Discovering Family

It's 1:00pm. I'm sitting on the kitchen floor. One-sock Jason and Matt are making breakfast. We are in København - Copenhagen, to the Westerner.

Here, I am Jane Goodall, observing contingents of toddlers walking two-by-two holding hands, dressed in ski-suit onesies; bizarre sculptures - of little kids gutting fish, of vikings with axes on horseback, of bulls wrestling sea monsters; and ubiquitous graffiti, which always seems to lead to Christiania, the self-proclaimed freetown caught somewhere between Soviet hangover and Jamaican ghetto. Tattoo parlors and hair salons litter the bike-filled streets, but only where the bike shops have not already. And Danes of all ages are riding by on two wheels. It's the beautiful women I especially notice, somehow managing to look elegant and vigorous at the same time - the best of both worlds. But that's precisely what København, the bridge between Europe and Scandinavia, is.

Last night began when we walked into a pub full of smoke and old men. Already through the threshold, we had gone too far to turn back. Immediately, the place fell silent. My hyperbolic recollection tells me that even the music stopped. After several drawn-out seconds of staring at onlooking eyes... "HEY!" Before we knew it, the old Danish men were asking us to share some beers and sing with them. The euphoria helped to calm the nerves when the beautiful women arrived. It was then that I learned that the fable tellers were mistaken, that beautiful people on the outside can also be beautiful on the inside. By the time the bar was closing, I had met the love of my life... twice.

I don't know what it is that makes me love København. Perhaps it's the lack of shattered glass, or the obsession with candles, or the lack of Australian tourists, or the way the women stare at you out of the corner of their eyes, yet directly into your soul. Danmark is a land whose main exports are stoicism and blue eyes, and where "the bikes are not free...but they're free if you borrow them" (but I will warn you - in København, there is nothing lower than a bike thief). It's also a land where I'd never want to enter a spelling bee, and where social norms are more important than codified law. On that note, in the land of the polite pedestrian, the jaywalker is NOT king...he's just a self-interested prick. To paraphrase Garrison Keillor, 'Well, that's the news from København, where all the women are good-looking, the women are good-looking, and the women are good-looking'.