The beginning of our trip
My trip to Copenhagen, Denmark was all it could be during the three very short days I was there. I went along with my good friend Caroline and we stayed at a hostel located at HC Andersens Boulevard 50, just a short trip from Rådhusplassen (the centrum of Copenhagen). The hostel was cheap, but good. We stayed at the 13th floor with a great view over the city and some river. We also had our own bathroom, which was very important to us when we chose our resort. The toilet had a weird seat though, but it turned out to work fine. I must say I don’t remember too many details, but I think the first thing we did after checking in was to look for a place to eat, we wound up at Apollos Bryggeri (Apollos Brewery) where we got served tapas (Caroline) and thin slices of beef (me). Those thin slices of beef were delicious and they melted on my tongue. The course also included lettuce, lemon and some olives (and olive-oil), there was also a very good olivebread on the side. A very tastefull and light meal. To drink we ordered the restaurants seasonal homebrew which for the occasion was named easter beer, 0,5ltr + 0,25ltr was enough to make us a bit lightheaded with its 7,5% alcohol.
Meeting up with our friend in Copenhagen
We went on roaming around the city looking for exciting shops and our friend Hannah who moved to Copenhagen sometime last year. After a short search and some phonecalls we found her and her apartment in Strøget (a street with shops shops and more shops). She pointed out and excused that her room was looking really messy quite a few times, but it was no worse than my own bedroom is most of the time.
After we met Hannah we roamed a bit some more Hannah took us to an ice-bar called Paradis (ice-cream in danish and norwegian is called “is” so they had this nice little thingy with the word which Hannah was very found of). Me, I’m not too fond of icecream so I ordered a coffee instead. The rumour around the table was that the icecream was indeed very tasting and low on fat. Yay! Then we moved on to Christiania to have the years first beer outside. It was a bit chilly, but with the nice relaxed and festival-like atmosphere of Christiania made it all worth it. About an hour later we moved on. Hannah had to get back to her apartment to record some sort of educational lesson on her eLearning computerthingy and we went back to our hostelroom for a nice warm shower.
We met up with Hannah later at Rådhusplassen and went out to eat at some place called Palace India or something, they had nice and spicey food. I ordered a mix of scampi, chicken, lamb, salmon and some weird sausage. It was a huge plate with lots of food which all tasted very good, except for that sausagething which kind of looked like a mix between a deep-fried penis and crap. We had more beer to this meal. When it was time to leave the restaurant we were so exhausted that we decided to get back to our hostelroom. Hannah had to go home to her apartment to get some sleep before school the next day anyway.
Our one whole day in Denmark
Early the next morning I woke up alone. It was the day of the concert with Sisters of Mercy and Caroline was missing. I looked for her everywhere in the hostelroom, even under the bed and in the small lockers, but she was gone. After I had searched for her for about 5 minutes I found a note which side “Right back”, so I went back to sleep again and woke up again. Still no Caroline, I noticed that her purse was still there and pundered a bit about where she had gone without her purse. She never goes anywhere without her purse. Five minutes after a short shower she came back with breakfast and coffee from a bakery a couple of blocks away. Good coffee, great sandwich and Caroline was back so no more worries.
We figured that we should spend the day eating and drinking, but soon we decided to go shopping. There had to be some exciting alternative stores in Copenhagen. After a ten-second discussion between ourselves we went into the tourist information center. I used their computer to look for stores out of the ordinary and found a couple. Didn’t seem like a long walk on the map so we began walking. It turned out that it was a long walk, at least it took some amount of time. On the way we found a small pub with local alcoholics were we had a small beer, a bakery were I bought us a couple of Berliner’s, a leather and fur shop where Caroline found a nice jacket that didn’t fit, and we found the shops. The shops was a disappointment, not at all what they were described to be, they were nothing but ordinary second-hand shops much alike the ones we’ve got home, just smaller. On our way back we got hungry and stopped by an Italian fastfoodplace. They had excitingly cheap food, 40 kroner for a huge plate of food, way too much for both of us. We ate about half. While we ate we studied the menu and one could order 10 italian pizzas for 300 kroner (about 3,50-4,00€ for each). Then we went back to our room at the hostel.
