One very nice thing is that the public clocks work. I've seen dozens of clocks, and all but two showed the correct time. The downside, though, is that some of these clocks are attached to church bells, and those work just as well. My new room is a block away from a big ole' church. The bells were charming when they rang 8 pm. Less charming when they rang in 11 pm. Even less so at midnight. Six am I didn't appreciate. But they don't ring every hour, which I guess is good - certainly it's quieter - but confuses. Sometimes there's a single bell at half past. Last Thursday there were one hundred and twenty nine rings at a bit past seven. Saturday morning, one hundred and thirty-something rings at a time I can only define as "early morning." I've been told that Danish counting is base-twenty, but that seems insufficient explanation for the perfidy of the bell-ringers.

(Let's take a moment to applaud the Chinese counting system, shall we? Base ten and completely simple. Four is four. Ten is ten. Forty is "four ten." Forty-four is "four ten four." There aren't even teens. It's brilliantly simple.)

I'm getting used to the bicycle lanes, which are both a blessing and a curse. You have a dedicated lane on most streets, but when you turn you have to remember to watch out for real bicycle traffic as well as cars and pedestrians. Making a left turn can take an extra light cycle as you coast to the far corner, pivot awkwardly, and wait.

I went to the US embassy early last week to get more pages in my passport. A year of Chinese efficiency had used up almost all the pages in a new passport. (Adam Katz, I still have one of your visas in my passport. I hope you got that straightened out.) The American embassy in Copenhagen is really really ugly - a squat fortress with office-building-like glass stylings, and lots of concrete barriers and construction debris. And beefy Danish security guards. Where are the Marines? I got this nice patriotic surge looking at the flag and then there weren't Marines. What the hell do I pay double-taxes for if not for sharply-dressed Marines at the embassy? And then the extent of the first security check was, "where are you going?" "I'm going to my embassy." "oh, American. Go ahead." So if you want to rush the embassy, just practice one or two phrases until your accent is eliminated.

The second security check was five feet later, and I had to surrender my laptop, my Palm Pilot, and my keys, and go through a metal detector, just to get into the passport services office. Turns out I can't go anywhere but the little service room, which has mostly unhappy-looking Danes and tennis magazines. The library is long-closed, and the very pretty gardens didn't look open. I filled out a form, handed over my passport, and read tennis magazines for half an hour until I got my passport back, twenty blank pages fatter. Happily, this service is free, so I highly recommend it as morning entertainment to any Americans abroad, particularly those homesick for American hospitality, Newark-style.

Last weekend Peter's friend Bogdan, a Pole living in Philadelphia, came to visit on the way home for vacation, so we went to Sweden for the day. Peter eagerly pointed out how much better everything was in Sweden, but really it seemed about the same. The bathroom at the restaurant where we had lunch does deserve special mention, though. The weather was amazingly pretty so we were all sitting at outdoor tables on the main square in Malmo, and I headed into the empty retaurant to take care of business. I saw a waist-high cement pillar labeled "W.C." at the center of a descending spiral staircase. You go down the stairs and you're in this beautiful, ultra-post-modern frosted-glass fantasy of a basement bathroom. The door to the mens' room is a sheet of glass blocks six feet wide, permanently anchored to the floor at a forty-five degree angle to the opening. I was very impressed and hoped that perhaps Sweden was secretly a nation of palatial bathrooms, but sadly the other accomodations I saw that day were not of that caliber.

It turns out the Sweden and Denmark are more or less the same. The Danes were a tribe out of Sweden, and once they conquered Zealand and Jutland they started their own country, with the same language as Sweden, and naturally there was nothing for the two nations to do but go to war with each other over and over for hundreds of years. The church we visited in Lund (north of Malmo, but not as far north as Helsingborg, which is across the water from Helsinore in Denmark) was famous for the Bishop, who was actually Danish, because at the time that chunk of Sweden was conquered, and the Bishop is famous for discovering the Danish flag, alleged to be the first national flag in the world. It's red with a white cross, and it fell from the sky and landed on or near the Bishop, and that's how we all came to have flags.

The consequences of my failure to maintain, even for two hours, my oath to foreswear pastries in Denmark has surprisingly not had disastrous consequences, perhaps because the omnipresent pastry shops (look for the pretzel shape on a sign) all offer the same selection, and I can only eat so many chocolate croissants. Real decadence is much more expensive and not offered at every corner. In fact, if you take price into account, I was much happier with the dining options in Guilin. There's Danish food (not much for vegetarians after the potatoes), shawarma (middle-eastern - pretty good because you can get falafel in pita), pizza, and McDonald's. I tried an Indian restaurant tonight and it was fine if not inspiring, and US$20. The Thai food has been disappointing, and it's really hard to get tofu unless you cook it yourself. The fancy department store supermarket had jars of tofu at US$5 for half a block. Um. Come on, guys, it's just tofu. But their dark chocolate truffle, at US$1 each, was so good that I ate one and was made happy and content, both extremely rare states for me.

In my travels, I'm not learning languages so much as learning how to fake languages while communicating. On the way back from Frederick County Town Hall, where I registered for my id number and health insurance (I had to pick a doctor at random - I looked for the least Danish name on the theory that immigrant doctors have more to prove), I tried to pop in to a little place for some Thai food. They had lunch boxes for US$5. "No meat," I asked the extremely jaded, very Thai-looking woman of uncertain age and function by the door, who might well have been from the porno business next door except that she seemed to want to take my (lunch) order. She launched into a description of the different lunch choices, which seemed superfluous both because they had pictures and because her language of choice was indeterminate. When I thought I heard "chicken," I interrupted. "No gai." She stopped, puzzled. "Tofu?" This got me directions, mostly in English, to a different Thai restaurant. "Ahh. Sawa-di-kap" (hello/goodbye) and I steepled my hands in front of my face and bowed in traditional Thai style as I left, which got me a grin and a punch on the shoulder.

Denmark is expensive! The basic plan for Danes seems to be that your standard of living for a given month is your income (less forty-five percent), and that you don't bother to save because taxes are high and social security is plentiful. This seems like an exaggeration/over-simplification - taxes aren't that terribly high, for one, but all the same I don't expect to save much money here unless the dollar really crashes. Which I'm hoping for - I get paid in Kroner.

The office is in an five-floor brick 1859 trading house on Havnegade, which means harbor street. So the water is directly across the street, and there are some public tie-ups. The whole time I've been here, there's been a medium-sized sailboat with a Swedish flag tied up in front of our building. We saw the owner once or twice - he looks like a stereotypical mad Swedish sailor - lanky, middle-aged, a deep weathered tan, a bunch of curly hair, and little round glasses. Once he was drinking tea, and once he was doing boat stuff, and Simon says he saw him yelling at tourists. We're afraid of him. We want to know why he's been parked in Denmark for three weeks. Other boats have come and gone and he's still there.

The history of US foreign interventions in the last century is filled with stories in which the US first tried to build liberal institutions in this or that country, saw it was going to be either really tough or unsustainable, and then settled for dictators or autocrats who were thought could secure our interests for the time being.
-- Josh Marshall