This is not another X things to do in Copenhagen article. Ok, maybe it is, but I am too lazy to count.
Torvehallerne is a modern market in the Nørrebro district with all that is cool: smørrebrød, fish, sweets, craft beer, new-wave coffee, and wine. Two halls house a fascinating array of small stands. I think it speaks for the place that thousands of bicycles are parked around it all the time.
For dinner a recommendation of our Airbnb host was Madklubben. According to her the restaurant's philosophy is to serve excellent food for affordable prices for regular people. (The prices are up to interpretation, I guess they are not too horrible for Danish standards.) They have more than one restaurants, but the best one—I've been told—is Bistro-de-Luxe in København K. It fills up quickly, especially on weekends, so a reservation is a must. Fortunately they have an excellent online booking system for that. Besides the exquisite food, the kindness of the staff is to be emphasised.
Too bad I didn't know about this last year but the Palmehuset in the university's Botanisk Have is open from ten to five, is heated to tropical standards, and has no entry fee. Just what a frozen to the bone sightseer needs.
This time the tide was higher so I could take of a photo of Den lille havfrue without a million tourists blocking the view.
Another destination I have skipped before is Fristaden Christiania, the self-proclamed autonomous neighbourhood / commune. The most intriguing part of which is the 'Green District', where visitors are warned not to take photos, refrain from running and in general behave well. Also that the buying and selling of hashish is illegal. Inside there are well curtained stalls with mostly black guys with covered faces selling ready-made joints. Beware, here be dragons.
Our host in Copenhagen had this poem fixed on her fridge:
Coming home I've checked it out: it's Lykken by Benny Andersen. His Selected Poems—which contains Happiness too—is freely accessible in English on Google Books.
What I have especially liked was the last line. And serendipitously enough we've just been talking about positive psychology at one of my meetings today.
I'm going to København (again) in a few days so I decided to try how well I can do on Danish Duolingo. On the placement test I managed to clear 14 skills and advance to level 6. Most of the time just using Norwegian as an answer was a clear win. A few pointers:
Getting used to spelling can be tricky but there seem to be "rules" such as a p in Norwegian is often a b in Danish, an e becomes an æ, etc.
It is pretty much cheating, but setting a Danish keyboard on the iPhone corrects spelling on the go.
Also, Duolingo often accepts words when only one letter is different, writing it off as a typo.
Duolingo can be criticised for teaching its own logic, which once you're familiar with can help a lot in solving the problems.
There is a scene in the excellent black comedy / revenge thriller Kraftidioten, when the two Norwegian gangsters sitting in their car start singing along with the radio. KTamas found out that the song is Floden by Bjørn Eidsvåg and Elvira Nikolaisen.
[youtube id="SRfrkuGzq7k"]
The lyrics are quite beautiful actually, if one can decipher the Stavanger (?) dialect. (Bjørn is from Sauda, and Elvira from Moi, both towns in the Rogaland fylke of Southwest Norway.)
Eg lure nå på koffor bade e'kje meir i det
Koffor, koffor når eg kjenne det goa du gjør med meg
Det kan nesten virka som om eg prøve å unngå det
Og eg føle meg redd for nåden og glea du skjenke meg
Forunderleg, forunderleg
Ulver ("wolves") is a Norwegian experimental band I'm extremely glad to have found.
Their latest release is ATGCLVLSSCAP, a completely instrumental and partly improv album. I have first listened to it during a run in the gloomy, cold forest — exactly where the soundscape belongs.
Some of the songs reminded me of The Gathering, especially How To Measure A Planet.
Ottó Oláh wrote an extensive review of his (and his wife's) experiences with the first generation Apple Watch. It's a long but very interesting read. (If you know Hungarian, that is.)
Based on this I can see myself using an Apple Watch for several reasons.
A lot of notifications I receive only warrant a glance. Fishing out my ample sized iPhone 6 Plus from wherever it lies at the moment can be a hassle.
At work during meetings it's much less of a distraction to look at a watch to evaluate a notification than constantly glancing at a phone.
I didn't know about the navigation feature of the watch. It sounds pretty useful especially when I drive alone and can't put the phone somewhere I can see. (Parents' car does not have a phone holder.)
Being able to reply to messages using the voice recognition during a run sounds like a dream come true. Stopping and handling the phone is an unwelcome chore, and often I don't have the luxury of running without it: I have to remain accessible.
Do I want one? A resounding yes. Will I buy one? Very unlikely. For now, at least.
Nasty surprise last Saturday: my Skype account started sending short URLs of weight loss and phishing sites to all my contacts. A password reset resolved the issue quite quickly, still the bot managed to churn out more than a hundred and thirty spam links.
No massive harm done, it only generated some traffic to the sites linked, still it's a massively annoying thing. Especially unsettling was to see the messages being sent out while I was trying to figure out what to do. Fortunately, Skype has proper security that logs all instances out once a password is changed. I assume the bot used the API to send messages in my name, and it lost authentication after the password reset.
This is apparently also a good way to reconnect with everyone on your contact list. I've changed my status message to warn people, but no one ever reads those, I guess. Since then I'm constantly being sent question marks in response.
Kids, don't use easily brute forceable one-word passwords. My only defence in the matter is that Skype is one of my oldest accounts made way back when I was much more ignorant about security.
