Intersection Logs

DSC05672
Originally uploaded by ellarien.

Most of the photos I took in Copenhagen were taken pretty much on the run and there aren't that many of them. This is one of them, from the first morning. The lakes host quite a variety of birds, including swans; we also noticed ducks, coots, a crested grebe, and a couple of maybe-cormorants.

The rest of the photos I'm prepared to post are here.

Long, long day in Copenhagen. If it wasn't for a couple of wives and a secretary, I would have been the only woman around for most of it. Mostly I'm fine with that kind of thing, but when I'm also a long way from any of my values of home, and the sole representative of my institution, it gets a little tiring.

We had dinner in a very noisy and smoky French bar-cafe with a France-Denmark soccer match on the TV. I don't think I've breathed that much passive smoke since I left London. The food wasn't bad, though.

The decor around here, both in the hotel and the institute where the meeting is, runs very much to the sort of featureless square-cornered modernity that went out of fashion in the UK and (as far as I can tell) America some time around 1980; it mixes oddly with the old-fashioned buildings with their narrow hallways, winding stairs, and decorative cornices. The shopfronts sport a surprising amount of random English, enough to make me suggest that it's considered cool or trendy. I can't complain about the general level of English-speaking, however, as it makes life very easy for me as a non-Danish speaker. (I know people who've lived here for years without speaking a word of Danish.) The meeting officially goes on in English, with occasional outbreaks of German.

We're close to the lakes, and this morning saw quite a variety of wildfowl and their young: swans; ducks and ducklings; geese and goslings; coots and baby coots (cootlings?) The coots have special wooden rafts provided on which to build their nests. In the fresh wind, the babies were bouncing around quite a bit on the choppy water, but they didn't seem to mind.

I've taken advantage of having some access to bandwidth to start posting photos to Flickr again, here.. Only last Thursday's and Friday's shots are up so far -- my mother's garden and the Winter Garden and Botanical Gardens in Sheffield.

The broadband here at the hotel is working fine right now; I suspect that, being an open network in a densely built-up area, it gets swamped by the neighbours in the early evening.