Prague re-visited

Prague is still there, though a little smaller and a bit meeker. Or maybe it’s just me; I got bigger and stronger.

A little back-story:

Last week I returned to Prague after 5 years of living in very polished environments. I left the place looking like a stick insect and weighing about 167 pounds, I rolled in mid-January with 40 more pounds, a knapsack, and two additional chins. My severely emaciated condition can be accounted to shoddy eating habits, no exercise, and hangovers so tremendous I didn’t bother getting out of bed to eat for days at a time. The weight gain is a result of doing the opposite of that.

The places that I lived after Prague were Ottawa; the town that fun rolls down the window to laugh at as it drives from Toronto to Montreal, Powell River; a place where they lynch you if you don’t think it’s fun, Vancouver; which everybody tells you is fun, and probably is if you weren’t on the verge of committing suicide; Delft, Holland, which is fun because your health lies in the hands of 15-year-old with the fists the size of ping-pong paddles, and Aarhus, Denmark; where fun may exist underneath the layer of fog produced by their foul-smelling cheese.

Despite the vast geographic distances between these places they have certain things in common, the most evident being loads of white people and fairly sterile atmospheres. Sterility is a word which brings to mind doctor’s offices and spermicidal jelly. You stretch the definition to cover cities or towns and you’re still not far off from the original definition. The places I’ve lived since Prague are not only clean and wholesome, like Delft —or like Ottawa, which works as a fairly effective anti-conception system — but their governments and authority figures have a much closer relationship to their citizens ranging from “meddling” to “rape”.

An Israeli friend of mine in Prague, for example, has been making and selling lovely tasting snacks to drunk bar patrons. Here’s is how it works: He makes them at home, puts them on the counter of the bar, people buy them, he profits. There’s no contract, no city, merchant, or union approval, and no taxation. People in Western Europe may dimly recognize this system as a half-remembered memory, like nation-state borders or Otto Von Bismarck. People in North America are aghast and reach for their phones to call lawyers and see if they can crush him for not being FDA approved — which still wouldn’t stop them from stuffing their faces with his delicious snacklings.

Another couple friends own bars which they keep open as long as they want, so long as they don’t piss off the neighbours. Those same places are hosts to the kinds of shady activity that would have entire police forces dedicated to their surveillance if the bar were in any other country.

Another friend arrived in Prague as a back-packer, climbed up the corporate ladder to a powerful position with a massive international conglomerate before getting too cocky, going independent, and landing on the wrong side of the real-estate crash. Massive doses of pervitin probably did not help. It made him loopy and stripped his teeth of enamel, which made his teeth slightly transparent and rendered his open mouth a good place to keep goldfish.

This last story I’ve heard a lot. In fact. this tends to happen more than the people that find success and fulfilment.

Another heavily frequented bar in my old neighbourhood still has the exact same people telling each other the exact same sad stories about ice-skating up a hill, but having a plan to change all that.

This sort of thing can go on because the country, like much of Eastern-Europe operates in a distinctly grey area. It’s not necessarily a good thing; one bar-owner friend was significantly screwed by his management and forced to shut down with no legal recourse. With no fixed identifiable system in place, bureaucracy —building off former Soviet ineptitude and malfeasance— behaves like a spoiled rich fat child that repeatedly changes the rules of the playground games in order to give themselves the advantage.

It’s hard to tell if the grey area is a good thing or a bad thing; whether it’s okay for 12-year-olds to be served alcohol by topless bar staff, or that the place is rife with people stitching each other up for a quick buck due to loose laws, it just is. And to be honest the place, within its own dodgy framework, functions just fine. Very little violent crime, no particular profusion of destitution, and a fairly healthy, though moderately weird-looking, populace.

That grey area, also, allows for some pretty peculiar behaviour. When eating with a friend in a local eatery (Czech eateries on their menus, by the way, tell you how much food you’ll get by weight; 150g, 200g, 250g, etc. However, the scales are fairly arbitrary from restaurant to restaurant. 200g in the particular place we were in was a mound of fried cheese and french-fries, in another restaurant, for the same price, 200g is a bean on a leaf of lettuce. Grey.) a man walked in dressed like how a drunk Czech man imagines what a guru looks like. He was wearing an orange sarong/toga/robe, elf boots, and an orange turban like the 50s cinema portrayal of the Maharaja by people that have never been to India. He was also a drunk Czech man.

