The job offer in Copenhagen was always a one-month trial, so I had a one-month ticket. It was obvious within the first week that we had a good fit, but I still had a relatively unchangable return ticket, and also a lot of unfinished business in Seattle. When I left, I was overseeing renovation of my parent's island cabin, which had a rotten bathroom floor from the Eisenhower administration. (No, really. They used a lot of newspaper for insulation, and one headline wrapped around the shower drain pipe said something about Ike sending ships to Indochina to help the French.) And the bathroom was part of the new wing of the cabin.

Scandinavia, charming as it is, can wear thin after a while. There seem only to be about four basic Danish faces, and while a year of China has simply made me hunger to hear Mandarin - especially I love to eavesdrop, even though I can only understand about ten percent, so I if I were reporting back to the CIA my transcipts would read,
A: No, I don't ... ... ...
B: Do you ... ... ... food?
A: Today ... ... ... ...
B: ... ... ... bathroom.

- but a month of Danish and I'm already filing it in the lower half of the beautiful-languages league table. Anyway, although I'm in a groove at work and making minor progress apartment-hunting, I want to take care of stuff at home. Now that the contractors have finished the floor and put in the new water heater, I can wrap up the easy stuff like painting and flooring, and find a new rentor who might pay enough to cover the taxes. And collect my bicycle and music hard drive. Though I fear I've already set my self up for another ordeal: Round trip from the West Coast to Copenhagen for Oct-Dec is US$2500. If I go for one month, it's $600, but that doesn't help me. But, it turns out, I can go to London for 3 months for $600. So I have a round-trip ticket from San Diego to London Heathrow, and a one-way ticket from London Stamsted to Copenhagen for 30 pounds. Of course, Heathrow and Stamsted are something like fifty miles apart, and the shuttle bus web site actually says something semantically equivelent to, "Our shedules (so to sic) are a total joke, you silly wanker" so I've alloted six hours to that leg of the trip. And I'll have my bicycle as emergency fallback. Oh, yeah, so now I'm looking up the bicycle policies for Southwest, United, and easyJet. But it will all be worth it, I keep telling myself, when I casually pass not only the commuter Danes, but also the hard-core spandex-clad messengers on real bikes with real derailleurs. I've been bicycle-commuting in Seattle, and they live in a flat country. (In reality, I frequently get overtaken by little old (blonde) ladies on pseudo-Schwinns. But, thanks to China training, I now give elbow as good as I get against all ages and infirmities when boarding buses and trains. But the Danish messengers don't look like much compared to Seattle's tattooed downtown bicycle messenger corps. I bet hardly any of the Danish riders even have social diseases.)

The first big wrinkle in my plans was the email from the contractor cheerfully announcing that not only were they over budget (not technically true, I guess, because I screwed up and didn't set a ceiling) but were an entire (expletive inserted by me and then deleted) month late because we needed a custom shower stall. Well, no, we had a shower stall, the old one, and it was profoundly dirty and probably easier to replace than clean - unless it turned out to be a custom size!! I would think that a month delay and unknown dollar increase would at least prompt a heads-up email, but then again I'm in the software business, where we perpetrate far worse every day. But then again again, commercial software development is a few decades old, whereas we've been building houses for profit for maybe a bit longer?

So, because the shower stall wasn't there, they didn't finish the electrical and can't do the floor. Since they can't do the floor, they can't paint yet. Since they can't paint yet, they can't put the toilet back yet. (I guess we'll get to find out how much a month of Honey Bucket rental costs.) So I'll be reverse-commuting from friends' apartments in Capitol Hill out to the cabin for a day at a time until it's liveable, at which point I'll have to go back to Denmark. And I'll be trying to work part-time during this, over a modem.

So this has set my mood for the flight back. Then I find out that the flight I remember as a 10 am departure is actually noon, so I've got extra time to kill in the apartment, my third in a month. This one I have all to myself, which is good because it's a small apartment; the owner has gone to Bulgaria for a week. Meanwhile I've managed to partially clog the shower drain, which upon inspection is a hole in the floor leading to a pipe that goes straight down for an undetermined distance. So I can take feeble showers or I can swim. I am of course mortified to leave the apartment in this condition, but the pipe is at least a foot straight down, so I can go shopping for coat-hangers or I can go shopping for toxic drain-cleaning products labelled in a foreign language. I do neither, ultimately; instead, I apologize in a note so that it won't be an untimely surprise. Surely she will have a tried-and-true solution. And she doesn't know the previous landlady to warn her - the previous landlady (the new-age hippy who's owned her apartment for over two decades) and I got on well enough that she invited me to stay there again, at a much lower monthly rate, when I got back if I didn't have a place, and this is my fallback if there is a snag in negotiations with the prospective new landlord I met the night before I left, who has a perfect sublet walking distance from the office but wants a half the rent off-contract - wants half-rent for twelve months in advance, in cash. Um, yeah. The Danish Kroner isn't worth too much more than a Chinese Yuan, but I'm being paid ten times more per month - and everything, housing included, is at least ten times more, so we're talking real money now. I'll email back a counter-offer and see what she says.

Anyway, I have time to kill, but I have very efficiently left my power adapter plug at the office, so I just go to bed early and wake up early, saving both laptop batteries and my new books for the flight. Since I don't have an assigned seat, I figure that getting to the airport three hours early will be a good thing. And mass transportation to the airport takes $3 - one bus and one train, totalling four zones, or two punches on my two-zone card - and well under an hour.

I don't know which was a weirder sight: the Boeing 737 in Aeroflot livery, or an identical place at the next gate from Estonian Air. Estonia is almost adjacent to Finland. Peter says that Swedish is the most beautiful language, except maybe for Norwegian, which always sounds happy; Finnish always sounds depressed. Danish is too gutteral for him.

