Copenhagen

Friday started with me waking up at 6.30 to get to the CS faculty by 8 as I had made an appointment to play a tabletop role playing game with my friends over Skype and while they started at 9, I had to begin one hour earlier.

It was quite fun - possibly even moreso for my coworkers as they just saw a guy with two computer screens in the staff resting room laughing and occasionally talking in Estonian.

The game lasted for about 4 hours. After that, I went back to my office and told Dominik I would be ready to leave whenever he was. Since he was writing a paper and the deadline is coming up very soon, he had some more work to do so we could only leave about 3 more hours later. However, that was still ok as I also had some unfinished stuff I needed to take care of. We got to Copenhagen at about 6.30 PM.

We settled into the hostel and then got out to catch the metro to the center and to meet up wtih Kaur and his co-workers. We did so about an hour later, in a Pakistani restaurant.

The food was great and so was the conversation. After the round of introductions, the conversation shifted to pornography in less than 5 minutes. One guy then explained how he had had fun with a fake publisher who spammed people with PhD-s to publish their thesis as a book. He first used SciGen to generate a whole thesis.. and when that got published, he then sent Darwins the Origin of species to them.. Nearly verbatim, with just one section added, explaining why he was doing it. That, too, got published. Both are now available on Amazon.com, by the way :) Also, as I was sitting right next to an Australian native, I asked him for some travel tips for my summer vacation.. and got a few quite good ones.

We then went on to have a few beers. At about 1.30, we started heading back. As we heared that Kaur was living in a hotel, where each room was designed by a different artist, we also took a look at his room.. which was quite artsy, being white with black inkblot-like patterns. It also had touchpad light switches so you had to move your finger on them to dim the lights. Fancy, and not at all that expensive.

One nice thing about Copenhagen is its Metro system, for it is open 24 hours. They also have regular ticket inspection - me and Dominik got checked twice during our 4 metro trips.
We got to our own beds at around 2.30.

The next day we took a nice 5 hour walk around the city, visiting the queens palace and the old fortified castle (which was still owned and used by the military, but thankfully open to tourists), also wandering through the main restaurant and shopping streets and finally ending up on the central square next to the Tivoli.

All that in pouring rain. Leather jackets are a godsend, by the way.

When heading back to the hostel, we passed by a protest directed against Scientology. When they realized we cannot speak danish, they explained in english that "Scientology can break up families and ruin lives". Both me and Dominik agreed. "So can any other religion," I added a bit later, when we were alone again, "but the older ones have evolved ways around that most of the time".

The drive back was fairly silent. We were both tired and I was somewhat preoccupied with my thoughts. Why do relationships have to be this complicated? The radio was playing hits from the last 4 decades. "I will survive" seemed most appropriate of the ones that got played. Don't really feel like wollowing in self pity any more, at least. I suppose that is an improvement.