My background knowledge of happiness used to be that research shows there's no strong connection between happiness and wealth, that even dirt-poor people were statistically as happy as anybody else, and this surprising information because my own conventional wisdom. Recently I saw statistics that poor people are indeed unhappy, but once you get about US$10,000 per year, happiness flattens out. Here's some data that's even more precise, and it suggests that we have gone full circle back to the idea that, the more money you have, the happier you are.

Here's Dani Rodrik's writeup of the paper. My biggest question, before reading the report, is how distorting is it to group people into income vs happiness by country, instead of in smaller units?

Someone moving to Denmark this fall asked me for tips, so I've written up a list based on what worked, didn't work, or was starting to work for me in my year in Copenhagen. The key problems I experienced as a foreigner in Denmark were isolation and, to a lesser extent, alienation. I think I could have done a better job of it.

1. Learn Danish. Start as soon as possible. Study on your own. Learn vocabulary.
2. Learn Danish. Don't worry about pronunciation - you'll be completely wrong until you get into school. Try to do the level 1 class at KISS because it focuses on some subtleties of sound creation that you will almost certainly never acquire without instruction.
3. Learn Danish. Go to school as much as you can. It's free if you have a CPR number. Avoid KISS unless you thrive under pressure.
4. Make sure that the first words out of your mouth to any Dane are always Danish.
5. Bring your own stuff. Look around your house - anything you are going to need over there you will probably have to buy, and it will cost more there.
6. Read the newspaper. Use it to learn written Danish before you go. My unawareness of local Danish news contributed to the feeling of living in a vacuum.
7. Watch Danish TV and listen to Danish radio. I didn't do this; the cost of forgoing so many hours of ear training exceeded the savings on the TV tax.
8. Go to expat meetings. Meetup.com is one source. You need to make in-the-flesh friends, and network.
9. Spend some time there in the summer so that you have a positive mental image to hold on to the other eleven months.
10. Learn Danish.

Last year I embarked on Plan C, " to move to Europe ... and work on open-source systems for non-profits and universities." One motivation was the job; another was a desire to live in Scandinavia for a while to see what it's like. A month or two ago, on hiatus from Danish class, I realized that my learning and assimilitation had plateaued. I wasn't going to see much more progress in living here until I really mastered the language. And I had three conclusions based on my observations:

First, I wouldn't be seeing substantial return on psychic investment until I had lived here for two or three years more.

Second, there are three types of expatriates in Denmark - "here for work," "here for a job," and "refugee." Out of all three groups, none seemed to have Danish friends unless they were dating or married to a Dane.

Third, my progress learning Danish was very slow because I didn't need or even want to use Danish. This is because I've never felt like I belong here or want to belong here. I've checked it out and it's not my bag. (Aside: the people here are very nice. One phrase I've seen a lot in travel gossip around the world is "the people are nice." In my experience, most people in most places are nice most of the time, as long as you are interacting individual to individual. Humans are nice. People in China are nice; people in the US are nice; people in Europe are nice.)

Since I have no plans to settle here permanently, all this argued against investing another year of my life just to make the year or two after that nicer. The job is still interesting, and we've got some fun projects for the rest of the year, so I'll keep working for Collaboraid. I still want to live in various strange places, and so I updated my essential criteria for selecting a home. There are three. I gotta have friends or family there already, speak the language fluently, and enjoy the weather. That left southern California, so I'm moving back to my birthplace, Los Angeles, from where I'll work remotely, travel back to Copenhagen for a month or so this fall, and not think about the future until I really have to.

Though I do want to get back to studying Chinese. 1 billion native speakers vs 5 million. Hmm.

Thursday night I stopped by the grocery store in the evening to get supplies for enchiladas. This was exciting, because I haven't gotten around to much cooking lately. Also, my previous attempts at refried beans have been so disastrous that I thought I would actually look up a recipe and find out how one is supposed to make that fetching brown paste.

So the lady rang up my 200 crowns of food, and I was bagging groceries in my bike bag (you bag your own groceries in Denmark, and you buy or bring grocery bags, too), and my Dankort debit card was denied. Invalid card. I had 40 crowns on me, so I ended up having to abandon my purchase, with a long line of people staring at me. It was a lot of fun.

A few weeks ago, I upgraded my Dankort from Privat (just a debit card) to a regular Visa. I kept my old card while waiting for a new card with the Visa symbol to arrive in the mail. The PIN showed up first, so I looked at it and did one of three things. Either I memorized it and threw it out, or I realized that I would be completely incapable of remembering something that way so I created a mnemonic and then threw it out, or I put the piece of paper somewhere. When the new card showed up, I couldn't remember which I'd done, and I couldn't remember the new PIN, so when I called to activate it the lady said that she couldn't even reset the PIN - she'd have to send a new card. It should not suprise you to learn that the next day I found the letter with the PIN.

So what happened is that, when the new card was finally mailed Wednesday, my Dankort was invalidated. I didn't expect this because it hadn't happened the first time a Visa was mailed. After the nice lady at the bank finished the forensic work, she suggested that I get a little cash while waiting for the new card. I got a thousand crowns, and last night I paid cash for enchilada fixings and tonight I will feast on Enchiladas. But first I have to go in search of tofu. The store I tried in Amager closed at 4:30 pm weekdays - hopefully it will at least be open today.

