Berlin

I went to Berlin to visit Martin! Lots of walking, train-taking, dancing, sausages, marzipan, Haribo, and drinking beer in public.

Rome

Becky visited me in Copenhagen! About half the time was spent snuggling in my hammock in various parks around Copenhagen. Quite relaxing.

And then we went to Rome, where half the time was spent eating delicious pizza, pasta, and gelato. YUM. We went to a restaurant with no menu. For 25 euros, you got 4 mystery courses, and wine.

And of course we went to Giolitti's gelato place, about 5 times. It's amazing. Their "small" cone is a giant cone with 3 flavors and whip cream on top.

Great vacation.

Climbing

I went wall climbing at a gym last weekend. When we were about to leave, I jumped from the top of a bouldering problem, maybe 10 feet, onto the heavily-padded ground. But as I was falling I noticed a small gap in the pads. One of my feet landed right in between these two pads. As soon as I landed my ankle was in a LOT of pain. I immediately got ice on it and kept it elevated. But I'm pretty sure I sprained it. What do you think, based on this picture? This was taken a bit more than 2 days later, once the bruise fully came in.

I almost walk without limping, so it feels like it's getting a lot better really quickly. So I'm not too worried.

China

Beijing was very interesting. Things were quite cheap: 32 oz beers for 67 cents, 45 minutes taxi rides for $11, taking the subway for 30 cents, lunch with drinks for $3, decent buffet for $9, etc.

Summer Palace was beautiful. And the Wall was spectacular!!! And the whole time, it was spectacularly hot and humid.

At the conference at the beach, I found it very interesting that a lot of the Chinese people at the conference had NEVER been to the beach before, and a lot of them hadn't even been swimming before and/or couldn't swim.

The food was good. REALLY oily, and salty. And lots of meat, but the meat was harder to eat because there were usually bones and tendons, etc.

I bought a fake rolex for $20. It looks nice, but we'll see if it works in a week.

The Great Wall

China update. We went on a group excursion to where the Great Wall reaches the sea, which is called the dragon's head, because the wall is sort of a long dragon. It wasn't totally amazing, but pretty cool. The best part was the fact that a couple of times, random chinese people came up to me and asked if they take a picture WITH me. Apparently they don't see many westerners.

I plan on going to the Great Wall again this weekend, to a more scenic section in the mountains.

Night Swimming in China

Last night we had a beer on the beach (32 oz cost about $1.80), and then went swimming. The water was so warm!!! And there was this disco music playing on the beach. It was very asian-sounding techno, a lot like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_qwUS8Uqjg

Chinese people dance funny. There were a bunch of little kids who were basically hopping to this music.

Amsterdam, Paris, Brussels, and Beijing

I went to Amsterdam, Paris, and Brussels with Paul. Ate a lot of frites, bread and cheese, and chocolate, respectively.

Now I'm in Beijing for a conference. I've been eating chinese food every meal for 24 hours, and this trend will continue for the whole week. I'm already kind of sick of all that salty food.

The Fjords of Norway

Norway is the land of mountains and fjords and tunnels and it is quite beautiful. These pictures are from a speedboat tour of Naerøyfjorden (the first one is just a tad fake, but still awesome I think).

Parents in København

Parents showed up in København.

- We spent half a day looking for public city bikes for them (pronounced "shitty bikes").

- Saw the overrated little mermaid and some other much more awesome statues.

- Ate Thai food.

- Went on a boat tour of the canals.

- Walked around Christiania, a hippy paradise of music, food, art, and paths along water.

- Ate soft serve ice cream in homemade waffle cones.

- Climbed to the top of a tower in Christenhavn (see photo).

- Went to the Danish National Museum (a history museum of sorts).

- Cooked a delicious meal of pasta with garlic and broccoli and cheese.

- Biked around a beautiful bike path in the suburbs or outer reaches of København.

- Had probably the best veggie burger I've ever had.

Chapstick

As soon as I got to France (a couple of weeks ago), I realized I'd lost my chapstick. OH NO, I thought, this is going to be bad! Without access to chapstick whenever I needed it, I would go insane!! The first 2 days were really bad. I went to sleep thinking about chapstick. I worked all night thinking about chapstick. I had real bad cravings. But after about 2-3 days, I started to get used to it, and by the end of the week, I was almost totally fine without it.

But as soon as I got back from France, I found my chapstick. And since then, I have found not one, but TWO additional chapsticks in my luggage. I feel rich having so much chapstick. And now I'm addicted again. Oh well.

Fireballs

Saturday night, Kyle and I saw "fireballs" flying across the sky again! They looked the same thing as last weekend, like they are meteors entering the atmosphere, but moving relatively slowly.

