Just a few pics from Sebastian's fake Bar Mitzvah as well as the bike light assembly line. If you don't know what this is about, read here.

Last week's been somewhat busy. Here's what kept me from writing:

The type workshop kept me quite busy. We got a new assignment on Monday: cut up one of the letters of 'your' font into nine pieces and create a new typeface with them. For this I was teamed up with Linn, a swedish girl specialized in illustration. After taking two days of deciding on the letter and the way to cut it up we thought it was better to split for creating the font itself. I think you'll figure why from the results (above). Tomorrow I'll try and post some of the other group's finals. Working so hard on this thing kept me from continuing my big illustration project, which I was supposed to finish next Tuesday. Luckily I was able to talk to my teacher and am now able to send via e-mail. Phew! But that's DKDS.

As part of the workshop we also got to listen to a lecture by Bo Linnemann, one of the leading danish typographers and founder of Kontrapunkt. He and his staff have actually worked for quite a few big companies (Carlsberg, Microsoft, Danske Bank etc.) and created their share of type faces. Most famous probably being Kontrapunkt Font, which you can download for free here. Although I don't like all of his stuff, it is quite impressive how productive this guy is. On this occasion I was also able to watch the Helvetica movie again, which one of our teachers had organized. A thing I forgot to mention about it last time: it has a very nice soundtrack, which almost by itself makes the film worth seeing.

And: Last Thursday Felix arrived! Hooray, first visitor from back home! After already having gone to Stockholm and Berlin beforehand, I'm his third and last stop on his visiting-friends-across-europe-for-christmas trip. Since his arrival we've been quite busy:

• Thursday, 9 p.m.: Picking Felix up from the airport.
• Thursday, 11 p.m.: Going to Simon's place to celebrate Sebastian's fake Bar Mitzvah, which was actually just an excuse to get drunk and spend a nice evening with friends, and which meant that in order for Felix and me to catch up to everybody else's alcohol level we had to down several tequila, vodka, absinthe and muskat shots (in that order) in the first half hour. But hey, it worked :) It also led me to finding out that Felix, just like me, is a notorious party smoker...
• Friday, 8 a.m.: After having slept 4 hours and having a massive hang over I had to drag myself to school to print and present my workshop results. Luckily my body seemed to have somehow functioned on autopilot, as I don't remember half of that morning except for feeling miserable and very zombie-ish.
• Friday, 1 p.m.: Getting back home, sleeping for three hours during which Felix discovered Copenhagen for himself.
• Friday, 7 p.m.: Making dinner and calling up some friends to go to Vega for what would turn out to be an amazing night out, but I'll let you read about that in the next post.
• Saturday, 2 p.m.: Having had a good night's sleep, we got up to the sound of many people's voices and the clicking of plastic parts. And suddenly we found ourselves in an assembly line putting bike lights together... Let me explain: Simon and two fellow students had to come up with a good business idea for a university project. The idea was so good, that in fact it is now being realized. To encourage people in Copenhagen to use more bike lights (which is actually a law) in order to prevent accidents at night, they suggested to the city police to give out light's as 'Christmas Gifts' when catching people not using them and fining them 500DKK. These people still have to pay the fine, but at least they get some lights for it. The city is sponsoring the whole thing BUT Simon and his friends had to deliver the lights ready made: equipped with batteries and wrapped as a gift. So now, they had to cut open 2000 packs of bike lights, put batteries into and a ribbon around them. Too much work for three guys alone. So this morning, Sus, Julie, Rebecca, Astrid, Noah, Jonas and a few others came around to help. And at 2 p.m. they had two more guys doing the dirty work :)
• Saturday, 4 p.m.: Going on a quick sight seeing trip to Christiania, and eating some of the best food I know: Strawberry Cakes from Lagkaghuset. I could eat these things all day – if I had the money.
• Sunday, 3 a.m.: After some chilling, a good dinner, playing some Playstation and watching a very confusing movie by the name of A History Of Violence (I think we just didn't get it), Felix has gone to bed and I'm writing this post.