What was particularly interesting about him though was the people he was with — not a circus troupe, group of cheap palm-readers, or hari-krishas— but normal people. Even when he suddenly got up and started gesturing in a pseudo mystical manner; flighty hand gestures indicating his knees and the turd-like object attached to the front of his turban, they nodded appreciatively and continued their amiable banter.

For someone like me that thrives on weirdness, it’s things like this that make Prague so attractive to me.

And how was it for me returning?

Originally I wanted to re-visit the city, but in the end it was about seeing friends. There is a special comfort in being with people that are on the same wave-length. I spent many formative years with these people; not sitting around television screens, not texting each other, not using social-media as a guise for a real relationship, but actually talking, and more importantly laughing, and often sober. Having the conversation pick up where it left off, shed of the bullshit second-guessing which beleaguers most new relationships, makes you realize how tiring it is the rest of the time.

Prague itself has actually changed very little, at least on the surface. Maybe they’ve cleaned up their bureaucracy somewhat, but from what I’ve heard you still need 13 stamps from eight different locations in opposite ends of the city to renew your driver’s license. The metro is still packed with dour people and smells like an NBA locker-room after game-time. A man will still wears socks in sandals without any sense of irony. You can also still blag your way into the pricey seats of a Strauss Concerto, be unselfconsciously approached by beautiful women, and dance till 5 in the morning. I did notice a fine effort to institute recycling, complete with bins for paper, glass, and metal, but it was once, and in the national airport.

This is horribly clichéd, but I find it hard to avoid the analogy. Visiting Prague was like seeing a past girlfriend with whom I shared an emotionally charged and passionate relationship for a long time. The amount of terrible explosions of blind anger in the place was only equalled to the amount of times I laughed so hard my diaphragm seized up. The sex —still with the analogy here— was unimaginably good, as only two people who have a lot of time to practice together can make it. It was a slightly sad though cleansing re-union where we both appreciated who and where we are in our lives. And without a doubt, after my sudden break-up with Prague, I fantasized often and heavily about her. Facebook didn’t help, it put the city in my face (appropriately) constantly. Returning to Prague has made me realize that we can be friends. This is a nice feeling. It’s soothing because I may understand her better now than I did when I was there... at least my relationship with her anyway. I also know that as long as the right people stay there, she will always be there for me when I need her. Which I will.

Because I still find her sexy as hell.

a bit of past

My cousin Shannon has commissioned her family to write stories of their past experiences as sort of compendium of the family history. The aim is to enlighten her children about who we are, and who we were. This is not one of my usual cynical diatribes in which I try to be funny. Move to the next if that's your bag.

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I had this friend named George. Not talking about your grandfather, who is awesome and you’re very lucky to have, I’m talking about a very strange and wonderful person I knew some time ago.

In my late teens I had a band. I played drums, Rob played bass, Jodi played rhythm guitar and sang, Clint played lead guitar, and George just hung around. We weren’t that great, but George was a dedicated follower. Like us, he was about eighteen or nineteen. Unlike us —and this blew my mind at the time— he had two young boys. He shared the kids with his on/off girlfriend. She was crazy and violent. But with George, this perhaps can be forgiven.

He was a difficult guy to understand. Not only because he had a tendency to mumble, but because he was wracked with a terrible stutter. This combination can be deadly in terms of coherency. He was a heavy smoker and occasional hare-brained philosopher. . . when you could understand what he was saying. It must have been frustrating for him; having all these incredible thoughts and having them torpedoed by his unreliable mouth. At times, when he mumbled and stuttered, he did it enthusiastically.

Truth is, at the beginning I didn’t think much of him. People claimed he was hyper-intelligent, and there were moments when that would shine through, but for the most part I thought he was in idiot. He was easy to make fun of, and we all did. It wasn’t born of some cruelty. The fact of the matter is that he did stupid things — like use my father’s university scarf as a baby-wipe, or dive head-first into nearby lake and emerge, his head covered in feces.

The years went on, alliances in the band shifted —I started dating Jodi’s ex-girlfriend, Devon. Devon and I had been friends prior to this and she turned to me romantically, I think, out of the shear neglect she experienced from Jodi. While “the boys” ignored us due to heavy involvement in a role-playing game she and I were left to our own devices. Long eye-contact changed to soft touches. We fell utterly and hopelessly in love.

