: topic:Life Abroad (CPH)

Copenhagen Good

ccseabass — 2008-12-22T18:26:00Z

Less than 48 hours for a visit were definitely not enough, but still managed to get quite a bit done :D

Thursday

10:30 - arrived at Kastrup Airport
12:00 - arrived at my old flatshare, met Simon, Jonathan, Jonas
12:30 - Simon and his brothers have shooting for a short TV news part
14:00 - meeting Emil and Sebastian, eating Shawarma with the boys
15:00 - hanging at Emil's place drinking tea
16:30 - Christmas shopping with Sebastian and Simon
19:00 - driving to Simon's house
20:00 - dinner with the Lajboschitz', table tennis and chilling
22:00 - Simon passes out on the couch (Bachelor thesis...)
23:00 - 2 1/2 hour movie with Rebecca and Sebastian
02:00 - sleep

Friday

11:00 - waking up
12:00 - chat with Carlos, new flatmate at Simon's place
14:00 - a stroll through the town, to DKDS, eating hot dogs etc.
16:30 - playing Tekken Tag Tournament at the flatshare
18:00 - scary incident with Carlos' employer
19:00 - getting ready for the night
20:00 - meeting Johannes at the Christmas dinner at DKDS
22:00 - concert by Klezmer band Mames Babegenush at Global
00:30 - chilling at Johannes'
01:00 - meeting the gang at Rust
02:30 - getting drunk
04:15 - still at the club
04:30 - taxi to the flatshare, packing, catching the metro
06:20 - on the plane to Berlin
10:25 - arriving in Nürnberg

Phew.

The Copenhagen Wall

ccseabass — 2008-02-24T19:43:00Z

This was one of my walls back in my room in Copenhagen. Collected and piled this up during my 5 month stay there: posters of events I've been to, entry tickets, scribbles, findings from the street, postcards, presents. Just thought I'd share it.

Next Time I'm Renting A Car...

ccseabass — 2008-01-25T22:25:00Z

The odyssey started last Monday. After having finished my illustration work the weekend before, I had to present all my semesters work to two of my teachers. All in all a very relaxed atmosphere, nice chat and some long awaited, legitimate and useful critique! Well, you didn't get that often at DKDS usually everything was always just 'great', 'nice' and 'very good' so I was actually quite happy about it. The rest of the day I spent cleaning up my workspace, having a chat with Kári and going shopping for sweaters (got two). In the evening I met Henrik for one last time to have a couple of beers and good conversation. In the end we wondered, why we hadn't done that more often in the past...

Tuesday started quite late, as I couldn't get my ass out of bed. After finally having managed, I started cleaning up my room, taking off all the things I had hung up on the walls. Then some dish washing and trying to dissemble my bike I had to take it halfway apart in order for it to be allowed on the plane. Actually all simple tasks: let the air out of the tires, cover the chain, turn the handlebar and take the pedals off. Actually. The first three were in fact no problem. But taking those damn pedals off. Fuck. I was trying for one hour with arguably crappy tools when Simon came down and told me, we had to get ready for practice. Ok, next day then.

After playing soccer with the boys one last time, I met up with Guilom, Dora, Gabo, Manu, Andrea, Mirco and Kári for good food (by Dora) and wine (by Mirco). I was one hour late because one of our car's headlights broke and it took Jonathan almost 45 to repair it. Anyways, after an undefinable but good rice dish and some amazing apple pie we headed on to 'The Moose', one of our favorite because cheapest and coziest bars in Copenhagen. And to my surprise there were Yoshi, Johannes, Dot and Schwan! I actually didn't expect to see them again, as I wouldn't have known when this was my last night in the city. Andrea had called them, but hadn't told me about it. Cooles Ding :) I just felt a little bad, as they'd already been waiting for one and a half hours, but I just didn't know! Anyways, nice to see these guys again and have some nice last talks. In the end I was home at 4. But not before having seen Mirco hook up with 5 girls in one night (!), Kári who is a husband and father of a little girl as wasted as I've never seen him before and Andrea intimately kissing and leaving with some Danish dude. Plus some fun with the light switch and invitations to Paris, New York and Iceland. Hehe.