Sorry for this massive amount of text but there was obviously some catching up to do (Falko, I hope you're happy now ;)). Pictures to all this stuff will follow the next couple of days.

On my way to becoming a fully accepted member of the Jewish community I took part in celebrating Hanukkah with Simon's family and a couple of friends (Jonathan, Sebastian, Julie, Rebecca, Malte and more...) last night. Sus and Lennart came over to our place and cooked a delicious dinner. After stuffing ourselves with chicken, green beans, couscous, brownies, pancakes and ice cream we rolled the Dreidel for gifts that Simon's parents had brought. Pretty funny. Got a cat, candy, bike lights and a thermos flask. Yeeey!

Yesterday the students at my school had their annual Christmas market at which they sell loads of their self-made stuff – prints, bags, clothing, pottery, stuffed animals and more handcrafted things.
This event is well known among the Copenhageners and therefore the place was crowded like hell and just crawling with mostly giddy women trying to finish off their Christmas shopping. I wonder why don't have such a thing in Darmstadt. Ah yes, cause we're unable to even organize a decent party...

But that's what I've been the last 5 days. Down and out with a pretty bad flu. At least according to my doctor who stated his very competent and sophisticated view on things with the words: "It's a virus." Gee. Wow. Thanks. That helped. Anyways, after being high on something called Hexokain and caffeine from drinking too much black tea and making sleeping my activity of choice, here's a résumé of what I've been up to the past days:

Things I've Missed Out On

• sunlight (Crap!)
• Monday's 'Work In Progress' Presentation (Fuck!)
• Soccer practice (Fuck!)
• dinner at Simon's place (Damnit!)
• Busy P at Vega (FUCKFUCKFUCK!!!)

Things I Did Instead

• sleep
• cough up green sticky lumps of ???
• drink loads of tea
• take hot steam baths (which I haven't done in like 3 years)
• watch Harry Potter I
• watch Harry Potter II
• watch Harry Potter III
• sleep some more

Things I've consumed

• 17 bags of camomile tea
• 12 bags of black tea
• 10 bags of green tea with lemon
• half a jar of honey
• 5 liters of chicken noodle soup
• 30 Halls® Sugar Free
• 12 pills of Hexokain (and counting...)

And to be honest, the movies weren't even that bad. Of course, no highly intellectual, mind boggling, breathtaking, seat gripping, I-can't-sleep-because-I-have-to-figure-out-this-movie stuff. But they did it's purpose, they entertained.

This night was Pecha Kucha at the Dansk Arkitektur Center in Christianshavn – ten lectures held by designers, artists, architects and musicians each lasting 20 slides x 20 seconds. Making it 6:40 min. of lecture per person. The evening included presentations by people such as the founder of Wonderland Magazine, two guys from Mad Architecture (check their nice video here), photographer Simon Høgsberg, this wonderboy called Emil Hartvig and jewelery designer Alidra Alic. And as you can see, it was quite packed. Maybe because of the popcorn and cookies that were hanging off the ceiling for everyone to take...

This afternoon, we went to something like a 'Christmas Market' organized by the Art Rebels – a Copenagen based group of designers, artists, musician, DJs and other creatives that work together in a big old garage on Islands Brygge really close to my home. Very nice place to get busy. Stine, a girl who's in my class at DKDS is also part of the gang, check her work at Go Ahead Rob Us. But anyways, the past two days they've been producing all kinds of stuff from postcards and posters to bags, pillows and t-shirts. Today they sold their work with all the income going to a charity foundation. Bought a CD mixed by Djuna Barnes, a local electro DJ and also part of the group, as well as some nice Christmas decorations. But I'll show you those some other time.

Saturday Night Chillin' with Chloé, Johannes and Dot.

Played some good ol' indoor soccer last night with Simon and Jonathan and a couple of their friends. Today I walked like a friggin' 80 year old...

200m from my door.