Arrival in Copenhagen and return to consciousness

Copenhagen International Airport is nonsmoking, but you can tell Denmark is a smoking country with your first breath of air when you step inside from the jetway. During the entire walk from the gates (eerily similar to Oslo's in design as if they'd been copied from the same blueprints, but built from metal and linoleum instead of wood) through the very attractive shopping area through passport control, baggage claim and finally the terminal area I saw no smokers, yet the smell hung in the air everywhere.

Both of us were tired to the point of catalepsy during the short flight from London, so instead of the highly recommended quick and inexpensive public transit we took a cab to our hotel, the smallish but very pleasant Copenhagen Strand. One side of our room faces the water of the Inderhavnen canal, one of the large waterways that cuts through the city (if it were Venice, this would be the Grand Canal), and the other overlooks a little courtyard and back street. completely charming. Through our window little whiffs of the Jazz Festival drifted in, but we couldn't hear or see from where.

After freshening up a little it was about Fpm local time so we decided to put off the need for sleep just a little while and wander a little first. We walked two blocks up the waterside to Nyhavn, the short canalside street of outdoor cafes end to end that you can see in every guidebook and on the cover of ours. On the way to Nyhavn Kristiana thought she could hear jazz coming from several directions including across the channel (the Copenhagen Jazz Festival is HUGE), but once we turned on to Nyhavn the New Orleans style saxophone band at the far end of the street drowned all the others out.

Kristiana and I took different sides of the canal - she wanted the best vantage points for photos and I wanted to wander among the cafes themselves - and as I passed the bandstand I saw police arriving to divert traffic. Shortly some kind of march, perhaps 500-1000 people (I have no special skill at estimating crowds, but at the end of a day of international travel including a layover at Heathrow my sense was that it was a good three large superjets worth). The crowd was mostly though not uniformly young, and very passionate in their cause, though the loud synchronized chanting was all in Danish so I could not at this point tell you what that cause was. The procession was followed by a sort of mobile DJ van emblazoned "SUMMER OF 69 FOR A NON PROFIT KICK ASS CULTURE," and as it drew up to a point behind the bandstand it stopped and over its speakders boomed several minutes of speech - again in Danish so again I can't say what it was, but I got a couple minutes of video which I will try to post if I get a real connection later (I'm writing this on my Blackberry). At the end the chants resumedan and they moved on.

My need for sleep was now overwhelming so I went back to the hotel. Before I could finish texting Kristiana, she walked in the door as well. she was hungry but hadn't yet found anything that appealed to her, the plate-of-clams-and-a-pint-of-Carlsen cuisine of Nyhavn not really meeting her definition of jet-lag recovery food.

I napped briefly - less than the length of the album playing on my iPod (Wendy Luck's The Ancient Key, if you're interested), and awoke to the smells of Indian food that Kristiana had materialized from somewhere and had already eaten her fill of. (Note to Kristiana: how'd you do that - did you just rez it out of inventory or something? Do we have Build privileges here?)

Now it's morning, both local time and body time. Kristiana has gone out to shoot pictures in the morning light while I blog. As soon as I post this, I'm heading out to find her and get an espresso.