That's a big contradiction in Denmark: it was early in adopting real women's lib and having adult members of both sexes in the workplace, but retains by law the shop schedule that only works when each household has a homemaker. The only things you can reliably buy outside of the window of M-F 10-5, Sat 11-2 are snack foods, restaurant meals, and alcohol.

An oft-noted feature of language is that it affords the routine creation of unique, never-before-uttered sentences. For instance. Today was mostly sunny, breezy, and not so cold, and so after heading down to the new mall (formerly advertised as the biggest in Scandinavia, a claim revised to biggest in Denmark after some belated fact-checking), I returned to my neighborhood and, after a mediocre sandwich and very good cookie, climbed the spiral steeple of Our Savior's Church with, for no particular reason, the chorus to "I Spent my Last Ten Dollars on Birth Control and Beer" stuck in my head. While I was presumably alone in my selection, I did squeeze past other musically entraced folk wending through the maze of wooden staircases, crossbeams, and ladders below the spire.
Tourist one: "Who waaaaaaants .... to liiiiiiiivve .... foREVarrrr ...."
Tourist two: "? ... Highlandah!"
Tourist one: "Qveen!"

The view was spectacular and acrophobic.

In other news, I'm on a month-long hiatus from Danish class due to scheduling conflicts. I watched the last seven episodes of Angel thanks to the magic of BitTorrent, and found the series finale far more satisfying than Buffy's. Unlike Buffy, which was consistently better than television until its often dreary deathmarch of a final season, Angel flirted with elements of mediocrity, especially in its fourth season, when its creative genius, Joss Whedon, split himself between three different television shows and his wife had a new baby. And where the show suffered most, I learned, wasn't in fact that Joss had less time to doctor the scripts. It was that his megalomania, combined with his overcommittment, meant that the production staff were unable to perform such basic duties as scouting locations and scheduling actors. This supports my working theory that most project (tv show; business; etc) fail bacause they get the easy things wrong, more often than because they get the hard things wrong.

Anyway, by the time I tuned back into Angel late in the last season, Joss was apparently back in full force, and I think the pressure of unexpected cancellation pushed him to write a better resolution than he might otherwise have indulged in.

In other other news, I now prefer milk chocolate to dark chocolate. No word on how long this phase will last.

"Only by intermittently exposing large numbers of male bodies to the risk of violent mutilation and destruction, can true masculinity and the health of society at large be adequately displayed and preserved."

On a completely unrelated note, we had F-16 flyovers today in Copenhagen, the beginning of a period of celebration leading to the Crown Prince's marriage next week Friday.

Friday I got to class a few minutes early, as I usually do, so I could go across the street and get a hot dog before class. There's a halal hot dog vendor on the other side of Norbrogade from the school, and he has vegetarian hot dogs. It's a very high-traffic street, even though it's only one lane each way plus one bike lane each way, so a lot of the time I get trapped waiting for traffic and it takes more time than if I'd walked to the light at the corner. But that didn't matter Friday, because even as I was turning in to school something odd and something's police escort were brewing up the street. By the time I locked up my bike in the courtyard and went back to the street, it was full of a few thousand Muslims chanting, "Allahu akbar" and "Down with USA." Of course I support an immediate end to the US occupation of Iraq, but as an atheist Jew and supporter of the ideals behind the US, I wasn't ready to join in the march. And more importantly - I won't join any march where the men are segregated from and placed in front of the women. I eventually got across and ended up talking to a Palestinian guy next to the hot dog stand for quite a while ("we welcome the Jews to Palestine, as guests. But then they make us get out of our homes. Is this how a guest behaves?") but never got my hot dog.

The weather this morning was so perfect that I had no choice (after breakfast and a few chapters of reading in bed) but to put on the new, almost unworn running shoes that I bought after I decided not to enroll at the kung fu school on the next island and go for a jog to the giant, centuries-old timber loading crane at the end of Christianshavn in what can only be described as perfect jogging weather - brisk but dry and sunny, about 10 C, with air so clear that the buildings across the harbor could have been on the next block, although perhaps professional marathon runners prefer a bit of haze to the direct sun, but those people scare me so I haven't approached one to ask, and look at the old track-mounted cannons just past the crane at the end of the island, pointed north towards where seaborne invaders from the Atlantic without the wits to take a different route might come, and in fact there's so much low-slung littoral industrial plant on multi-kilometer jettys that open water is not actually visible anymore from from the cannons' hillock, and after the jog, which was short but enough to leave my legs leaden, I headed into town on the Metro on what I am pleased to report was a successful, albeit tardy, excursion to take advantage of Saturday's retail opportunities in my continuing - some might say, neverending - quest to assemble a quiet music server in my home; tardy because Thursday and Friday were holidays, during which (surprise!) almost everything is closed and I spent most of my time on client crises on two continents anyway.

Speaking of my home, I have to move out in July because my landlady wants it back. She gave me three months notice, as required by law, but was also kind enough to let me stay an extra 10 days until my vacation starts. So now I have to start apartment-hunting, which is not fun but on the bright side, I'll be able to get a new route to work and a new neighborhood to explore, and I can get away from the grubby hippie trash that swarm around Christiania.

