copenhagen and helsingborg

hej from jes and steve in sweden. yeah, just got a ferry to sweden yesterday. as you do, when you're IN EUROPE.

so, boys and girls, it is august 18 and the end of the party is just around the corner, 24 days specifically. we're expecting to be in scandinavia for a bit longer, it's gotenborg tomorrow which is a supposedly very trendy town a couple of hours away, then stockholm for 5 nights, then hopefully a ferry to helsinki where we have no accommodation and might curl up with a bum in a trainstation. UN-PC!!!! its because of no uni. dont judge me.

now i will tell you a tale of a boy and a girl who have a romantic reunion at the arrivals terminal of copenhagen airport and all which happened around it.

from my point of view: i was worried that the months of wear and tear backpacking may have slightly diminished my aesthetic appeal/smell. so i went with a canadian girl called larissa to a bathhouse about 20 minutes walk from my hostel. steve wants me to mention at this time that i saw fake boobs in the changeroom, though i dont think its such a vital detail. hennyway. they were really delicious baths with two salt pools, massage chairs, a sauna and a steamroom which are a good challenge and some uv light chairs which were pointless and made me feel like a lizard at the dentist. so we swanned around feeling glamorous, and then got HAIRCUTS!! so i would be all prettied up for the reunion. unfortunately the hairdresser was an insane french lady who mostly made me bald and uncomfortable so it was a waste of about 320 thousand australian dollars.

steve's point of view: being the stupid backpacker i am, i checked out of the london hostel i was in on time... meaning i had about 9 hours to kill with a big big backpack. so, i put that pack down behind the counter at the hostel, read a bollocks novel i brought with me, ate some fantastic pickle and cheese sandwiches, looked in a museum (victoria and albert museum... lots of clothes from old old times), then got a train to Gatwick airport at 1 o'clock. I'd now successfully killed four and a half hours. On top of this the showers at the hostel had the worst water pressure i'd ever experienced, meaning my cleanliness was at best questionable when I plonked myself down on the floor of the crappest airport in London (I've never been to Luton or the one starting with S so don't quote me). I finished the bollocks novel. The plane that picked me up was relatively nice, but I couldn't understand the lady with the food so i didn't eat: really really cultured of me, i know. at about 11 pm, the doors of copenhagen airport arrivals thingamajig opened and...

SMEE 'GAIN: i caught the train to ze airport at about 9pm after drinking 6 orange fantas at an irish pub to keep me buzzing. oh, le waiting!!!! the peering and the waiting and the looking at the screens. v. painful. but at last!! le steve! le steve pushes his way past some old people and a disabled man and runs, runs! and attacks! argh! oh, it was amour fou or something. and i was very very happy.

le steve: THERE WAS THE JESSICA! All hair-cut and trim-looking from her months of travel. Grinning away (as usual) and looking all clean and smiley. It was all an act of course - she was only clean because I was there. Subsequently, she's taken about 3 showers in a week. If that.

yessica: 3 showers is enough for a smell of only one or half metre radius and if people get that close its their own fault.

enough of the silly narrative!!


in copenhagen:
tuesday:: wellz. it rained and rained. we went for a decent walk around the main square and streets, steve ate a danish hotdog with allll the toppings, including pickles and onions and mustard. for lunch we had pizza and matilde chocolate milk, because denmark is stupidly expensive. we ended up spending a lot of this day inside becuase of le rain. the hotel was OK, BUT A BIT WEIRD. because the lady from the desk was NOT normal. shouting at all her staff in front of customers etc, workplace awkwardness for all. cept our room had a fridge which was pretty cool because we needed somewhere to put the ben and jerryz.

the next day:: we visited christiania which is a free town in the middle of copenhagen. it used to be a military base, and then when they didnt use it anymore some hippies got in there and declared independence, maybe in the 70s? since then it's apparently deteriorated into an excuse for drug selling and emos congregating (its main st is called pusher st which is interesting) but we still found it reasonably charming. there's obviously a big push against the hard drug selling within the community as there are big signs with pictures of people punching needles that say 'say no to hard drugs' etc but i guess its still a problem. there's a lot of weed floating around though. we had some beers with a spanish guy and a newzealander who are living and working in norway, and then we wandered home. for lunch we had delicious sandwiches with avocado mousse!! AND ZEN WE SAW BATMAN!!!!!
i didnt really like it that much but i can understand its greatness. heath is really scary but personally i thought christian bale was lame. aaron eckhart did his classic starts good, turns evil, but still with good that he seems to do in every movie. it was a bit dumb, but pretty scary and sadistic.

