My personal blogging continues its trend towards infrequency with this number, covering some random thoughts about readjustment to yet another new European country.
* The Special: As I've mentioned earlier, Copenhagen is significantly if not staggeringly expensive, especially when it comes to going out. Draft pints hover around EUR 5-7, and mid-range restaurants open the account with mains for around EUR 30. Interestingly, one rarely sees people eating off the central part of the menu, and even some of the better restaurants in town offer prix-fixe meals to the exclusion of alternatives. But the one thing that keeps most people here in the restaurant game is...The Special. The Special takes a number of forms. It can be a set of three open faced sandwiches for lunch, chosen from a short list (plaice and salt beef items being my faves). It can be a buffet, which, despite the quantity involved, is generally the cheapest menu choice, and often less than EUR 15. But most of the time, it's either a permanent fixture with garnishes or an item of the day, generally 40% off the comparable menu price. Mercifully, relatively few specials involve pork, reflecting Denmark's reluctant rush towards multiculturalism.
* The Neighbourhood: I purposely selected my neighbourhood, Orestad, because of both a relative sterility and a very high quality of ultramodern housing, shopping and public transport. To be sure, some facets of Danish life invaded, like being called out by the owner's association (aka the Garbage police) for misaligning the detritus of my apartment move into the seemingly tolerated piles of similar trash in the apartments well-policed trash area. But, aside from having a convenience market open from 8-20:00 on my ground floor (and interesting, convenience stores here can be cheaper than full supermarkets), my neighborhood looks more like the set of Blade Runner than a "cozy" Copenhagen hood. Food and drink are limited to the nearby mall, though the driverless metro that's 500 m away takes only 14 minutes to get to the Magic Kingdom of Hans Christian Andersen and his agnostic antecedents. It's all very nice. In Brussels, it was all about finding great pubs and drinking great beers and eating great food all the time. Here, the food is actually pretty good and the beer has its moments (though overpowering Danish stouts may actually be a creative rebottling of my employer's North Sea Crude), but going out every day is out of the question. So, the neighborhood is working, so far.
* The Girlfriend: Still accepting applicants. Must live in Copenhagen or Southern Sweden, the latter being a 30-70 minute train ride from a station leaving right near my house. Women here are beautiful--and the middle 50% is particularly strong. Cautious optimism remains in place.
* The Travel: One of the less-well known facts about Copenhagen is that it is not easy to get to Europe by rail, as it lays on an island in an archipelago strewn between the North Sea and the Baltic. For sure, CPH has a deluxe airport which is a mere 10 minutes from my house on the same train that goes to South Sweden. But the days of daytripping to 4 different countries in a month are over. Instead, Berlin looms large as a release valve, reached easily by short, cheap easyJet flights or relatively competent German trains (at 8 hours, about the edge of daytime trainability). The more time I spend in Berlin, the more I love the place, and I was there recently giving workshops at the excellent Quadriga University Internal Communication conference, which plunked me there on the same weekend as the 20th anniversary of German Reunification. Now, the Reunification anniversary was somewhat more subdued than the Wall demolition festivities, and indeed, was marked by a profusion of German bluegrass groups peopled by 50-something guitarists and banjoists. Germany must be the second largest consumer of banjos aside from those parts of the US that seceded during the Civil War.
Aside from superb Indian (Mumtaz off Kurfurstensrasse) and Turkish (Hasir, on Maassenstrasse 10) dinners, the two biggest highlights of the trip were one of my hotels, the Sorat Ambassador, and a Berlin tour.
Berlin is not an overly photogenic city, but it has some overpowering sights. But it has a thoroughly overpowering history--arguably, the most morally convoluted of any city in the 20th century. As a Berlin tour is far more about making sense of that history than about understanding why the F|rench Protestants still have a church in the East, the guide is crucia, and Olaf Kolbatz may be the best tour guide I've ever encountered.
Kolbatz is as affable as a Berlin guide can be, maintaining an appropriate balance of warmth and humour on the one hand with a sense of the gravity of the material he has to work with. Even pre-20th century Berlin with its imperial ambitions met often with harsh failures (such as an attempt by a Lutheran emperor to transform the oversized Cathedral into a Protestant Vatican of sorts). But Kolbatz was at his best navigating both the post-war east-west division and the impact this division has had on how Easterners and Westerners treated and perceived the historical baggage left by the Nazi era. Kolbatz, who doesn't volunteer his origins and only mentioned his eastern origins upon request at the end of the tour, deftly manages the weight of the stories he was sharing with an appreciation of their historical, local and aesthetic context, with a particularly poignant discussion of the dynamics of the events that ultimately led to the placement of the Book Burning Memorial at Humboldt University in the East in 1994.
As for the Sorat Ambassador: Much emphasis is placed in former East Berlin on "Ostalgie", or for lack of a better term, all things from East Germany which didn't completely suck. Some Eastern brands are actually quite suckable, like Radeberger Pilsner and Kostritzer Schwarzbier, while others like Vita Cola survive on the distinctness rather than the broad appeal of their taste. But very little emphasis is placed on "Westalgie", even though the well-manicured streets and prosperous mid-rises of West Berlin are no less distinctive than the tower blocks and farty 2-cylinder Trabant cars of the east. Enter the Sorat Ambassador. The Sorat is unapologetically retro, and has old school German features like 1970's minibars (alas, closed), clock radios, panelling, beds, and the world famous German shelf toilets. It also has a herculean breakfast including salmon and sparkling wine. And at EUR 50 via Expedia, the value of this place more than makes up for the authenticity of the plumbing.
* The signoff: So that's for now...if you would like me to share more snippets of life in the Great White North, let me know. You can find me at
mikeklein.dk@gmail.com
I am a Europe-based communications professional with two main streams of professional experience–internal and political communication–combining to provide consultancy and solutions that are innovative, hard-hitting and effective.