Devon is easy to love. Warm, sweet, caring, tomboy, stunning, she is gifted with wonderful attributes. For me, it was two things: I’m a sucker for red-heads — she is as beautiful a ginger as they come, and she has the voice of an angel. I have never heard something that sounded so beautiful. It’s the only voice that can move me to tears. She has a lot of other great things going on, but I suspect it’s her gregariousness that caused men to fall in love with her. I personally know quite a few of them, and I think that many still do. George did at one point. But, it never got in the way of our growing friendship.

I started to realize that George was, in fact, a kind of tortured genius. His personal life was a train-wreck; the kids, the crap jobs, the social blunders, getting kicked out of his house. It went on, and on. He was always a guy that demanded a lot from his friends because of acts of utter stupidity and weird twists of fate.

The night before I was going to move to Montreal with Devon I got desperate 3 am call from him. It turns out he had run out of gas two hours out of town, and he was in the middle of nowhere. He wanted me to fill a jerry-can and drive it out to him to refill his tank. After cursing him for several minutes I got in the car to find him. When I finally did I asked him what happened. He stuttered that he got lost after being convinced he was going in the right direction. I said, “That’s how it usually happens, you idiot.” Our relationship was filled with these kinds of moments.

And those moments continued even when I was living in Montreal and my emotionally-charged relationship with Devon started to careen out of control a couple years later. It happens, you know? I was too jealous, she was kind of an unconscious flirt. She liked attention, I didn’t give her enough. The lines of communication between us became pinched and atrophied. I can turn to ice when I want to. For someone so warm, and in need of warmth, this was difficult for her to deal with.

My few relationships tended to be very long, and very intense. My relationship with Devon was no different. This made the long drawn-out break-up incredibly difficult for both of us. We were still living together, we were emotionally immature and knew each other well enough to pick and choose fighting words with intent to destroy.

She would probably claim that it was more difficult on her. That may be so, but I can only see things from one perspective. Mine. The long terrible nights waiting to hear the door of our Montreal apartment open and close, as she came home from a night of carousing. The ignoring. The tears. Division lines between shared friends. Watching men fall for her. Picking up our relationship by the scruff of the neck to try to make it work, and then beating it senseless because it couldn’t, again, and again, and again. The same incredible energy that fuelled our fantastic love was the same energy that we used to tear it apart.

Like I said. It happens.

Sitting here now, in Denmark, looking at the inches of snow out my window it’s hard to believe that I was so wrecked about that break-up so long ago. But I was utterly mangled; negative emotions amplified by teenage testosterone running amok. A general despondency tweaked because we didn’t have the distractions then that we have today. We had a television but no cable. It’s hard to focus on a book —of which I had many— when you’re feeling that black. We had movies we’d already seen a thousand times. Not many people had Internet connections in their home. We certainly didn’t. Ironically the very thing that Devon taught me to do was the very thing that kept me moderately sane throughout that long terrible time; I chose the most complicated guitar piece I could think of, and I learned it.

I also went to Ottawa a lot to escape from the toxic atmosphere of the apartment. George, by now had been kicked out of the house he shared with his girlfriend and two kids. He was living in the basement of his mom’s place on Bronson, North of the Queensway. The band was long defunct, but I still spent a lot of time with Rob and George. George had taken up weightlifting along with “the boys” but like everything he did, it was adapted and made “Georgified”. I remember walking down the stairs to his damp dark basement and seeing him with a pillow attached firmly to his back with a belt you normally see worn with business suits. He was doing standing curls with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. I asked him about the pillow and he mumbled something about “back support”.

We got to talking, and he could see that I was dark, grim mood. I tried to explain in a fumbling way about what I was going through and that’s when he stopped me. He stammered that we should go outside. It was night as we stepped out into the parking lot between the buildings. Autumn had set in and the sky was clear.

The thing about George’s stutter, or anyone that stutters for that matter, is that you’re tempted to try to fill in the words that the person is trying to get too. Otherwise you either stop paying attention, or the stammer takes on a hypnotic quality as you’re drawn into each painfully executed word. When George speaks I learned to just listen. If he’s passionate about something his voice takes on tenor of wonderment, he gets excited and words tend to bottleneck in his mind as they scramble to get out of his mouth. When I recall what he said that night I don’t remember the stammer. I remember the kind of subdued elation that occasionally overtakes him.

“Look up at the sky. See all those stars? There’s millions of them, and each one is a galaxy with any number of planets revolving around their own sun. This planet is a rock spinning through space, just like millions of other rocks doing the same thing. Think about how small that makes you.”