Apropos of nothing but the fact that I'm dumping my accumulated notes into a belated blog entry, I want to tell you about my ordbog. A month ago I bought a big red cloth-bound book, "Danske ordbog," or Danish Dictionary, which despite the 500 crown price (USD 80) was a pleasing purchase because it featured full phonetic spellings of all the words and represented a recommittment to learning Danish despite my Danish teacher at the time and was a handsome tome which looked forward to referring to for many years. Only days later did I notice the spine of the book, which featured this symbology: "2 E-H". I had in fact purchased one sixth of a danske ordbog. After retrieving the receipt from the garbage, I was eventually able to return to the bookstore and exchange the book for "Dankse udtale" - just the phonetic spellings, but for all the words, and the new Neal Stephenson, in paperback but still heavy enough to represent an ergonomic challenge in the reading.

Today, Sunday, the temperature is over 10 C and the sun is shining through a bit of haze and very scattered clouds. It's a week early (it's not even the Ides of March yet) but it feels like spring. Yesterday, it was right at freezing all day, the sky was almost featureless gray, and a mid-afternoon rain developed into mid-afternoon wet snow.

Guess which day Peter and Branimir and I went to the beach and to the royal park at Klampenborg?

We got back from the Berlin OpenACS Bash (pic) and spent Monday morning moving from our office space near the door to the front end of the building, facing the harbor. If you look at this picture, we moved from partway down on the right to the far end. If you look at this picture, I'm looking at you from the top-left-corner window. We can see water, and the Havnebus (the coolest artefact in Copenhagen), and lots of government buildings, and a few nice church spires. Quite an improvement for us.

Smoking is forbidden in our building, so smokers congregate on the pavement by the rear door, and the real stairwell always reeks of cigarette smoke. But this is an intolerable distance for some schmuck on our floor, who has been taking cigarette breaks in the bathroom every afternoon. Today there is a nasty note in Danish in the bathroom - nice to see somebody else doesn't care for drug addicts getting their fixes and leaving their messes in shared office space.

Also, I now know what U2 was talking about re: Zoo Station on Achtung Baby. Downtown Berlin is basically one big railway station after another. When the main train station was caught behind the Berlin Wall, the pretty little Bahnhof by Zoologische Garten got promoted into being the main station for West Berlin. It's called Zoobahnhof, or Zoo Station, and both the intra-city and long-haul trains share one big platform. They're finishing up a new cross-shaped central station so that the long-distance and international trains will have a platform of their own. Counting the former eastern stations, there are four major urban-center train stations in a row in downtown Berlin.

More than half a year after leaving Seattle, I finally dragged my lazy behind to Amager Kung Fu Skole, a few kilometers south of downtown Copenhagen. Everybody spoke perfect English, but only when they were talking to me, so I understood about zero percent of the group instructions, and just followed along as best I could. Which was moderately well, except for pushups and situps which led in embarrasingly short order to outright muscle failure. But the rest was all familiar - foot position on front kicks is different, hands chamber at the ribs instead of the waist - but it's very much the same art.

The people were very nice. The class was a bit loose, which is disappointing because I've gotten used to a rigorous, formal environment with well-known rules and find it a welcome change from daily reality, but the nice thing about being in a disciplined environment, whether it's martial arts or software development, is that you internalize the discipline and from then on it's always available to you, from inside. So I've been very fortunate to work with some serious ... disciples, I guess, of both martial arts and software development.

Towards the end of class, one of the black-belts was fooling around with a rubber knife at the other end of the room while the instructor kept us in a high horse stance with arms outstreched long enough that my hands fell asleep. And the guy dropped the rubber knife on the floor, and immediately dropped and started doing pushups. This is a rule I'm familiar with: weapons are respected, and clumsiness or carelessness with weapons is punished - and if nobody is watching, you'd better punish yourself if you have any self-respect. When I saw the guy drop for pushups, I had a deep smile and a comforting sense of home.

They're both painfully aware that Danish bands have a reputation for sucking royally, but they're both proud of putting Denmark on the musical map. They're especially touchy about Sweden, the country that has been kicking Denmark's ass in the Scandinavian-rock game since Abba. "Swedes have a lot of self-confidence," Foo says. "In Denmark, there's a lack of self-confidence. Nobody's supposed to be better than anybody else. There's a saying: 'Don't rise above the noise.' That's why every Dane who's ever successful has to leave." So who do the Danes really hate? "The Germans," Foo says. "They invaded us in the Forties, so everybody still hates them. It sucks for the Germans, but you know, they fucked up."

"The French are assholes," Wagner adds.

"Every single one of them," Foo agrees. "Except Serge Gainsbourg. And Brigitte Bardot."

It's really hard to get good orange juice in Copenhagen. It's not that it's rare, it's just that there's lots of really awful orange juice and the packaging is very similar.

I bought a small white-board for my bathroom. It's something I've been thinking about for a long time, since I do much of my best thinking there. I suspect it's because of the relative sensory deprivation in a bathroom - there's just a lot less to distract the brain. So I got a white-board to mount on the wall to take notes. It paid off the very same day.

I was walking home with my new purchase and I had a great idea for the premise of a movie. I didn't have anywhere to write it down and although I was only five minutes from home, I knew that once I got in the door I would get distracted by the mail and dinner and probably lose all of my great ideas. Then I remembered I was carrying a whiteboard. I sat down on the bench under the next streetlight, unwrapped the board, and filled it completely with mad scribbling.

The next morning, I transcribed my notes to a computer and they seemed pretty stupid. Also, it turns out that whiteboards don't work in moist environments.

