Riding a strange bicycle, my frustration led me to enumerate all the things I like about my own bicycle. It fits - the frame height and shape, the seat height, and the crank length altogether are pretty close to correct. It has a bunch of gears, and even in a flat country that's useful for accelerating without brutalizing your knees. You can shift gears while pedalling - that's nice. It has a rack and pair of panniers, so I can carry a lot of stuff without wearing a backpack or shoulder back. It has clipless pedals (a wonderful misnomer for pedals that clip to metal cleats in one's shoes, because they work like the pedals with the big basket clips that normal shoes fit it) so my feet never slip off the pedals, and I can put a bit of power in the upstroke. It has a real front headlight and red light in the rear that can blink at two rates, though you shouldn't set it blinking because that's illegal. It has brazeons with cages that hold water bottles. It has a bicycle computer which, despite (INCOMPLETE - get link) certain usability issues, often shows time and velocity. It has narrow, high pressure tires so that I don't spend energy flexing the rubber. I can spin the pedals backwards freely, which lets me line up the pedals for a good stomp when the light changes. I have a comfortable, stylish helmet. My bicycle is the thing I miss third.

Peter, the Swede, reports that Swedish women are taller, blonder, and more .... "More Swedish?" I ask. "Yes."

In the duffel bag that I chose to leave in Seattle, after lugging it up and down the West coast from Anchorage to San Diego, was my external hard drive with all my music, as well as my nice, bulky Sony headphones. Regretting the decision, but having left the duffel on an island, I picked up some used CDs in Seattle just before I headed for the airport. The new Peter Gabriel needs a dozen more listens before I reach any conclusions; early Loreena McKennitt sounded like a mistake on the first track and I haven't gone back; a Springsteen tribute album with Dar Williams, Los Lobos, and Johnny Cash is something for the library, not traveling music; The Magnetic Fields is a group that's constantly cited in the local alternative newspapers and The Onion as the sort of band that I should feel stupid and mainstream and ignorant for not having heard. I picked up 69 Love Songs part 2. Aside from the one delightful track I sampled at random at the store, the rest seems deliberately stilted and unmusical. So I guess I wasn't missing much. Later: Okay, after listening a few times I appreciate it a lot more. It holds a tremendous amount of musicality and quite a bit of wit. Not all of it actually sounds good, though. My music is the thing I miss second.

I left my nice Microsoft Natural Pro keyboard in Seattle. It includes a USB hub, has a good angle, and has the correct arrangement of keys (2 1/2-wide, single-high Enter key, 1 1/2-wide \| key just above, and a double-wide, single-high backspace key in the top right; plus the Ins/Del, Home/End, PgUp/PgDn cluster in the classic three-wide, two-high configuration. My only complaint is that it has a numeric keypad, which hardly anybody would notice if it were missing. But I chose to buy a used Thinkpad in part because of the keyboard, which has the full, correct complement of Ins/Del/etc, a full inverted T of arrow keys, and the correct Backspace/\|/Enter configuration. So my keyboard is not the thing I miss most of all.

The eraser-head pointing device isn't bad at all, though my index finger pad started to hurt after two full days of work. But I borrowed a mouse and it's fine. So I don't miss my mouse.

Drivers in Copenhagen are nearly as aggressive as LA drivers, but not as hostile. They honk, swerve, and then go about their business. I suspect the aggressiveness may come from the fact that people who don't particularly want to drive can realistically use public transportation, so the drivers are disproportionately twenty-to-fifty male jerks. But there's still not too traffic overall, and in particular there are very few SUVs. I don't miss SUVs or passive-aggressive Seattle drivers.

I've gotten lost repeatedly. This is in part because I didn't have a map for a few days, and more because, while the intersections are often at right angles, the blocks aren't necessarily square. So I get off-track by a few degrees here and there, and it adds up. In the core area, the distances are small enough that my dead reckoning usually puts me close enough to recognize my surroundings. In the suburbs, at night, and particularly after getting off at the wrong train station without realizing it, this can be a bigger problem. But the map helps (though it took a fair bit of shopping to find a decent, laminated, folding street map), and the city is small, and I'll figure it out, so I only miss street grids a little.

I've looked up an American ex-pat meeting, and though it's at a bar I guess I'll give it a try. Hopefully I'll find somebody with a baseball glove, but I left my own glove and ball in the notorious second duffel. So maybe it'll be frisbee. But eventually I'll get my glove out here. I miss my glove and ball, and Americans.

At lunch with co-workers Simon (Danish) and Peter (Swedish), I asked about regional jokes.

"Of course," Simon answers, "Jutlanders have jokes about Zealanders, and the other way too."
"What about Swedish jokes?" I ask.
"We have Swedish jokes, and they have Danish jokes."
"Do you know if Scandinavians feature in jokes from the rest of the world?"
"No."
"Well, I can't really think of Danish or Finnish or Norwegian jokes, but there are plenty of dumb Swede jokes."

Peter interrupts at this point to gloat at Simon. "At least we Swedes are known. They haven't heard of you."

Public transportation is fairly flawless - buses as nice and as frequent as Hong Kong, better labelled (or maybe it's just easier to read a Roman alphabet), and without the tv advertising. The trains are covered in grafitti, but also well labelled and timely. I don't miss American public transportation.

I bicycled part of the way to Elsinore Sunday. It was mostly sunny and the temperature was perfectly pleasant. I think the land across the water was Sweden. Peter says the train to Sweden takes half an hour and DKK90 ($15). Maybe I'll go to Sweden next Saturday. My landlady (I'm living in a rented room in a townhouse in Emdrup, part of the first ring of suburbs. It's about four miles from downtown, maybe five.

Last week I wandered into a Pakistani Independence Day rally at the main square. I had a semi-coherent conversation with a man who remembered it personally ("Of course! I ran down the street with the flag.") and later relocated to London with his family. He was a bit hard to understand despite forty years in England, though I suspect he might be hard to understand in any language. I don't miss incoherence - I have yet to meet a Dane who couldn't speak fluent English. I've got the accent down on the numbers and "thank you" well enough to fool shopkeepers into answering in Danish, which is pretty counter-productive of me because then I have to say "pardon" and they blink because that doesn't parse because they weren't expecting English, and it's a bit of a snafu before we get back on track in English. I guess I should learn some more words. In particular, I often see stored boasting, "Slutspurt." But I think I'd rather preserve the mystery of that particular word.

A little, toyish purple game console with a lunch pail handle on back, with cartoonish games about a cartoon Peter Pan-esque Link who saves a cartoon princess and a cartoon plumber who collects little bits of smiley-face sunshine to save the sad, sad smiley-face sunshineless town, might be a lot of fun. Only those of us who are very secure in our manhood will ever know.