And suddenly I felt better.

Looking back I think two things happened. First, in the grand scheme of things I realized my break-up with Devon was pretty weenie when you think of the scale of the space that we occupy. And secondly, what he said didn’t shrink the significance of my existence, it shrank the significance of the problem.

George and I lost touch, and Devon and I share a special kind of bond now. It's no longer romantic, but perhaps more pure, because of it. Whatever it is I care for her deeply and wish her all the happiness she deserves. And, I still carry that night with George on me and recall it when I’m feeling low.

Everything gets better if you keep going.

monster germark

What is it Melville said?

Retards, all over the world, stand hand-in-hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round.

Something like that.

The Danes have a word which they claim figures heavily in the national mentality. The word is “Hygge” (roughly pronounced “Heeewlllgh”. The language will remains a mystery to me for fear of severely injuring my tongue). There is no really effective translation of the word, and the only reason I can glean its full meaning is because the Dutch have something similar: Gezellig. Loosely translated it means “cozy”, but with a more ambient definition and increased saliva.

Anyway, for better or worse, I feel that word right now.

When I didn’t feel it was a few days ago when I went to a monster truck rally with some classmates. Admittedly, a weird thing to do, but I looked at it two ways: I’d never been to one before, and the thought of being surrounded by Danish rednecks appealed to me in a twisted sort of way. Also, I figured there had to be story in there somewhere. I mean, it was a German monster truck rally in Denmark, in the company of people from a variety of nationalities —everywhere from Iceland to Lithuania to Brazil.

(This truly international evening would not end until I helped a blind-drunk French girl off a bus and out of pool of her own vomit, made another French girl cry, and drove a normally sweet and placid Catalonian girl screaming mad by loudly playing guitar with a Spanish guy at an awkward hour in the morning.)

Before heading to the rally a few of us were in an Icelandic classmate’s kitchen embracing manly US redneck culture by engaging every stereotype short of burning crosses.

Or trying to anyway.

Sausages were fried accompanied by homosexual innuendo (which in itself is sort of a homosexual innuendo —the medium is the message). Hamburgers were prepared in the proper American way; with buns. That is, until we ran out of buns, and I, overcome with a frenzied hunger, may have eaten a beef patty before it was properly cooked. Twice.

Bruce Springsteen was listened to on a laptop, The Boss telling the European pseudo-rednecks about being born in the U.S.A. The beer flowed freely. This was apparent, if not by the increasing presence of empty cans, then by the fact that a few of my classmates started trying to adopt a Southern Drawl.

I believe that one particular 6-foot-7 Danish guy was trying to sound like he was from South of the Mason-Dixon line. Instead he sounded like a cross between Daffy Duck and Orson Welles. The Icelandic guy, abandoning words altogether, and prattling gibberish, sounded like an Irishman on crack. The Brazilian sounded Jersey, and the German sounded like a paedophile. The two Canadians in the room, most able to generate some semblance of redneckism, remained quiet and exchanged looks across the table. Although one of them did put on a bandanna. A bright orange one.

We studiously examined youtube videos of rednecks doing stupid things — dragging each other behind tractors through mud, lighting themselves on fire, trying to speak, more mud. There is a plethora of these videos on youtube if you want to look and your opinion about humanity isn’t low enough.

In my mind a proper monster truck rally is in a massive stadium, the floor covered with undulating piles of dirt, the roar of engines, and Old Dixie displayed prominently around the place. It should reek of piss, beer, and vomit, and the bearded overweight faces of the audience should be white.

As we approached the thing in Denmark my definition gradually changed from “Monster Truck Spectacle”, to “Something Involving Cars”, to “Eastern European Circus”. That’s what it looked like to me. A section of parking-lot in front of a community centre had been cordoned off with some colourful tent vinyl and a few of those fairground trailers usually associated with shooting little wooden ducks for a stuffed animal. The whole area was open to the sky and wouldn’t have filled and NHL-sized hockey rink. . . rink, not arena.

The show itself —after paying about $35 and taking a seat on a length of two-by-four which served as the “stands”— largely involved German’s doing strange things to red BMWs. At least the first half. You could plainly see four monster trucks parked on the sidelines looking fairly menacing. They drove the BMWs around the track at crazy speeds and then they all stopped so we could meet their drivers. The drivers emerged from their cars, each one brandishing a child of about four to six years old. This, it turned out, is what made this rally different from an American one, aside from the lack of dirt, lack of beer, and lack of union jack flags —was the liberal use of small children throughout the performance. Children wandered around the track, fingers in their ears from the noise of the engines, and the music, and the guy screaming into a microphone in Danish. Children were driving ATVs through flaming boards, and motorcycles were jumped across rows of children lying prone on the concrete.

