Alright I'll start by saying that I have been a stone cold turd this past week. Not only did I start this entry last Monday, but I haven't done a single fucking thing besides do poorly on a Czech quiz at the beginning of the week, wake up after 1 pm every day, and eat my meals in bed while I refresh Faceook and Hypem. Paaathetic. Anyway, considering I got back from Copenhagen a full week ago, this thing needs to see the light of day.
I'll also say that this entry ended up being very long so I've split it up into two parts: Friday and Saturday. The following is Friday.
I'm gonna recap the weekend chronologically, but first allow me to praise those wily Danes.
We all know Copenhagen is clean because of those criteria and blah blah. It's clean; that's good.
What's better is that on every roadway in Copenhagen, there is a small lane designated for bicyclists. That's good because bicyclists (there is a big difference between a person who occasionally rides a bike and a "bicyclist") are douchebags who think that spending $4000 annually on skin-tight outfits and really nice Styrofoam hats entitles them to go 21 MPH in the far right lane, creating what boils down to be a slow-moving double parked car. All the while the fuckers think they don't have to obey traffic lights unless there's a god damn fleet of tanks approaching the intersection at 200 miles per hour and it's a matter of absolute life and death.
Normally, I can't fucking stand bicyclists. But not in Copenhagen. Bicyclists in Copenhagen have a home, and that home is a modest patch of concrete between the cars' home and foots' (pronounced "foot-ziz") home. And even though I made the honest-tourist mistake of bringing my feet into the bicyclists' home unannounced and felt the wrath of their cute little warning bells a few times, not one bone in my body felt compelled to chirp back because I knew I was their equivalent of a slowly moving double-parked car.
Oh, and bicyclists have to obey traffic patterns. Fancy that, you aerodynamic assholes.
Speaking of assholes, I'm pretty sure there weren't any in Copenhagen. Everyone I encountered was super-ass friendly (point in case: I was standing at a metro ticket dispensary and a man walked up to me on his way out of the station and gave me his ticket), AND I could actually converse with them because everyone spoke English.
Including the clerks at 7-11. Yeah, that's right, 7-11. There was one on almost every other corner, and I went into almost every single one I saw. I fucking love 7-11; 3 reasons: Slurpees, microwaveable breakfast sandwiches, and Taquitos. Nuff said (I'll admit that WaWa is superior, but I don't live in a crap ass beach town in the Mid-Atlantic so it's just not practical for me to keep WaWa in my mental rolodex of places to go when I'm stoned).
The only unfavorable thing about Copenhagen was the price level. Much to the benefit of Denmark's economy (I think it's to their benefit, but it's not like I'm an Economics major or anything), the Danes have decided to remain outside the Euro-Zone and continue to use the Danish Krone. About 5.5 Danish Krones is the equivalent of 1 US Dollar; a 24-hour metro pass costs 135 Danish Krones, or $25 (much to my chagrin, the Copenhagen metro system does not operate on the honor system); my shit breakfast buffet on Sunday also cost 135 Danish Krones, or $25. Bottom line, shit was expensive. But I guess that's what happens when you live in a clean place where every friendly citizen speaks English.
So, highlights, chronologically:
We landed at 8:30a Friday and Metro'd to our hotel, where these two chimpy looking guys from Estonia tried to chat us up while we checked in. They meant well, but it was 9:30 in the morning and they were dishin' high fives and foreshadowing a group pregame for Sensation, so we promptly gave them the elevator to stairs fakeout and vowed to avoid them all weekend--a vow we made good on.
Then we got to our room, which was a hands-on lesson in space saving if not the biggest 3-star hotel rip-off in the history of 3-star hotel rip-offs. The good people at the Cabinn Express Copenhagen managed to squeeze FOUR twin beds into a space only slightly larger than a handicapped bathroom stall. The four of us trying to move around our room resembled what I think it would look like if four retarded seals somehow managed to board a submarine. We were bumpin' into each other constantly, knockin' shit over left and right, barking, accidently killing our offspring while trying to maintain alpha dominance, and the like.
Once we dropped our stuff, us four youths decided we wanted to go out and experience a little bit of Copenhagen's culture, so we went to the little known Freetown of Christiania (I'm being facetious; it's very well known).
Simply put, Christiania is an open-air pot market, where, if one were so inclined, one could get high as fuck in public and (probably) not face the long arm of the law. Technically and legally, "The Freetown of Christiania" is currently regarded as a commune regulated by special law. In a nutshell, Christiania is where the good people of Copenhagen have been coming to get high for decades.
A brief history lesson: Christiania was established in 1971. In the late 70s, as happened to many good places in the late 70s, the hippie crowd gave way to the heroin addict crowd, which prompted "the eviction of hard drugs" in 1979. After the eviction, the open-air pot market in Christiania was controversial, but tolerated. Things changed in 2004 when the Dutch fuzz raided; the raid only served to create a fivefold increase in drug traffic everywhere else in Copenhagen, so after 2004, the mysterious forces of government control and market supply and demand served to restore the open-air pot market in Christiania, though it is still not technically legal.
I've gone to the trouble of paraphrasing Wikipedia for you in order to provide some context for the remorselessly sketchy and poisonous air that now fills the Freetown of Christiania.
Having been to Christiania, I am now an ardent opponent of communes that subsist on the buying and selling of marijuana. It's the kinda thing that sounds really great in theory--buncha people just gettin' high and chillin' all day, free love, free Tibet, etc.--but it's the kinda thing that, once executed, is a shitty place full of pot holes where everyone huddles around a trashcan bonfire and tries not to get jumped.