Seriously, what the fuck are those things!!? And why is nobody else curious about them!?

Trees and Swings

Friday evening, Kyle and I biked around Copenhagen. We stopped and drank a beer in an amazing tree. It was a perfect climbing tree, with tons and tons of limbs, and perfect for drinking beer. We then stumbled upon a set of swings, which was an equally good place to drink a beer. I'm still getting used to the whole "drinking in public" thing. And by "getting used to" I mean I am in love with public drinking. haha.

Great Tragedy and Dumpster Diving

On Saturday we witnessed a great tragedy. At 8pm, we were standing outside of a bakery that was just closing. Inside, a woman was going through the shelves against the windows, and throwing away EVERYTHING. Brownies, pastries, fruit tarts with whipped cream, croissants.... ALL went in the trash. I couldn't watch; it hurt too much. It was pastry genocide. Kyle and I decided we had to try to get our hands on that trash bag full of pastries, so we went around back to the alley after the employees had left, and sifted through several dumpsters. Alas, we never found the bag of pastries, but we DID find a garbage bag full of croissants, of which I had one. Of course, just as Kyle and I were munching on a croissant, the other 4 people in our group came around to the alley and saw us. We were caught red-handed, sifting through garbage and eating garbage croissants. We must have been a pretty hilarious sight.

So now we're determined to go back there every night until we find a bag of pastries. And then, we'll open up a discount pastry shop called *Garbage Pastries.*

Christiania Fest

Last night a bunch of us went to Christiania Fest. The music was this amazing Danish reggae, and besides the fact that all the lyrics were in Danish, and that the temperature was around 60, I felt like I was in Jamaica. Amazing.

The weirdest part was that during the concert, a bunch of "fireballs" were flying over our heads. They were way up in the sky, and going about the speed of airplanes, but they were super bright, like they were on fire. We decided that they were asteroids or meteors or comets or whatever it is you're supposed to call those things. And because there were so many of them (about 12?) we started to get pretty worried that this was going to bad, i.e. these asteroids would impact the Earth and cause tsunamis, or that this was the apocalypse. Denmark is all SUPER flat and right at sea level, so I was actually at the point where I was looking around, half expecting there to be a big waves of water coming over us. Kinda freaky, kinda weird, kinda funny.

Alas, nothing happened. I can't even find anything on the news about asteroids hitting the Earth, except for a bus-sized asteroid coming close to Earth tomorrow.

Morning Run

I started a run at 5am. Ran up a mountain. I was running along a trail, minding my own business, when I saw a deer on the path up ahead of me. I took out my camera, started a video, and walked towards it. I got closer to it and realized that it was a wild boar, and it realized MY existence and made a loud scary snort and jumped off the trail. It freaked me the fuck out. He had big horns. It was making snorting noises off in the bushes, and I was just standing there on the trail, paralyzed like a deer in headlights, convinced that he was going to come stampeding towards me any second. I slowly backed away down the trail, thinking 'shit shit shit shit.' I finally stood behind a tree and decided that if he came towards me I could either hide behind the tree, or climb up it.

He didn't make any noises after that, and I was pretty determined to get to the top of the mountain, so I slowly tip-toed my way up the trail. As soon as I was convinced he was behind me I started running as hard as I could to get away from him.

I didn't quite make it to the top of the mountain. There was a vertical cliff in my way. But I still had some amazing views of Grenoble at sunrise. Grenoble is really the Golden of France.

The Night Shift

I'm working the night shift at ESRF in France for the next week. 8pm to 8am. This afternoon in the middle of the "night", I woke up to find myself in pitch darkness in my underwear. I had absolutely no idea where I was or how I had gotten there, or how to get out. I thought I was outside, and I was feeling around for the wall. I found my clothes on the ground and picked them up. I walked one step at a time with my hands blindly in front of me, terrified. I was pretty sure I was in a dark alley of some kind. So I kept thinking that somebody was going to come running at me, or jumping out at me, or that there were bugs or animals out there in the night that I couldn't see. The only thing I could see was this ledge behind me, about waist high. I stumbled for another foot or so, looking around and panicking. I started to think I wasn't going to be able to get anywhere in this darkness. I felt so alone and scared.

At some point I was looking at the "ledge," and thought, "wait, is that a bed? What is that doing out here?" So I stumbled over to it and felt it, and I thought, "wow that's a bed!" Then I looked around some more, and FINALLY I realized I was in my hotel room. I laughed and got back into bed and went back to sleep. Sleep-walking at its finest.

