Jaguars are for driving

Day 3 (Tuesday, 1/6)

When Ben left for school at 8, I got up and hopped in his bed and slept until around 1:30/2. I knew it wasn’t good for my jet lag but it really felt quite nice. I had planned on exploring the town of Lyngby a little that day but when I got up, the light was already starting to get darker and I just felt like relaxing a reading a bit as I was kinda hung over. So I read some of Jimmy Carter’s book and emailed my parents and a few other people until Ben got back around 3:30ish. At that point, Ben and I rode into the town of Lyngby (near the train station about 2 km away), parked our bikes, and walked around for a while. It was a nice little town it reminded me of something between a suburb and a small town, which is really what it was. Copenhagen proper really isn’t a very big city with the tallest building I think being a Radisson hotel about 20 stories tall, and numerous church steeples. The metro area, however, is around 2 million people making it the second biggest city in Scandinavia after Stockholm. That number doesn’t count Malmo which is just across the water in Sweden, now connected by a bridge which for a brief period of time was the longest bridge in the world.

Anyway, Ben and I walked around, I got a Squash at the SuperBest—a grocery store with a hilarious name. Oh yeah, a Squash is a Danish soft drink made by Tuborg. It’s an orange soda, sorta like European Fanta but I like it better. It’s actually one of my favorite sodas. Ben and I walked around a bit more and then showed me where he works which is called Joe and the Juice. It’s a juice bar in a department store that makes smoothie-like drinks from juice but they’re not frozen. We had a strawberry and lime mix and a ginger, apple, and kiwi (I think) mix. The second one was really weird at first but turned out to be really good once you got used to the spice from the ginger. We hung out there for a while and I realized I heard “Inside and Out” by Feist (from her first album) playing. Ben and I started talking about music some more and he told me that after I had bought him The Reminder by Feist the previous Christmas he had started playing that at the juice bar. Sure enough, two months later she broke out onto European radio and TV and she was on pretty heavy rotation everywhere. I think Ben got some serious props from his boss for knowing what the next big thing was going to be. We arranged a little trade with the manager where we put some stickers on cups there and got two macchiatos in exchange.

After that, we took the commuter train in to Copenhagen and then hopped on the subway over to Tess’s. I’m going to stop right now, again, to describe the subway in Copenhagen. It’s pretty new, not more than 5 years old and immaculately clean. It’s pretty far underground and all the walls and floors appear to be made out of granite. The trains are super nice and super clean and it’s really easy to use. You buy a little stamp card and stamp it for how many zones you’re going on the metro/S-train (commuter)/or bus system. Unfortunately, all transportation in Denmark is quite expensive. If you only go one or two zones on the metro it’s 20 kroner, which is a little less than four bucks, three zones is 3o kroner, four zones is 40 kroner, and so on. Ben and Tess live four zones away so every time one wants to see the other it’s at least eight bucks, one way. There aren’t any unlimited weekly or day passes like in New York or Seattle. But that’s the only bad part. There’s only two lines right now, one of which was opened since last time I was here, but a lot of people seem to use it. Seattle could learn a lot.

Anyway, we got back to Tess’s and Ben and I made some pasta. We cooked some noodles and made the sauce from scratch. I put a little secret ingredient in it that was awesome: tandori spice. After Ben and I did the dishes we went to a little neighborhood bar across the street—evidently they call little neighborhood dive bars “Bodegas” here—and had a few beers. We got some dice and they taught me a Danish drinking came pronounced “my-er”. I’ll teach y’all when I get back. It started snowing a little bit outside but it was so cold that a lot of the snow blew around and didn’t really stick to each other and just turned to dusty frost. I later found out from my dad that the hi for that day was 26 and the low was 20. Last call at this bar was at midnight, as it was a Tuesday, and as we were chatting about some family stuff this really drunk guy in his 40’s came over, sat down and started talking with us. At one point he turned to me and said something to which I replied “Uh…What?” And then Ben explained that I don’t speak Danish. He looked at me and went “på engelsk?” (in english?) and I went “Ja.” He started rambling on about Denmark and drinking and his daughter and who knows what else. When he found out I spoke French he started rambling on in a mix of French, Danish, and the occasional English sentence. He gathered that I could understand a little Danish so he kept going “forestar?” (understand) to which I kept replying “nej.” He was a pretty cool guy and I think I gathered that his girlfriend/wife (not really sure which) was French and his daughter was in New York or Montreal right now. Pretty interesting. At one point he asked us if we knew the Jaguar (I think it was a bar nearby that was still open). He turned to me when he asked this and to emphasize it he went “You know what Jaguar is?” I replied “You mean:” and then I put my hands up like claws and roared like a jaguar. Luckily he found it funny and didn’t think I was making fun of him. Then I took care of our tab and Ben and Tess and I left. Tess had to get up early for work the next day so we all went to bed, Ben and I crashing on her bed and she on the couch.