Parade sous la pluie

Copenhagen, Denmark

conventional diary entry:
We arrived in Copenhagen, Denmark to coastal rain and wind after so many sunny days in Sweden, a real bummer. After an argument with Virgile, I wandered through Christiania Freetown - alone, sober, penniless, and totally jonesin' for their green treats and space cookies. We met together again, this time accompanied with a bike traveler from Dublin traveling on the opposite route back up to Sweden. We asked a church for shelter from the rain. Denied, we were drenched with water from camping in the park on our first night in Copenhagen.

The guest bedroom where we so thankfully stayed after
one night's rainstorm in the park

An emergency Couchsurfing request offered by a Malaysian working in industrial technology as a skilled intermediary for a Danish tech company. He lived in a very cozy company apartment. Together, we shared stories of travel in Asia as a local and Europe as an other.

Between the rain showers, we didgeridoo busked on and off Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Played on yet again another pedestrian shopping path filled with instrumental buskers and silent performers at every corner: a Peruvian one-manband-show, Chilean flute musicians, Romanian clarinet and piano solos, a sitting headless man, standing golden and silver statues. On Sunday, I wandered through the rain again into Christiania. This time, I enjoyed a nice high to hip hop from Nemoland, my memories of Copenhagen forever trying to catch up with the wind, rain, sounds, stories...

(a juxtaposition of the unknown against the unknown)





cameraphone snapshots diary:

Look into the shopping windows and you might discover YOURSELF. On sale.

Life here, as anywhere, is exists in multiple dimensions all lining up together in immeasurable and illegible sequences \ Teams of bicycles whizz past automobiles and pedestrians \  People do not jaywalk \ Gold-gilded churches and bronze portrait sculptures in elaborate designs erected at almost every corner \ On the port by the famous mermaid statue, a cruise ships fills the backdrop with the sound of American pop music \ Conservatives live in cottage mansions \ The homeless live together on the streets \ The tourists walk past them \ Against the state institution, an anarchist squatter community creates a social history and constructs an alternative world for its in-and-outside inhabitants \ My memories of Copenhagen follow the pattern of a parade intermittently interrupted by the fall of nature: the rain, the trash, the mistakes, the misery.

A dark cloud looming over the town on the water

A boat of tourists gliding along the city's ancient canal network

On one side, the blocks of concrete pave the path for street shoppers,
performers, and onlookers to pass; on the other side, their trash.

I love trash photos like this one above.
How often do we look, let alone see,
the other road not yet followed
but already a repository of the forgotten?