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.