Next day I got up at 11, planned was 9 not taking into account the saying goodbye to Jonathan who left for work at 7 in the morning. It took me three hours to shower, clean up the room and pack everything up. My taxi would come at 16:45 and I wanted to grab some late lunch with Simon. Left me with about one and a half hours to get those damn pedals off my bike. More than enough. Wrooong. After two hours of helplessly trying to get them loose, bringing the bike to the bike store at the corner ("Sorry, we don't have that tool here..."), screaming, freaking out and panicking, I just let them be. Fuck it. After all, no one complained at the airport. But this completely useless waste of time left me with only half an hour to grab some food with Simon. Our choice were greasy french fries and burgers from the place around the corner. After talking too much and having to wait too long for our food we had approximately 6 minutes to eat, before the taxi arrived. Sad but also funny in a way :) After a short goodbye I was off to the airport.

And that's where the real trouble started. My bags + bike + backpack + skateboard, which took me half an hour to get to the check in counter, were to heavy. Allowed are 32kg per bag, everything above wont go on the plane because insurance for the airport staff doesn't cover injuries from lifting such heavy loads. I had 34kg and 27kg. That meant: repacking. On the airport. Are you fucking kidding me?! No choice though. If I wanted to get on that plane I had to. After 5 tries of weighing and always having one of the bags slightly above 32, I finally managed to get both at around 31,8kg. Luckily enough the check in lady was very nice and patient with me. After this mess, I had to of course pay for my overweight luggage. Can't do that at the check in, have to do it at another counter. Great. Went there, showed my ticket (40 minutes to take off), wanted to pay the extra 20€. With my credit card. "We don't take credit cards, only cash." WTF?! Fuck you!!! "Ok, where's the next ATM?" "Oh, only three gazillion kilometers that way, past all these endlessly long queues and through these 5 million people." Maybe not that bad, but still ten minutes off my time.

30 minutes to get through security and on that plane. No prob, security's always quick at Copenhagen Airport. Wrooong. A friggin' 150m long cue! After ten minutes and moving 50m I asked one of the hostess ladies, if there was a way to cut the line. Thankfully there was. Running another 2 kilometers, cursing and sweating, I reached the gate. Only to find another 100m queue! The boarding hadn't started. The plane was late.

The Peeps * The Homies * The Clique * The Posse

ccseabass — 2008-01-22T14:41:00Z

The Who-is-Who of the Copenhagen high society I hung with.

Pete (UK) Chris (SCO) Henrik (NOR) Aske (DK) Lasse (DK)
Guilom (F) Dora (F) Gabo (ESP) Manu (ESP) Andrea (SUI)
Edu (ESP) Yoshi (J) Johan (SWE) Schwan (GER) Leo (GER)
Mirco (I) Pauli (FIN) Johannes (GER) Anita (NOR) Detti (HUN)
Jeppe (DK) Kári (ISL) Dot (USA) Chloé (F) Robin (SWE)
Simon (DK) Jonathan (DK) Sebastian (DK) Julie (DK) Lulu (DK)
Emil (DK) Rafael (DK) Ted (DK) Malte (DK) Astrid (DK)
Benjamin (DK) Rebecca (DK) Moi (GER)

The first row are people I still have contact with from the hostel. Everyone else up until Robin are friends from school or people I know through them. Simon and Jonathan are my flatmates, and everyone after are friends of theirs.

The Rik

ccseabass — 2008-01-22T02:46:00Z

Hanging with Henrik the coolest Norwegian I know for maybe the last time in a long time. Don't forget to mix hard liquor in plastic bottles!

Kitchen Stories

ccseabass — 2008-01-20T17:07:00Z

Chillin' with the French-Spanish connection.