At the airport, SAS is refusing to show checkin information for my flight (and just my flight), so after cooling my jets for half an hour I just go up to one of the thirty counters to try to check in anyway. Naturally I've picked a short line. Naturally I've picked a line with exactly one family in it, a family with two cats. Ten minutes later, they're finished, and I check in. But still no seat assignment. (I've had the ticket for four months now; I couldn't get a seat assignment when I bought it through Travelocity; I couldn't get a seat assignment when I checked in to Alaska in Seattle, I couldn't get a seat assignment when I inquired at the SAS desk at the airport in Copenhagen after arrival. I go to the gate and of course there isn't anybody at the desk - it's almost two hours before checkin. It's early in the morning, but I feel my buddha nature slipping away.)

Then we're all hearded partway back up the terminal for a security check. There are signs on the walls everywhere in Copenhagen airport (a lovely structure marred only by its stench, which results from the European insistince, shared by almost all civilized peoples except the Californians, of permitting - almost demanding - smoking in all public and private areas. Yes, please, I would like your stinking poisonous gas in my face. Please, impregnate my clothes too. When this decrepit guy at the laundrymat took time out from scoping the girls to light up, I almost cried. Even when I go to wash the smell from my clothes, this is not permitted? You have a long way to go, Europe) warning that there are no gate announcements. What this means in practice is that there are still loud, intrusive announcements in two or three languages every several minutes, but instead of a few of them being relevant, none of them are. Unless you are passenger mumble mumble on British Airways, in which case you should proceed urgently to gate C14.

So SAS has taken this new policy to heart, and now communicates to its passengers by having someone murmer quietly to one or two members of the crowd, relying on the speed of rumor. So we were herded out of the gate area, into a non-line in the wrong place, and then into a line several feet away from the first line, and then Newark-bound passengers were seperated from Dulles-bound passengers, and then it was let slip that those of us without seat assignments should be at the other counter. The one that won't open until an hour before scheduled departure. Well, we wouldn't want to take some Scandinavian Air Serviceperson from their morning Weinerbrod and cigarette. In case you haven't noticed, I've developed a serious antipathy to SAS employees, who to a woman seem to be arrogant jerks unhappy to be forced to deal with actual paying masses. Perhaps they'd rather be out designing mobile phones or furniture or something.

Anyway, after handing over my ticket and asking for the worst possible seat just so that I wouldn't have to wait, I had to wait for forty-five minutes and ended up with a window seat. If you think I got my vegetarian meal, you would be wrong. I put the pork patties into the coffee cup and ate the veggies and the cake. Already I'm feeling much better about this EasyJet leg to my next Copenhagen trip. As I told my seatmate from Clairemont (SD, not LA), when she expressed frustration over our additional half-hour delay once on board while they searched for incorrectly routed luggage in the hold that turned out to never have been loaded in the first place (the sort of situation that makes you wish they'd just lied and said that one of the wings had cracked a bit and they'd had to add more duct tape, because then you wouldn't mind the delay so much), "At least with EasyJet you're not paying for the service you're not getting."

Dulles was fine - I gorged myself at Friday's, believe it or not, on cheese sticks and a bbq garden-burger plus sweet 120V from a conveniently located outlet for the ThinkPad. When I asked a guy behind a desk if the mailboxes at Dulles were past security or before security, he said they had ripped out all of the mailboxes and he actually sounded upset about it. So I asked him if he would mind mailing my postcard and he said sure. Then I said people were much nicer at Dulles than Newark.

Things really turned around on the journey when I picked up a new book. I had gotten a heavy paperback of Godel Escher Bach, which I hadn't really penetrated when it was handed to me at a ludicrously improbable age (thanks for the vote of confidence, dad), and a light sf/fantasy short story collection by an author I whom I had liked in collaboration ten years before. This latter choice was an obvious mistake in hindsight, and I left the book mostly unread on the airplane. But in Dulles, I picked up "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them." I've often found Al Franken unfunny in the past; unlike people like Mike Myers, who seem funny even when they aren't, and Jon Stewart, who isn't innately funny like Mike Myers but manages to always pull something funny out of his ass, when Al Franken isn't funny he has nothing to fall back on. Happily, that isn't a problem with this book because he's always funny. I've been biting my hands to stop laughing so loudly that I annoy my cabinmates. If you want to know the basic facts of how extreme the radical right is and how extensively it's penetrated and captured the mainstream, but you don't want to be driven suicidal or homicidal in the process, read his book. It's clear, actually researched, and after Franken writes something especially inflamatory, such as a chapter detailing Clinton's extensive antiterrorism project (a Reagen administration counter-terrorism ambassador says in 2000, "Overall, I give them very high marks. The only major criticism I have is the obsession with Osama, which made him stronger) and the Bush administration's stunningly complete abandonment of policy, which including everything from inattention to abandoning already drafted anti-terrorism plans to outright budget cuts, and was naturally followed by reality-inverting blame for Clinton, he follows with a nice tension-reliever like:

But, you know what, I don't want to get into a whole partisan politics thing here. Not in this book, anyway. We'll save that for my next book, I Fucking Hate Those Right-Wing Motherfuckers!, due out in October 2004.

And then, as we were chasing the sunset and losing (as a bit of geometry and a calculator and the knowledge that the earth is basically spherical and 8000 miles in diameter and rotates every 24 hours, jets fly at about 600 mph, and our route was at about 45 degrees longitude will tell you we must) a very nice Alaskan Airlines stewardess handed me a tray, asking, "You had a vegetarian meal?" And right on top of the rice and the brown sauce were big cubes of shiny white tofu. Bliss! I had a huge grin and I got my travelling chopsticks from my bag and ate it all and read Al Franken and tried not to laugh tofu up my nose