---

They refinished the staircase at work. The building's almost a hundred and fifty years old, the staircase runs up six stories, and a very small elevator has been squeezed into what must have been a tidy little shaft around which the staircase climbs. For two weeks we had to take the back stairs or use the elevator. The elevator claims to hold three people, and technically three people can fit in it, but they can't all be tops.

I had a nice Thanksgiving, thank you. I inviting almost everybody I know in Copenhagen and their friends, which turned out to be almost a dozen people, and made about half of Tony's menu. The home-made tofurky was surprisingly simple to make and surprisingly tasty; three kilos of tofu and a marinade including miso and shitake. What sold it as good food, if not as turkey, was the gravy, which was superb. I don't really know how I made it because I was ad-libbing, but it did contain a ground-up pan-fried parnsnip. Who knew? Also, it was impossible to get any gourds other than zucchini, so I went ahead with a butternut squash soup recipe and, lo and behold, aside from being pale green instead of yellow, it tasted good in much the same way.

We (the company) went to Hamburg for two days for a coding bash to fix bugs in the open-source product we are working on. People came from as far as Munich and Berlin. I had a nice time because there were genuine nerds (Peter and Lars, despite being professional programmers, are not nerds, and they refuse even to feel bad about not being nerds). Timo noticed my totally cool Buffy hat sitting on a table (totally cool because it's cast-and-crew schwag I got via a Connection, not store-bought merchandise), which nobody ever does and so I often break down and point it out, which is stupid because if the other person didn't already notice it then they certainly won't care, and inquired of the room, "who hass de buhffy haht?" "Es ist mein Buffy hat!" I cheerfully replied.

And it was nice to be in Germany, where I'm at least 1% capable in the native language. On that note, Danish classes start next Monday, three hours each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and it's just in the nick of time. I've been in hermit mode, recovering from an overactively social summer and revelling in my first no-roommate, all-mine, more-than-three-months home in several years, but my ongoing laziness has made it a less productive hermitage than I had hoped. Relaxing, though.

I mailed three boxes of my own stuff from Seattle to Copenhagen. Two arrived in a timely fashion; the third was delayed a week or so because it had customs due. Which I thought was odd, since I was transporting my own goods. A conversation with the USPS's local contractor revealed that, if I agreed to pay the tariff, I could get my stuff the next day. So now I have a bill, in Danish, for a sum of money due German customs (because that particular box was shipped through Germany) and an accompanying form, also in Danish, that I am supposed to send in parallel to get them to refund my money. I've been sitting on this particular task for a while, but today something strengthened my resolve.

I order some samples of my new Bill of Rights merchandise, mugs and bumper stickers. The mug got clipped a bit, so that the first four amendments are unnumbered, I, II, and V respectively, but in general it looks pretty good. The annoying thing, though, was that before the post office (motto: open 10 am to 5:30 pm for our convenience) would give me my own stuff, they took out a DKK78 tariff for each of the two sets of samples. The wholesale cost of a mug and bumper sticker is listed as US 15 on the package, so that's DKK 95. Lars explained the charges: 23DKK for VAT (25%), 44DKK fee for charging VAT, and 11DKK VAT on the fee for charging VAT. So I had to pay an 82% tariff to get my own merchandise samples through customs. Look, I'm sorry if the US has imposed illegal steel subsidies against Europe, insulting the global free trade movement and putting the lie to the Bush administration's ideology - and cutting maybe 30,000 US jobs from steel consuming US companies in order to save a few steel jobs in electoral swing states. There's not much I can do about. But I'll tell you what, I'm going to take that other tariff bill, which I still haven't paid, and I'm going to ignore until they come to deport me.

A nice thing about Scandinavia: pictures and even advertisements of designed objects, such as furniture, feature the designer's name. An observation: if Plato and the other Greek philosophers had been Scandinavian, their ideal shape would not have been a sphere but instead a cylinder, machined from metal, about a centimeter in diameter and an inch long in its purest expression.

A less nice thing about Scandinavia, or at least a not-nice thing about Copenhagen the party town: public urination is fairly common. Not just late at night, but all hours of the day. And public urinators are always surly, and are always looking around as if trying to make eye contact simply in order to glare at you for looking at them while they are publicly urinating. (While bagging on Scandinavia and Denmark in particular: everybody smokes, and parents are careful to smoke in close proximity to their infant children (possibly why Denmark has the highest health care expenditures but second-lowest life expectancy in the EU smoking; a serious lack of vegetarian options (also a health care factor?); sky-high prices, including for food (come on, get some illegal immigrant labor already); terrible retail opportunities.)

On a related note, at the corporate relay race in the park back in September, I noticed an innovative new form of porta-potty. It consists of four quadrants around a central shaft. Each quadrant is big enough for one person, has a teeny bit of divider on each side, and has a groin-sized hole at waist level. (23 Oct 2003: Roger Lai has a picture of one in London.) Its use consists of a man standing right against the central pillar, unzipping, and taking care of business. While it does provide the service of obscuring direct view of skin, it expresses what I find to be a deeply alien interpretation of the bodily function taboo.

Almost all bodily emissions are publicly taboo - it's easier to list the exceptions. Only a few are at all permissable in public - sneezing, coughing, crying, bleeding. The first two aren't inherently private, but carry the stigma of infection and so are rude, at least, when conducted in proximity to others. Crying is cause for embarrasement, and bleeding for alarm, and both are acceptable perhaps only to the extent that they are involuntary.

