Fox Life

My high school buddy Jeremy came to visit Sarah and me this weekend. He flew out to Sweden for work and then rerouted himself through Copenhagen to put a Danish notch on his passport belt. In the "What should we show Jeremy?" planning process, Sarah and I compiled a list of things to do that probably would've taken about a week, and could in no way be shoehorned into the day and half Jeremy had to see the city. Whenever we found a new kebab place (the one under Nørrebro Station) or remembered how much we liked our jazz spot ( Blågård's Apotek ) we added it to the impossibly large list of things to do in our new city. Sarah asked me why I wanted to have so many things on the list, and it's because having someone visit you is the test of whether or not you've done a good job of making a place your home. By comparison, you're now the expert. Sure, you're not a native, but you're a local, or at least the closest thing they have to one. There's only...

So there I am in Christiania, the rootingest tootingest frontier hippie commune imaginable, replete with a shady hash trade and a cozy vegetarian cafe, all within a five minute walk. I'm looking for that free tour I've heard so much about because I need to research life in Christiania for a news piece I've been commissioned to write. I go to a place that I think is the Infocafe to get a tour, see two girls behind the counter, one of them is making kanelsnegl . She tells me to go to the next place over to get a tour. I look around and end up at the top a stairwell inside a music venue with a woman with an English accent asking me if I work there. I tell her no, and that I’m looking for a tour. I ask her if she works there and she says no, she's the tour manager for a band called Warpaint that's playing here tonight. A guy in the back says he’ll be out in a minute. We hunt around for a lighter for the English woman's cigarette, peaking behind the abandoned bar, b...

It’s 1:26 AM and we’re home on a Friday night. I would’ve thought that 1:26 AM would be a fine time to be at home, all hygge and happy, and yet for our neighbors one floor down, there seems to be something distasteful about a quiet night at this hour. And so I enjoy what appears to be a mix of polka, Louis Armstrong, and the voices of alcohol-lubed Danish youth creeping through the floorboards. Now they’re laughing. I know it would take a particularly virulent kind of crank to get mad at other people for laughter, but I think laughter has to be one of the least pleasant things when you’re not in on the joke. There’s nothing like hearing a group of people at the table next to you in your quirky little coffeehouse cracking up to make you realize just how joyless your life is, and how much duller your companions are by comparison. Make no mistake: laughter, music, and good times are all fine things, as long as you are the direct cause of each of them. Surely these strangers in apartment ...

While in Berlin, Sarah and I took a free walking tour. The tour guide stopped at a car park. About 8 meters below us, Adolph Hitler shot himself 65 years ago. And right after his guards found his body in the bunker, they all lit up a cigarette. Apparently, Hitler hated the smell of smoke, so all the soldiers were prevented from smoking in his presence. But with him dead, and the war going as badly as it was, a cigarette must've seemed like a pretty good idea. Berlin's a weird place. There's no way to reconcile its oppressive, fascist past with its fun, vibrant present. It gets even weirder when you layer in a second oppressive regime on top of it, so walking around you can't help but bump into the austere concrete slabs of the holocaust memorial, a fake military checkpoint with fake US and East German soldiers posing for photos, and the most delicious and cheapest pastries and roasted bratwurst imaginable. The experience is like watching TVs that are playing "Schin...

There's no getting around it: this place is expensive. And it's expensive in a really bizarre way. Like at the supermarket, there's a $2 box of cereal next to an equally tasty $9 one. The thing is, $9 isn't an insane amount of money on its own... I mean, I've spent $9 before. In fact, $9 is totally okay to spend on a lot of things, like flourless chocolate tortes, Gap clearance jeans that happen to be in your size, and matinees of 3-D movies staring blue cats in love. There's nothing wrong with $9. Furthermore, there's nothing wrong with boxes of cereal. I like cereal, it's delicious, keeps well, and if we are to believe John Harvey Kellogg, limits the body's baser passions. (It's true: I don't want to watch Jersey Shore after a bowl of corn flakes.) Now, in the case of cereal, my choice is an easy one. I simply buy the $2 box and convince myself that I like it better. However, what am I to do when I don't have cheap alternatives and the ...

When we last left our intrepid travelers they had settled into a new apartment and went to IKEA. They followed this up by realizing you can't cook on a mattress and went back to IKEA the next day for pots, pans, replacement pillows (turns out Gosa Klätt actually wasn't the right call), bath mats, shower curtains, and all the 20 kroner accouterments that make a house a home... plus three extra things that they'll never use but thought they needed at the time. Now might be a good time to talk about the soul of the city. First the good news: it has one. I talked a lot of trash about Milan and one reason why it was so professionally terrible was it was soulless. But even if I feel it when it's gone, I'm still not sure what makes a city's soul. To investigate further, I listened to Empire State of Mind and watched full seasons of How I Met Your Mother. These works of art/entertainment are love letters to New York. They express appreciation for the things that are on...

Spoiler Alert: Denmark is different than Italy. It's hard to believe we've been here for almost two weeks already, but it makes sense. We've shifted into living-mode, which is decidedly easier than traveling-mode, but you blow through days a whole lot quicker. This post finds me in our small Nørrebro apartment listening to Danish radio on the internet which oscillates between a vowelly word-soup and the very pop songs I was hoping on escaping. Katy Perry follows me everywhere. Two weeks is a little late to do a first impressions blog, but I'll do my best to remember those first few days. We arrived in Copenhagen a little frazzled since this time Sarah's bag had some things stolen from it. One could blame Italian baggage handlers, but we preferred to think it was a Robin Hood type of forced donation, and the money he/she got from selling the stolen goods will shortly go to getting orphans their gout vaccines. Still, we lugged our (slightly lighter) bags from very c...