Cereal with Jam

I really miss cereal. I thought about some amazing cereal I had in San Francisco a couple of months ago, and I found a poem I had written about it.

Cereal with Raspberry Jam

By Anthony Johnson

Cereal with raspberry jam,

Is a treat, oh what a treat for me,

The crunchiness and the sweet

And cold sweet milk and the chewy raspberry pieces

Mixing together synergistically

Perfect union of bran and fruit.

Fit for a king or a god,

For serious.

Copenhagen Carnival Day 3

Day 3 of Copenhagen Carnival. I show up around 4pm and immediately begin dancing. At first I am among the crazy few who are actually dancing seriously this early. Picture maybe a dozen or two people dancing, out in the sun, while the other hundreds/thousands of people are just lounging on the lawn drinking and smoking. As the day/night progresses, more and more people start dancing and I am no longer the minority. By 11pm, the whole park is packed with people dancing.

At midnight, Scott, Kyle, and I biked home. Scott thought it would be a good idea to sort of "connect" our bikes side by side, by putting our arms around each other, with Scott in the middle. For some reason Scott then takes both his arms off his handlebars and puts his arms around me and Kyle. As soon as he does this, he starts start screaming as his front wheel starts pivoting randomly and out of control. Shit shit shit shit, and he can't get his arms back to his handlebars for some reason so he's just screaming "stop stop stop stop!!!" Kyle and I manage to break away from him and Scott collapses on top of his bike and is sprawled out on the ground, laughing. We weren't drunk, by the way.

So I danced for about 6 hours yesterday. That was a good day.

Copenhagen Carnival

Scott and I bought a couple beers a the 7-11 and started walking down the street drinking them. At first I felt like I was doing something illegal. It felt scandalous. But as we approached the carnival, we noticed EVERYONE was drinking beer. Once at the carnival, it was actually pretty funny that I had been worried about a little casual drinking on the street, because this carnival had the most public drinking I'd ever seen. Beer, wine, liquor... people were wasted. It was hilarious. And the WHOLE time at the carnival, I didn't see a single cop. Complete anarchy! Copenhagen Carnival is essentially a free 3-day drunken rave in a public park. There definitely isn't any fear of the police like there is in the US, which is quite refreshing.

Also, everyone in Copenhagen smokes cigarettes.

Also, nobody wears helmets when they bike. NOBODY.

Running at Sunset

I discovered a beautiful path along the water in Roskilde. I went running and saw a booooootiful sunset.

I was walking along thinking about how weird and awesome it is that I'm in Denmark for the next 6 months. And then I thought to myself, "How can I make my life MORE awesome?" And so then of course I jumped in the water. The water was cool (not COLD, like Lake Michigan) and only a little salty.

First Blog Post Ever

This is my first blog post ever. Bare with me.

Last night I got back to my hostel around midnight. Upon getting ready for bed I quickly realized that I'd left my phone and my computer in my office, and there was no clock in the room, and there was nobody else sleeping in the room, and thus I had NO way of knowing the time nor setting an alarm. Poor planning on my part, I admit.

So I went to sleep hoping to wake up around 8:30am and then go to work but knowing full well that I could easily sleep until 3pm, considering the jetlag and the fact that I had been tired all day. So, sometime the next day I woke up, and looked outside for some indication of the time of day. No luck there; it was too cloudy to determine the location of the sun. So I got ready for work and walked towards the train station. I've never found myself in the situation where I have absolutely no idea what time it was. It was weird enough with the jetlag, but the lack of clocks was really throwing me for a loop. I looked for clues. There were many people walking around, so I considered that maybe they were just commuters like me and thus it was a reasonable time (around 9am). But I began convincing myself that perhaps these people were all going to lunch, or coming from lunch, and thus I'd slept until 12 or 1pm. Without any concrete clues, I actually began assuming the worst, that I'd actually slept until 4pm and that everyone was commuting HOME from work. But really I had no idea. I had deduced that the time was sometime between 6am and 6pm. That was a relatively safe assumption.

On the way to the station, I saw a big grocery store called Kvickly, and I went inside to see if they sold a watch. I was walking around the aisles when employees started yelling at me in Danish. I looked around uncomfortably, certain they were talking to me but not sure how to respond. I just looked at them and said, "English?", awkwardly, to which they responded in beautiful english, "We're not open for another half hour, at 9am." Haha, yes!

So it turns out I woke up at exactly the time I had intended, but unfortunately had been unable to buy a watch because of it. Is that irony?

In other news, Copenhagen is awesome! Lots of bikes, lots of bike lanes. And I mean LOTS of bikes. More bikers than drivers in downtown.