And it's not the actual excreta that is the focus of the taboo. It's the idea that the entire person is engaged in a private activity, one that is not shared with others. So there's not a zone or region on the body, like "the upper half" or "everything within a meter of the hole in question," that must be shielded from view. The whole body must be invisible - not just blurred like a mob fugitive on a talk show, but made indistinct in form and action. There must not be any definite indicator, in sight or sound or, to the extent possible, in smell, of the person's exact action. This, to me, is the essence of the bodily function taboo, and while I abhore certain other of my inculcated cultural inhibitions I'm quite comfortable leaving this one unchallenged. So the quad-unit huddle-and-pee unit, while smaller and more efficient than the traditional enclosure, remains bewildering to me.

---

Somehow, without really thinking about it, I realize each Friday around sundown that I'm lighting candles. No prayers or anything, I just think it would be cool to have candles and then I buy some and I get some holders and one night I get home late and another very late but one night I get home right at dusk and light the candles and that night just happens, by chance, to be Friday night. Three weeks in a row. Also by coincidence, after seeing some more cool cheap candles at IKEA, I now have one huge candle in the middle and four smaller ones to either side, each in their own candle stand.

---

I spent last Saturday like I spend every Saturday, going out to IKEA to furnish my new apartment. This time I bicycled, detouring up the coast a bit, through Hellerup, which is growing on me as a sort of smaller, colder, more expensive Venice Beach Main Street, from Abbot Kinney to about the Gehry studio, and without the street life, and then back inland and around almost in circles, because my Cartesian navigation sense continues to betray me in triangle-based cities. I get lost routinely in San Diego as well. China was so chaotic that it was never an issue. In any event, I picked up the last few things for my apartment, including a tall, narrow little kitchen table thing for breakfast, a stool that's too tall for the table even at its lowest setting, a rug and chandelier for the multipurpose room, and a Bright Light HF 3305. Since this wouldn't all go on my bicycle, I shelled out 230 crowns for a ride back in a van. On the approach to my street, the driver explained what the people sitting at the entrance to Christiania all the time as if waiting to meet people are doing - they are full-time police watchouts. Great. With the exception of two metal washers to permanently mount the shower head unit, I believe I have finished my nesting. My new apartment, with one-year lease, is the most permanent residence I've had since the day in August 2001 when I woke up, showered, packed my bedding into a cardboard box, called Steve, packed up the phone, carried out the box, a backpack, and two duffels to the lobby, handed in my keys, and headed to the airport and thence to Beijing to start Phase Two of my adult life. It's nice to have a home again.

The Bright Light HF 3005 is a curved plastic thing, about two feet high and a foot wide, as bright as an overcast sky. The idea behind the Bright Light is that you stare into it, or at least put it in your peripheral vision, for half an hour (less than a foot away) to two hours (a yard away) every morning. If you are suffering from Seasonal Affective Disorder, this fixes your brain. After barely surviving the end of last winter in Seattle, I figured I should get a head start on these things, and also avoid the leaky-roof problem: when it's sunny, I don't need it, and when it's gloomy, I'm too depressed to go spend that much money. So, while at about US$300 for some light bulbs in a sturdy plastic case it's clearly priced to transfer wealth from the insured to Philips rather than as a consumer product, I still think it's a good purchase. After two days I'm still grumpy as ever, but it does say "two weeks" to have an effect, so I'll keep you posted.

Meanwhile I have posted some photos from my binge with Lars' digital camera, include one of the wiring problem (thanks for the tips! For now I've given up on the overhead switch per se and have rigged a wire from a switched outlet adjacent to the useless overhead switch (not to be confused with the switched outlet on the opposite wall that concerns wires C and D)).

The bedroom in my apartment, which is in a hundred-year-old building, has some wiring issues. There's a switch by the door to turn on the overhead light. Because the wires go in conduits on the surface of the walls rather than inside the walls, the overhead light switch actually leads to a box at the top middle of one of the walls. The idea is that a cable then extends from that box to the hook in the middle of the wall, and then down to your chandelier. The conduit extends past this box to a power outlet on the far wall. Since the box in my bedroom has no such wire emerging from its hole, I opened it. After brushing away the cracked ceramic pieces and dust, I found four wires.

• Wire A comes out from the switch side and ends in a metal loop.
• Wire B comes out from the switch side and ends in a metal loop.
• Wire C comes out from the far, outlet side and ends in a metal loop.
• Wire D runs unbroken from one side to the other.

The question, then, is how I should connect these wires, along with two new wires to the new overhead lamp, so that the switch controls the lamp and the far outlet always works. Through trial and error, I have determined the following:

1. If wire A is connected to wire C, then the outlet works but is controlled by the switch
2. If wire B is connected to wire C, then the outlet always works.
3. If wire A is connected to wire B, then the outlet does not work.
4. If wire A is connected to a lead for the overhead lamp, and the other lead is connected to wire B, and wire B is connected to wire C, then the outlet always works and the lamp never works and the switch does nothing.
5. If wire A is connected to the a lead for the overhead lamp, and the other lead is connected to wire C, neither the outlet nor the bulb works if the switch is off. If the switch is turned on, the bulb in the overhead lamp lights up for less than a second, then fades, and then the outlet works. The bulb in the overhead lamp is not burned out.