I looked around me at the audience, and indeed the faces were white. But that was no shock, Denmark is a very white place. I tried to find concern in the eyes of parents that brought their children to see other people’s children get narrowly crushed by a 600 pound pieces of machinery. The only thing I saw was polite applause from a crowd that acted like they were at a Stravinsky recital.

The music that blared throughout the show was not death-metal, hard-rock, or even folk. It was 80s music with Low Rider, the Magnum P.I. theme, and particularly the Beverly Hills Cop theme Axel F on heavy rotation. It’s to this cocaine-addled soundtrack that two red four-door BMWs were driven on two wheels, made to do donuts, passed each other at screaming high-speeds; both forward and in reverse (not that impressive if you’ve ever driven on the autobahn), they synchronized squealing and fishtailing, and drove through flaming boards with a person strapped to the hood of the car. Thankfully not a child this time. Well, there might have been, but at this point is was so dark, with so much smoke, the action was barely visible.

All I could think to myself was, finally the Germans have managed to invade Denmark and it’s in a black cloud of oily smog.

Then it was time to destroy a Toyota Corolla, presumably to show the German dominance in the auto industry.

I remember feeling sorry for the animals in the Eastern European Circus I saw in Prague. The poor buggers just looked so depressed. Well, for the first time in my life I felt sorry for a car. The things they did to that Corolla would have had PETA up in arms. They flipped it, rolled it, dropped it off a ramp onto its back, lit it on fire, and finally, when its engine seized up, they propped it up on its nose and smashed a BMW through it. A forklift that carried the blackened and brutalized corpse of the Toyota off stage was met with resounding applause from the audience.

It was hard to make sense of what was going on around me. It was a small operation, with the drivers doubling as motor-cycle riders, and cotton-candy salesmen. This aspect also reminded me of an Eastern European circus. But what was it that made people so emotionally involved in the whole thing? Was it a manifestation of an atavistic hatred towards machines and small children? Or was it that “Man like thing that go boom”.

In the interest of serious Journalism I spoke to the guy that ran the whole thing. I asked him how many people were involved in the operation? He said, 20. He added that they were doing 116 shows around Denmark and Sweden. I asked him how it was going? He said, “Slow.”

Maybe so, but the Icelandic guy was definitely caught up in the spectacle, or at least his sense of irony was. I cringed when he began chanting “U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!”. He howled with glee when the monster trucks finally arrived and began crushing horribly injured Japanese cars —including that savagely beaten Corolla. He was elevated in the moment, or seemed to be, screaming, “No WAY! They did NOT just do that!”

How did this become popular? What kind of brain-dead buffoonery gave birth to this type of thing? I suspect all of it was the illegitimate pear-shaped child of that Southern salute to all that’s wrong with humanity: NASCAR.

The climax of the show was the arrival of the actual monster trucks; those pick-ups with obscenely large tires, the kinds of tires the people of Powell River Canada might enjoy. Air-brushed on their sides were the names “Ghost Rider”, “Ice Man”, “Dragon”, and — as promised by their marketing campaign which said, “Original Monster Trucks From USA!”— “U.S.A.”. Unfortunately “Ice Man”, for reasons beyond me, wasn’t part of the havoc. I guess even chunks of fibre-glass built around ridiculous engines, over retarded tires, need a day off. Besides, for me, it was just bigger cars driving over smaller cars.

It was when all these things were going through my head that the German to my left said, “I smell oil.”

I don’t think he was quoting Melville

marked

Okay, so I got here.

And I’ve started school. The first week was an introduction to the University –Aarhus University pronounced “oar hoose”. “University” pronounced “university”. Those first few days were a blur of information about Danish study habits and Danish culture.

Concerning Danish study habits: You may or may not show up to class. You may or may not be marked on any of the work you do. Your final exam will be Judgement Day when you will be marked, but not by the person who taught you. I’m still not sure if this is incredibly fair, or incredibly scary. Maybe both.

