day 8 part 1 – sunday morning

i shut it down early after a rough day 7, and as a result i woke up the earliest i’ve woken up on this trip (8am! hooray!) and got productive pretty fast. i posted a bunch of photos and organized my flickr, and then i went in search of a solid cup of coffee to compete with coffee collective, the leader in the clubhouse for coffee shops.

my search took me to risteriet, a cool little shop on what looked to me to be a pretty hipster street about 10 minutes from where i’m staying. the coffee was fast and cheap, and they had a good amount of beans for sale and some interesting equipment, too. they even had cuban beans, which i guess isn’t much of a novelty for anyone except an american now that i write it out. however, the coffee just wasn’t that interesting. it might have been that they use the simplest beans for their filtered coffee, it might have been that things weren’t that fresh – but i was reminded of the lady at coffee collective telling me that the lighter roasts have more subtlety and flavor, and i tasted something that was dark and lacked both those things.

now, to be fair, the bar is really high and risteriet didn’t meet it, but it was a pretty solid cup of coffee to get the day going.

from there, i walked over to aamanns (which apparently has a location in nyc), walking through some of the central parks in copenhagen. i walked up to the rosenborg castle and saw some danish royal guards doing the whole marching band thing, and wandered around the castle gardens and the neighboring botanical gardens for a little bit. i kept walking up towards aamanns, and saw some cool residential side streets before settling down for a lunch of smørrebrød, which are basically pieces of bread with a bunch of stuff piled on top. i had the herring, pork belly, and roast beef. all were excellent, with the herring being the most delicious of the 3. i also had an elderflower soda, which was pretty interesting and tasty, though not a flavor i’m going to miss when i’m back home.

after a slow meander back to the apartment through a half-alive central copenhagen, i found the liverpool game on a stream and i’m going to watch and read through the afternoon. one of the things yesterday made apparent is that i’m running myself ragged through this city, and i should take it easy every now and again. it helps that everything is shut down here after 2pm on sundays, so unless i want to go to a bar, i’m taking it easy until dinner.

i walked back through a few busy squares and past a lot of closed shops, and there is something interesting to me about how the pop culture here is so american-influenced, if not out and out american. i can’t imagine what it would be like to have popular culture so dominated by a foreign country, and i wonder if that is partially why food has taken such a prominent place here in copenhagen. books, music, movies – these will never be exported from denmark matching the pace and quality required to keep up with america. but food! maybe food can?

or maybe there are niches in all of these things, and i like food more than i care for danish movies. i don’t know.

i have been struggling with my camera choices. the rx100-ii has been my main camera, and the d800s has been unused since norway. traveling alone, i tend to want to be discrete and quick, almost – i want to capture moments quickly, rather than carefully compose a scene. i think this is because of traveling alone, i’m not sure. the rx100-ii also isn’t making life easy by producing very excellent photos very quickly. it seems an ideal traveling camera for me, while i still need to sort out what to do with my d800s other than night skies and sunrises. i guess ‘struggle’ isn’t the right word, but this is both an excellent finding and annoying all at once.

liverpool is having a weird game against swansea right now, and maybe i’ll go down the street for a pint and the second half, or maybe i’ll lounge around here until i can think of something better to do. dinner is right next to coffee collective, and a return trip isn’t out of the question at all.