At the moment I have it wired so that the outlet always works and the lamp never works and the switch is useless. How should I wire it so that the switch controls the lamp and the outlet always works?

Since Fram's flight was an hour before mine, my parents dropped us off at SEA-TAC airport very early by my schedule. This turned out for the best, because the line to go through security into Terminal 2 ran the length of the central hall of the airport and then snaked halfway back the other side. At which point was a bookstore, and where I stumbled across Neal Stephenson's new book by accident. Thus fortified, I got into line. Forty-five minutes (it's a hardcover, so it takes me about 80 seconds per page, so I was around page 35) I finally made it to the front. I was of course in the suspected terrorist line, since I had a one-way ticket. The story I heard was that Delta's computers crashed such that they had to re-ticket all of their passengers. And just to be on the safe side, Delta ticketed them _all_ as suspected terrorists. Fortunately Delta doesn't have gates in other terminals so I assume Fram made his flight. I made mine but without much margin. Thanks, Delta!

The book was a bit disappointing at first - Stephenson's verbosity is much more jumbled than usual, as he tries to incorporate seventeenth-century spellings and phrasings. But either he smoothes out or I got used to it or I just read better on airplanes than in security lines, because the next time I looked up it was page 135. Stephenson continues to cement his title of Pynchon Lite. If you want historical fiction set in pre-Revolutionary New England and post-Interregnum Old England, with Newton and Leibniz as major supporting characters, dramatizing and personalizing the revolution in world-view that the scientific method represents, and you want in thousands of pages of prose by a didactic sf writer, littered with random historical in-jokes, this is probably your book.

I spent 10 days in Los Angeles and San Diego. Since I was bringing my bicycle to Copenhagen as part of the trip, I hauled it up to Los Angeles on the Surfliner when I visited my grandparents. Why does Amtrak, which has lousy and overpriced service with minimal coverage, have the coolest train names? They do let you take bicycles for free, and San Diego's Union Station has free wireless, though Los Angeles' does not. I was able to do a bit of war-training (derivation: war-dialing, not training for war), and can report that at least one beach house somewhere between San Juan Capistrano and Oceanside has an open WAP.

I bicycled from North Hollywood to Santa Monica via Sepulveda Pass during morning rush hour. Why? Because it's there! Aside from a head-on collision with a Porsche, it was without incident. And that was mostly harmless - at Ventura and Sepulveda I went through an intersection on a green light while it was still filled with gridlock, and while I was threading through the cars an oncoming Porsche from far back in the line of stuck cars whipped around a truck and right at me. I hopped a bit to one side and took my weight off the bicycle. The Porsche braked to a halt, with the bumper ultimately contacting my front tire and pushing the bicycle backwards from under me about an inch and a half. I remounted and bicycled around him, calling into his open window: "You have a nice day, Mister!" He hid his face and mumbled something that could have been "sorry."

Have you noticed that checking ID has become the 21st century equivalent of bleeding a patient? Like bleeding a patient to balance her humors, checking ID is believed to have remedial powers, and is widely used even when inappropriate, even though in most cases there is no apparent improvement in condition, obvious detrimental effect, and no theoretical reason for it to work. Checking an ID card by comparing the face on the ID to the face of the bearer proves that the bearer of the card looks similar to someone that was able to get a desk clerk to issue a card to them with a particular name, age, and address. Unless the card was forged. That's all it does.

Checking ID isn't authentication - it doesn't prove that the bearer should be granted any particular power. (Except, in many circumstances, the power to drive a car, but that's just because we happen to use our identity cards for that purpose as well, and it's not even relevant to most uses of the drivers' license as ID.) To authenticate a bearer with a power, the name on the card then has to matched to a list of empowered names. Which still doesn't authenticate the bearer, it just indicates that the bearer can reasonably claim to have a name that is the same as the name on the list. And when the name does match, that is only as legitimate as the process by which the name was assembled.

Even when a bearer is matched to a name that means something in context - ie, identified, that doesn't mean that the bearer is safe. To prove that the bearer is not a threat, you must have a list of all people who are, or who might become, a threat. We probably don't want a comprehensive list of all people who are threats, because that is a substantial concentration of power and all concentrations of power are subject to abuse. (See also Dong, Mao Z, and Steel, Joe. Think I'm making an unwarranted slippery-slope argument? Ask the hundreds or thousands of people who are being partially denied their freedom of movement because they have the same name, or a similar name, to a person that some analyst someone thought was or might be a threat and decided, better safe than sorry, and thus put on a do-not-fly list that is obeyed without question or accountability.) And we can't have a list of potential threats for reasons clearly explained by Tom Cruise et al in their reasonably adequate dramatization of Philip K. Dick's story Minority Report. Remember that most of the 9/11 terrorists had legitimate IDs and were both identified and authenticated as safe passengers.

Recently I went to the premiere of a short film. Because it was on a studio set, I had to show ID. Wait, no - why did I have to show ID? To prove I was on the guest list? No, there was no guest list. I just signed my name. To make me accountable after the fact in case there was an incident? Sure, if 1) there was a way to correlate something that happened somewhere on a multi-acre lot with a name on a list and 2) if the guard compared the names on the list with the names on the IDs, which he couldn't do because the list was outside the security booth. To prove that I wasn't on a list of people who were barred entry? Sure, if the guard had the list memorized, and I didn't have a fake ID. To prove that I was authorized to drive a motor vehicle should the need arise? No, because I said (truthfully) that my ID was in a car on the far side of the studio, and was just waved in without an ID check. Entrants were asked to show ID simply because someone decided, without factual basis, that doing that procedure would make things better in some ill-understood way, even though it actually caused demonstrable problems. Just like the doctors and their leeches. It took medicine about 2000 years to progress beyond that kind of superstition, so don't hold your breath.