At the room the both of us remembered the t-shirt shop that we had seen near our hotel, we had to go there one more time before we were out of time to do it. These are the t-shirts I bought:
- Yeah yeah yeah yeah blah blah blah yeah yeah blah blah - Fuck your lifestory, show me your tits
- 90% of everything is CRAP
- Political Incorrect
- I’m not paid enough to be nice to you
- Sometime something went wrong (with a nice graphic of the evolution from monkey to software-engineer)
- If you see da police - warn a brother (with the Warner Bros logo on it)
- Violence starts at home (with a PlayStation controller on it)
- KGB - Still watching you (with the G as the Soviet symbol)
I’ll post some pictures of these on Flickr when I get the time. Caroline also bought the Warner Bros t-shirt.
The concert with Sisters of Mercy
When we got there I all of a sudden remembered that Morten and Ellen was in Copenhagen for the concert too. I’ve worked a bit with Morten over the Internet with GothCity related projects and was looking forward to meet him and Ellen. There was an agreement to meet in 30 minutes, which all of a sudden turned into two hours when the girls decided they needed to have a shower before we all met up. Finally we met around 19:00 at Apollos Bryggeri (Apollos Brewery) for some more of their homemade easter-beer. After we all had half a litre and a quarter of a litre we were late for the concert and took a cab to Vega where the concert was. My clock was ten past eight, and the concert was still to begin. Getting our coats and jackets delivered was easy, it was way harder to get them back again.
I was high from excitement and drunk from beer when the Sisters finally came on stage, at least I think it was them, there was so much smoke that it was impossible to see who they really were. They had to be Sisters of Mercy, who else would wear dark sunglasses and concieve themselves in smoke than those pretensious bastards? After one and a half hour with dancing and jumping and drinking more beer the concert was over, 5-7 numbers to early after my opinion. My cellphone told me the clock was no more than 21:55 which meant we had way too much time to drink more. We went to get our jackets when I discovered that I had lost the numbers, luckily enough I remembered which numbers we had and we both knew what our jackets looks like. It turned out to be a problem, we had to wait for everyone else to get their jackets before we could get ours, okay enough. Then we had to go trough some sort of a third degree and fill out a form before we could get our clothes back. Everything okay, and we still had way too much time to drink more.
Morten and Ellen had seen a bar named “Count Dracula” earlier that evening and we just had to check it out. After a short explaining to the cabdriver we were on our way, we wound up a short walk from the place. When we saw the handpainted sign with bloody fangs on it and the red velvet curtains we knew we were at the right place. We had a hard time finding the door though, didn’t really seem like there was a door at all. The only door we found led us into some sort of place full of shrinks, we quickly made our way out from there and in another door where there was a barber who could tell us where to find the entrance. Looking up at the door we couldn’t help but thinking “Of course!”. It was a huge door with one of those scary things to knock on the door with. No one opened. The place was closed, probably bankrupt and shut down because no one could find the entrance without ending up at the mentalhouse or killed by the barber first. The night turned out allright because we found another place just a couple of footsteps longer down the road. More homebrewed beer and then back to our room so we would be ready to catch our plane home the next morning.
The next morning
Getting up the next morning was hard work and very very painfull. I have no idea why I was so incredibly hungover, but I was. My head hurted, my knee hurted, my elbow hurted and all my other joints hurted equally. I managed to get myself in the shower without falling. We decided that we should skip breakfast and get a cab to the airport and eat there. On our way there I got less drunk and more hungover and when we finally were there I was too hungover and nausious to think about food and tax-free liquor. I almost threw up everytime I saw that huge fucking poster for Vodka Apeach. I’ve never been so hungover my whole life, I was to enter the plane in an hour and I was both hungry and thirsty, but too afraid to drink or eat anything. Carolines biggest concern was that she was looking just as bad as me, but I comforted her with the fact that she looked slightly better than me at the time. About 15 minutes before we had to be at the gate we found a place that served food we wanted to eat, we got the food about 5 minutes before we had to be at the gate. We used those 5 minutes to eat and find out that our gate was all the way on the other side of the airport. Our plane was still at the gate when we finally got there, I even got seated by the window.
When we got home to our cold own Norway it wasn’t cold at all, the sun was shining over Oslo and we used most of the rest of the day inside sleeping off our mutual hangover.
Be sure to check out my Flickr account for photos from the trip (only 3 there now, but I’ll post more as soon as Caroline sends more of her photos to me or returns my xD-card).
Their drummer was not Kourtney Klein (damn, I looked so forward to see her live), but some other dude I don’t know who is. He was a maniac on the drums though, so it turned out quite all right. They played trough alot of their best material like I woke to the rain of blood, enjoy the abuse, feed the anger, this shit will fuck you up and so on.