The lecture on Danish culture was presented by a Danish woman that had clearly never seen any living Danish people in her life. She told us that Danish people like a “a zone of personal space around them” but considering how enthusiastically they pack themselves onto busses I find this hard to believe. She explained this particular nuance by telling us about a Mexican that was talking to her too closely. She said she kept backing away, but not matter how much she backed away the Mexican —and I’m not kidding here, “continued to cross her border.”

This “personal space” thing actually raises all sorts of interesting questions about how the Danes propagate their own species. Unless they’ve found some other way, shagging does involve a certain amount of touching.

She said that Dane’s are serious about eye-contact. Which is true, unless you look them in the eye.

She did say one thing that was accurate; the Danes are extremely punctual. This has been stressed to me by so many people that I’m starting to think it’s pathological. It leaves me wondering about my classmates, many of whom come from places where it’s common to show up days late to one’s own birthday party.

The course in the Danish language was taught by way of some traditional songs. One of which was developed when the Danes won the UEFA cup in 1986. For anybody that pays attention to these types of things, the Danes, in fact, won in 1992. This error she made is pretty unforgiveable, and would normally necessitate a lynching, except fellow Danes can’t get close enough without invading her personal space. Isn’t this why we have Mexicans?

The latter half of the lesson involved a humiliating 600 person conga line with her in the lead. At this point she was the only one singing as nobody else in the room cold wrap their tongues around the peanut-butter-filled-mouth language. Also, logistically speaking, a conga line of that size cannot work in a small room without serious injury. Particularly if the leader is flapping her body around like a fish on a dock.

I fled.

The main campus itself is very nice with all the buildings surrounding a picturesque lake in which there is floating the picturesque bloated body of a dead duck. The buildings themselves are all yellow because —and this is true— Aarhus is the leading European manufacturer of yellow bricks. The effect is that of being in a massive outdoor sanatorium designed by people with a Wizard of Oz fetish.

The journalism building is a squat concrete bunker of the type that Hitler used to hide from the Allies and take cyanide. The auditoriums inside continue this theme with dim lighting, stale air, and no windows. If there is a nuclear attack it seems the post-apocalyptic world will be briefly populated by Danish journalists who won’t breed because nobody will get inside each other’s personal spaces.

I’m taking busses a lot again. I really despise the things. However, they’re all on time. The busses in Aarhus have machines on them where you can buy a ticket. Here’s the thing though —and this was pointed out to me by my flatmate— if the machine is not operating there is a sign saying that you absolutely must report this to the bus driver. Above the bus driver there is a sign that says, DO NOT TALK TO THE BUS DRIVER.

You board Danish busses in the rear and exit through front. The two busses that I can take to where I live arrive at the stops at the same time and don’t arrive again for another half-hour. This is during peak time, so riding a bus in Denmark is like trying to cram yourself into a can of tuna. I suspect that this is when the Danes conceive because their personal space issues provide no other alternative.

The busses, by the way, come more frequently at times when nobody needs them.

The town of Aarhus itself is —like the Danes— really nice. It sits on the Eastern Coast of the mainland and is the recipient of weather that could only be called “Schizoid”. I’ve heard that in New Zealand, if you go out for the day, you dress for all weather conditions. . . Including an airbag lately. In Aarhus you need to find a balance between an arctic expedition and a day at the beach. In most places of the world you look at the sky and you say, “I think it’s going to rain today.” In Aarhus you look at the sky and say, “It’s going to rain in 17 seconds.” In one day I’ve been basking in the sun, been drenched by a torrential downpour, been buffeted with the kinds of winds used to test airplanes, seen snow, and basked in the sun again. All before noon.

The buildings of the city are more Prague than Delft. Curiously I think they used up all their yellow bricks to build the University. And yes, there is a concentration of the types of buildings you associate with Vikings; stucco and wood-beamed structures leaning at precarious angles.

It’s brutally expensive to go pubbing in the city. The Danes get around this by buying their booze cheaply at the 7-11 —a slightly incongruous North American import— and drinking it wherever they please.

It’s this and other things that remind me that I’m in a civilized country after three-odd years in bewildered, anxious, North America. The people are friendly and charming. A traditional history of biking has made them fit-looking. The place is clean, the produce is fresh, the smiles are warm.

I’m beginning to understand how Denmark ranked number one on the list of happiest places on earth:

http://www.forbes.com/2010/07/14/world-happiest-countries-lifestyle-realestate-gallup-table.html

Then again, with no shagging, how happy could they be?