thursday:: something which was so boring we cant remember it.

friday:: museum, tivoli. museum was boring. TIVOLI WAS GRATE. biiiiig rollercoaster zoom!!! upside down zoom!! aaaaarrrrgggghhhhh!!! lots of money gone zoom!!!!! aaaaarrrrghhhhh!!!!!. donuts and bagels zoom.

saturday:: carlsberg factory = dumb but two free beers equalss ZOOOOOM.

sunday:: train from copenhagen to helsingor, the location of hamlet's castle on the sea border of denmark and a 20 minute ferry to helsingborg in sweden. hung around for about an hour on the trampoline in the back of our bed and breakfast until katerina the eccentric but lovely owner returned. she showed us EVERYTHING we could possibly have wondered about the building, including how to turn the keys and how to wipe our bottoms but then she went away and it was normal again. helsingborg is a really small town with a nice beach but grey weather, so we walked without swimming, bought brownie from the supermarket like true fatties, and ate soup for dinner.

monday:: I WENT horseriding, all day. katerina owns two palamino ponies! i was too fat for mine i suspect, and very bad at cantering, but it was still fun. steve couldnt come unfortunately, but i really want him to because its very exhilarating. for lunch we had thai food then watched the jumping horses in the olympics and katerina told us everything about it because she is retired and has time to know about these things.

steve's two bob worth: copenhagen, hey. twas verry nice. drank lots of juice, ate nice cheap beakfast every day and walked heaps. It's a funny joint - big old buildings with weirdly blatant advertising all over them. the canals are gorgeous, the people oddly attractive... really, all of them. Christiania was quite cool, particularly the sign at the 'exit' saying 'YOU ARE NOW ENTERING THE EU'. What else? Ah, Tivoli. Why oh why doesn't John So, or whatsisname Brumby,put more money into Luna Park in Melbs? Tivoli, basically an amusement park, is the centre of all of Copenhagen's social scene - it has killer rides, lots of food and drink and amazing bands playing... the friday before i arrived the Flaming Lips played! Would have loved that. There are ponds and trees and bars and retaurants, it's like a little town with rollercoasters around it. amazing rollercoasters. this one, called the demon, had a big warning sign with arrows pointing to a little man and crosses all over his body. you weren't allowed on if you'd eaten more than 1 hotdog in the last three days. I'd eaten one, so i passed. i usually pass things. the demon went upside down and inside out and was the best thing ever. decided not to buy the photo taken of us on it because, well, we didn't have our photo-faces on and looked mighty odd. I've got some amazingly good memories of Copenhagen: hot dogs (the Danish national diet it seems, some of which are wrapped in bacon!), kebab shops on every corner (which i didn't touch... out of character perhaps), turkish buffet restaurant food that almost killed us, lovely buildings, a great section in the National Museum about toys (not boring, interesting and fun, if in an all-too-cutesy way), good beer and friendly people. And of course the beautiful Jessica. Missed her so much that any country would have been amazing I guess... Loved it. Helsingborg is small, but somewhat wealthy, like Porsea or something. A lot of BMWs, AUDIs, expensive-arse cars floating about. While Jes was riding the small horse, I looked at bigger ones and walked about thnking "so this is Sweden, hey?" No one answered, but when a lady said hi to me and muttered something in Swedish i finally felt like I knew where I was. Denmark was cool as hell, now it's all about the Swedish, the people that like to say they used to own everywhere else in Scandinavia. So nice. So so nice here. Goteborg tomorrow (the party town where all the sewdish musos are from, Jens Lekman etc), then Stockholm. Should be a cracker of a week.

hluv from jes and steve.

PS PLEASE HEMAIL JES

BECAUSE AT SE MOMENT I AM LESS POLPLAR THAN STEVE