I was pretty preoccupied with this social paradox last weekend, but it did not take me long to realize why Christiania sucks so much:
1. people who sell pot professionally are degenerates; 2. when you invite an entire city's worth of pot-selling degenerates to sell their pot competitively in a single, consolidated area, that area will inevitably become a place abound with hostile degenerates and their hostile, degenerate friends; 3. not only are these people degenerates, but these people are stoned constantly; 4a. because everyone there is stoned constantly, not much beyond staying stoned gets accomplished; 4b. because everyone there is stoned constantly, everyone is also paranoid as FUCK. So, with the aforementioned as my witnesses, I maintain that Christiania sucks.
If you replace all the ornery black crackheads with ornery Scandinavian stoners, this is close to what I felt like in Christiania.
Now the reason I'm so hell bent on characterizing this place as hostile is mostly because of the Friday morning trip I started to recall about 9 paragraphs ago (those of you still reading this absurdly long entry, and those of you who aren't my father, congratulations, this is probably the longest thing you'll read today). I'll pick up where I left off:
We left the hotel and metro'd to the Christianhavn stop. Once we got our above ground bearings, we started off toward Christiania. We were standing at a stoplight talking about 7-11 when a short guy next to us chuckled, mentioned that he was American too, and asked where we all were from. We had the obligatory Americans-in-Europe-together conversation, and he seemed normal enough, so I invited him to join us on our adventure to the Freetown. Well, boys and girls, this right here is why mom and dad tell you not to talk to strangers:
This guy (no idea what his name is, but I'm gonna call him Chris) took his end of the conversation from "I live in Las Vegas" to "Then, when I was 23, I got a DUI and had to move back to California and live with my mom" in less than 4 minutes. Like as soon as we asked him how he liked Las Vegas, he felt compelled to distill all the bad shit that happened to him in the past 7 years and get it off his chest in 100 words or less. Then he made a half-joke about finding us on Facebook, and at this point we knew we were talking to a pretty lonely guy.
Not long after he ended his abridged autobiography, I noticed Chris was no longer in-step with us. So I turned around, and there was our boy, 15 yards back, polishing off a fifth of vodka. "Oh," I said to myself, "this guy's just drunk;" and then I said to myself, "Oh wait, it's 10 am, and he just helped himself to 4 gulps of vodka straight; this guy is a bona fide alcoholic." Then shit escalated.
Even though Chris was startin' the party before noon, we didn't say anything because he hadn't turned into a violent alcoholic yet, and we didn't want to expedite the process. He walked into Christiania with us and tagged along as we approached the first thing we saw and asked for pot; turns out this particular guy didn't sell pot, but he did sell sunglasses, and I was in need of white sunglasses for the next day's festivities (Sensation White; see next entry). So I plucked a pair of heart-shaped shutter shades and tried them on for shiggles. Well Chris got a big shit and giggle out of this, whipped out his iPhone 4 out (actually, he'd been fucking around with his iPhone 4 the entire time--one of those), took a fucking picture of me, and then said something about tagging me on Facebook.
Which is where Chris crossed the line in the sand (I think we've reached an era in which nearly every notable interaction between humans will somehow have something to do with Facebook).
Across this line you DO NOT...
I immediately took the glasses off, barely laughed at his half-joke, and booked it in the other direction. But Chris stuck with. Then shit escalated again.
Never before in my life have I seriously thought I was going to be murdered. Last Friday, that cherry was popped.
After not a long walk in that other direction, we stepped into a vestibule of what looked like a church, sniffed out the scene to make sure we wouldn't be abducted, and then perused the merchandise. After about 15 seconds, Chris broke out the iPhone 4 again and started snapping pictures of the product.
(There is a very strict no photography policy in Christiania. I love to be able to post pictures of all the graffitied signs that said no photography, but...)
The dudes in the vestibule friggity freaked OUT when they saw the iPhone 4.
"NO PICTURE CHRISTIANIA! NO PICTURE IN CHRISTIANIA!"
Chris: "Sorry; sorry; didn't know; didn't know," spoken in that slow, articles-and-grammar removed, I think you're a caveman tone Americans automatically use when they speak to someone who does not speak english, but who they presume will understand them if they remove all the formalities and just blurt out isolated english words.
"YOU DIE IF YOU TAKE PICTURE IN CHRISTIANIA"
I heard these words verbatim.
More sorry's and didn't know's from Chris. The pot-selling dwarf then motioned to his dwarf associates squatting in the candle-lit hallway, and two guys that were almost as wide as they were tall shoved Chris the Alcoholic and snatched his iPhone 4 out of his clutches.
It was at this very moment that I was 75% sure I would not be alive within 10 minutes.
In this corner, weighing in at a combined weight of half a ton, 6 surly Dutch degenerates who live and sell pot in a commune and who have apprehended another man's iPhone; and in this corner, weighing in at 165 pounds and .5 liters, an American booze-hound who has just been stripped of his iPhone 4, which he clearly really likes; and in between them, 3 average guys just tryin' to smoke a little weed.
Much to my surprise and joy, we were not taken into a back room and executed. Instead, I looked on in half-terror half amusement as the Dutch Neanderthal and his fat fingers struggled to delete all the pictures of Christiania off of Chris' iPhone. And we left the vestibule. And Chris took the hint and left us. For all of the man's shortcomings, at least he wasn't a clinger.
We had another extremely sketchy run in with a band of locals but this thing is entirely too long as it is. The rest of Friday wasn't even that blog worthy anyway.
At this rate, I'll probably finish the Saturday entry by mid-December.
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