Slumber Party!

ccseabass — 2008-01-19T15:51:00Z

Yesterday, I've probably been to my last Sabbath for a long time. But oh my, it was good. Jonathan's mom had cooked and there were about 20 friends stuffing themselves with calf fillet, sweet potatoes with pesto, lemon zucchini, mango salad with coriander, thyme white beans, horseradish salad, onions baked into pastry and finally one big chocolate and one big cheese cake with whipped cream. Not to forget the well picked red wine. God, I'm gonna miss these big dinners...

What you see below is the start of a 5 hour "Die Hard" marathon we started afterwards at our place, watching the whole trilogy with Martin, Sebastian, Julie and Simon. Except for Simon and me, no one made it through every film :D In the end, everyone just fell asleep in front of the TV. And how was the next morning started? You got it, playing some good ol' FIFA 2007 before even getting up.

Feeling Lucky

ccseabass — 2008-01-10T15:45:00Z

Ok, now it's official. Sad but true, I'll be leaving Copenhagen on the 23rd of January :( heading towards Den Haag. Not much time to mourn though when I'm arriving, I'll be already three weeks late for classes. Doh. But believe it or not, it seems I already have a place there. The international coordinator of KABK my new school gave me an email adress and it worked out. No flatshare which is kinda sad, as I'm not used to living alone (yes...sympathy...please.....). But hey, it's central, it's new, it's close to the school, it's furnished AND it's cheap. Well at least compared to the outrageous rent here. And since I already saw myself spending the first two weeks in Holland in hostels, I'm not gonna complain.

Until then I still have to finish the Illustration project. I'm gonna try to bail out of doing the essay and the other big practical work as I just don't have any time left. Also, Philippe's coming today. So I'm neither going to able to work nor update the blog the next 5 days. Well, maybe I will. I don't know. We'll see. Argh.

TIME. I NEED MORE TIME.

Guess Who's Back

ccseabass — 2008-01-06T22:26:00Z

Ain't Slim Shady. Ain't yo mama and ain't yo daddy either. Ok ok, cut the bullshit. I'm back in Copenhagen for another two or three weeks til I'm moving on to The Hague, Netherlands. Bought some bright green headphones at the airport upon arrival they're sooo cooool after having trashed my nice big-ass-I'm-pretending-I'm-a-DJ Sonys in Switzerland (which I didn't notice until today...) and then came home to an empty fridge. Great after five hours of travel with only a tiny bag of chips and a greasy sandwich to eat (thank you Air Berlin). I love my roomies.

Anyways. Next weeks gonna be stressful like hell need to work my ass off to finish my two projects, gotta write an essay, Philippe's coming to visit on Thursday, I don't have a place in Holland yet, ~~don't know how I'm gonna get all my stuff respectively myself there, can't reach the international coordinator~~, I'm broke, I'm tired, I'm totally unmotivated, plus there's something/someone that's thrown me quite off balance. Basically I'm completely fucked.

Still I'll try to update the blog on a more regular basis again, after having slacked off pretty much all of the past two weeks. Foremost I'll try to post a little more on the week in the Alps. Hope everyone had a good start into 2008. Cheerio and Peas.

World Press Photography

ccseabass — 2007-12-19T20:57:00Z

Last Sunday Felix and I went to the World Press Photo Exhibition here in Copenhagen. It's a touring exhibition and I highly recommend seeing it if it hits a town near you (for example, it's in Valencia 7th of March). Lot's of disturbing photos from war zones and other catastrophe ridden areas, I could literally feel cold shivers running down my back...

The Fruits Of Labor

ccseabass — 2007-12-17T01:37:00Z

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.

Sorry For The Wait

ccseabass — 2007-12-16T01:19:00Z

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.

Hanukkah

ccseabass — 2007-12-08T13:43:00Z

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!

Designskolens Julemarked

ccseabass — 2007-12-08T13:30:00Z

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...

Being Sick Sucks

ccseabass — 2007-12-05T14:49:00Z

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.