kitchen, so we made ourselves our usual pasta meal and relazxed some more.  After dinner, Marc and I took a walk around the city to see what we could see.  We stayed out past midnight, and there was still light in the sky even after 11:00 PM!  We certainly are mighty far North here.  Imagine how long the days must've been even a month ago, right around the time of the Summer Solstice!

 

 

Today we woke up to some issues.  Marc had accidentally left his daybag (complete with expensive camera and iPod) in the kitchen after we returned from our walk.  Sadly, it was gone.  After enquiring with the hostel staff if anybody had seen it, he began to assume the worst.  STA, the travel company with whom we purchased insurance, has a location in Stockholm, so Marc went to visit them to explore his options for replacement/reimbursement.  That took quite a chunk of time, but all hope is not yet lost.  Hopefully his things will turn up, but we're not expecting it.  Luckily, Michael has a spare point-and-shoot camera that Marc could use if he so desires, so perhaps he'll still be able to capture some memories of our last two cities on... silicon.

   

   

After that got as sorted as we could get it for the time being, we headed out to do our usual first full day wander-around-and-look-at-the-cool-sights excursion.  We wandered all throughout the main section of the city, seeing what there was to see for a good six hours or so (we walk a LOT- for example, we walk at a conservative average of 2 miles/hour, thus covered 12 miles today, on what was a shorter-than-usual day!).  Part of this excursion was centered around finding somewhere that featured Swedish meatballs on the menu, but the complete lack of such places is what gave rise to our eventual conclusion that Swedish meatballs are not, in fact, Swedish, and are, in fact, a clever ruse designed to elevate my hopes of national cuisine into the stratusphere, then dash them on one of Sweden's many rocky cliffs.  Maybe we'll manage to come across some when I'm less starving.  Maybe I should just search online for "Where to eat Swedish meatballs in Stockholm."

 

Well, tomorrow's another day!

Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!

Berlin's a great city.  As I said, it's extremely modern, but still dripping with history.  The past few days have seemed to include great swatches of the Berlin Wall and hopping between the former East and West Berlins.

Yesterday, we had lunch at a great Vietnamese restaurant called Monsieur Vuong and set out for the East Side Gallery, the largest remaining slice of the Berlin Wall.  Artists were allowed to paint it as Communism was crumbling in 1990 (before, it could only be painted on the West, as the East side was too repressive).  It's been maintained pretty well, and features a lot of cool art.

   

From there, we headed on to Checkpoint Charlie, the famed point of entry from the American zone, which later famously served as the main route between East and West Berlin.  We headed back to the hostel once it started to rain... of course.

 

Today, at Dana's request, we headed to a big flea market frequented by Berliners.  It was positively PACKED.  There were all sorts of vendors there, from established food stands, to food carts, to up and coming clothing designers, to bicycle repairmen, to record dealers and jewelers and yard sale type junk collectors.  It was a great time to watch locals "in their native habitat."  We spent a few hours there, especially because there's so little to do in Europe on Sundays.

     

   

Next was the Berlin Jewish museum, which chronicles the history of Judaism in Berlin from time immemorial.  It was a neat exhibit to see Judaism as it particularly developed in (what is now) Germany, but a little basic in terms of Judaism itself.  Perhaps this is because I got comfortable with the concepts of Judaism (a) as a Christian and (b) through religion classes in school.  The buildings the museum was in were neat as well.  One was a 18th century Prussian building originally built by the Prussian government, and the second was designed in the late 1990s century and opened in 2001.  Here's a neat view of the aerial contrast between the two at Wikipedia.  I dare you to figure out which is which!

From there we headed back to the Reichstag area for dinner, with the intention of climbing the Reichstag dome for a nice view of Berlin at dusk.  Sadly, dinner ran long and we were about 25 minutes late to get in the line to climb.  Either way, I was able to catch a few nice shots of it and of the nearby Brandenburg Gate in the dark.

   

Tomorrow we're off to our next to last city:  Stockholm, Sweden!  This will be our first airplane trip since we flew from London to Amsterdam all those weeks ago (it feels like an eternity).  It'll be a preview of our final flight from Copenhagen back to the USA.  Everything's packed and ready to go for the most part- tomorrow morning I've simply got to shower, throw some stuff in my bag, and it's off to the airport!  We'll be departing for our two-ish hour flight from Flughafen Berlin-Schönefeld (Berlin-Schönefeld Airport), which was once the primary airport of East Berlin.

Exciting!