And by the way, why do airlines, who've fought so hard against any change to the system that might cost them a penny ... oh, wait a minute. Checking IDs doesn't make anybody safer in the airport or in the air, but it does make it harder to sell your airplane ticket to somebody else. And airlines, who are leaders in that noxious practice of variable pricing, find that an unquestioning public loyalty to checking ID plays right into their hands. (See Bruce Schneier for step-by-step instructions on subverting this ploy.)

Happily, I've discovered a few objects I thought lost. I'm on my third key-chain miniature Swiss Army Knife, and for a while I thought I would have to get a fourth. The second was caught by SEA-TAC security while I was flying to Denmark the first time - I had gone through airport security maybe six times in the previous two months and gotten it through fine each time, so I was no longer worrying about it. I was escorted back to the concourse by the brave TSA officer, and then left it at the Alaska Airlines desk for retrieval a month later. At which time ... it was nowhere to be found. Anyway, I got a new one, and remembered to throw it in with my luggage instead of putting it back on my keychain. But when I unpacked in San Diego, it wasn't where I expected. I finally found it when I unpacked again in Denmark, in a different bag. I also found my Leatherman, which is (naturally) the third one I have owned, and which I had also briefly feared lost. And I discovered in my travel bathroom kit a new toothbrush bristle cap, replacing the plastic Chinese ziploc cannister that I didn't lose but simply left with the grandparents in North Hollywood, from whence I fully intend to retrieve it in three months' time. It's these little joys, along with the comforting inevitability of death, that keep one going on a rainy day.

The Swede is gone. Not Peter, the guy in the boat. It was still there when I returned, meaning he'd been tied up in downtown Copenhagen for at least seven weeks. And Lars actually saw him walking around, so he didn't just leave the boat parked there the whole time. But I came in Saturday morning and he was gone. Farewell, crazy Swede in a sailboat.

I've settled into my new apartment in Christianshavn, across the harbor from work. It's maybe 400 meters away by line of sight, but a full kilometer by the bicycle odometer, thanks to inconveniently placed bridges. While I don't blame the Danes for the bridges, I do want to complain about the tremendous amount of construction going on, which I completely failed to anticipate in the core of a thousand-year-old city. On my ride to work I can expect to pass within a few feet of: a jackhammer, a cement saw, a diesel backhoe, a diesel overhead crane, and a pneumatic sand pounder, strung along different construction sites just in that one kilometer commute. Get a bunch of Chinese migrant workers in here and you'll finish the job next week, I'm telling you. Those gals and guys really scale up linearly. Between Beijing and Shanghai China is probably building a Copenhagen worth of housing every year, or even faster. And while I'm complaining about the Old World: sure the old buildings are pretty, but everything built in the last fifty years is just as ugly as anything in New York. And while the advertising is reasonably limited, the typography in most of the shop signs is hideous, all shouting bold sans-serif fonts. Which brings me to the lack of exciting retail opportunities, but I'll talk about that after I do more research. I only found the mall yesterday.

Anyway, my apartment is a one-bedroom on the first floor (which means the second floor in Europe) of a hundred-year-old cement apartment building that takes up an entire block, albeit hollow with a big courtyard. The interior is nice - wood floors, possibly original, and whitewashed walls. The rear staircase looks unchanged for the last century - that is, I suspect it picked up a patina of age and a hundred years of wear in its first year, and has looked the same ever since. The far end of the courtyard has trees but I just have a view of the storage shed. It has a reasonably nice vibe and isn't too loud, even though it's only a block from the entrance to Christiania, the anarchist collective from the Seventies where you can buy hash openly at wholesale prices. And also live independently of federal law in an experimental society, but the hash is mostly what people talk about.

The plumber came this week and, while he hasn't yet fixed the stove, he did install a new shower head and rig up a mount so that the tiny room with a tile floor and toilet is that much closer to being a Proper Bathroom. Meanwhile I've installed or replaced almost all of the lighting in the place, made a pilgrimage to IKEA for reasonably priced bedding (I'm experimenting with surprisingly comfortable canvas-like sheets), and am debating leaving the living room unfurnished so that I can have a dry place for tai chi. Since I'm lazy, I instead just sit in the middle of an empty square room on a folding chair with my laptop. A posture which will be slightly more effective once I get my wireless DSL connection. Anyway, y'all are welcome to come and visit me, because now I have room, a real kitchen, a passable bathroom, and a one-year lease. Get here as follows:

1. fly to Copenhagen International Airport (aka Kastrup)
2. exit international customs into terminal 3, coming out the crust side of a pie-slice-shaped room with a super-high ceiling. Go straight down the pie slice to the train ticket booth, and buy a ticket to Norreport (DKK 30, or about US$5. They take foreign currency).
3. Go downstairs and wait for a train in the right direction. If it says Malmo, you're on the wrong side of the tracks. If you get on a Malmo train, you'll get off in Sweden. And you won't even be able to tell the difference.
4. Get on the train.
5. Get off at Norreport. That's two stops after the central train station. It would be three stops if they hadn't closed the old central train station and turned it into a movie theater.
6. Staying within Norreport station, go downstairs to the Metro.
7. Take any train going to Vestamager or Lergravsparken. If it says Frederiksburg, you're going the wrong way, but you'll still be in Denmark. You won't pass through any turnstiles, and your train ticket gives you legitimate passage on the Metro for up to an hour.
8. Get off the Metro at the second stop, Christianshavn. Exit the station. Sorry about the construction.
9. Cross the street and identify Princessegade. Travel east (away from the station) down Princessegade until it forks. Before the fork you will see the Christiania entrance on the right, with hippie losers lurking about. Don't make eye contact or pass on the downwind side.
10. Take the left fork, which is Burmeistergade. Proceed a hundred meters down to 1C, on the left. Ring the bell which within a few days will have my name on it. If it's a weekday, either wait until the weekend, because I go to and from work through the sally port on the west side so you won't see me if you are waiting at the front door, or climb up the wall to the first window above and to the left of the entryway, smash it, and climb in.

My address for at least the next year:

Joel Aufrecht
Burmeistergade 1C 1.tv
1429 Kobenhavn K
Danmark

I'll write more once my sleeping schedule is realigned with the rotation of the earth.

Denmark appears resistant to, or perhaps just in the early stages of infection with, the SUV. And completely immune to Starbucks. Blockbuster is everywhere, but aside from the ugly yellow and blue their stores aren't so hideous when confined to kiosks instead of mounted within parking lots (really, what isn't better when stripped of its parking-lot moat?). 7-11 is everywhere but they adapt so much to local conditions that I have a hard time calling them a plague.

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.

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.

At the beginning of my China journal, sweltering in a turboprop on the runway, headed for Vancouver, I noted that I expected to continue sweating for months to come. And I did.

Coming to Denmark, I didn't count on sweating. It wasn't a surprise that New York in August was muggy, sure, but after that ... I don't think it's dipped below 75 in the two days I've been here, even at night. Quite a shock, though consistent with the heat wave that left us cooking in Seattle last week.

Actually, I didn't think I'd be travelling right now. Due to miscommunication, I sat on the work permit paperwork until the last minute, and jeopardized my rescheduled plane ticket. Since changing the ticket involved multiple FedEx expenditures and at least an hour on hold, I was waiting until the last minute. (Travel Tip: never buy a paper ticket from Travelocity. Electronic, sure, but not paper. And since Expedia is ex-Microsoft, and Orbitz pays to piss us off with their pop-ups, I'm not sure what's left for fare searches.) But my tardiness worked out well when, the Friday week before the ticket date, I got an email that my work permit was approved. I bustled to mail my passport to New York, got it back the next Tuesday, and was on my way.

Oh, and another reason to avoid Travelocity for multi-carrier international travel: they gave me a 10-hour layover in Newark. 7 am to 5 pm. Thanks, guys. After six weeks of travel around the West Coast, I got hard-nosed and trimmed a duffel bag from my inventory of backpack, two duffels, and laptop bag. Bye bye second wool sweater, music apparatus, Natural Keyboard Pro, mouse, boots. But this still left me with an uncomfortable load of luggage on a day that was muggy before it even woke up. The very helpful people at Newark Airport (motto: "That's Newark _International_ Airport to you, you schmuck") said I couldn't store stuff there, "not since nine eleven." The bus driver was very helpful: "Nowhere. Nowhere in the city. Not since nine eleven." He dropped me off at his last stop, a block from ground zero. I walked over to the big hole in the ground, watched some street vendors fight over turf at eight am ("You don't touch the cart!"), and turned into a hotel across the street. They took my backpack and duffel for the day for free. I love New York - it's Jersey I can't stand.

New York was gray and hot and muggy - not a nice combination. I walked around, took a subway up to Times Square, walked partway through the Park, called Talli at 10:30 am and woke him up, met him back downtown, by which time it had cleared up a bit but was still too hot, and went to Battery Park to look at the Statue of Liberty (didn't I read that a judge had moved her to Jersey? That used to be good news but I'm not standing up for New Jersey any more. Although the bus driver did a great job of abusing traffic to get me back to the airport even after I had been stupid and gotten an unwisely late bus. I was still at the security checkpoint when they started boarding).

Denmark. Denmark is nice. I got it around 7 am on not enough sleep, and followed instructions to get to the apartment I'd found on the internet. My hostess was waiting ("I'm still up myself, actually. I was dancing all night,") and I dumped my stuff, got a key, tried to take a shower in a curtainless tub, and headed out to see Copenhagen.

At 9:30 am on a Sunday morning, really nobody is around except tourists. It was brilliantly sunny, utterly cloudless except if you looked on the horizon towards Sweden, and very civilized and peaceful. Nothing but cobblestones and six-story, two-century-old townhouses, with church steeples for variety. Really much much nicer than the bits of Newark I saw from the bus. Assuming the weather stays the same year round, the only thing between Copenhagen and perfection is some mountains nearby. I guess I'll have to go to Stockholm next.

There really are a lot of Danes in Denmark, and they really look like stereotypical Scandinavians. If there are brunettes, they're in hiding. They're all pretty serious about their tans. Everybody I approached spoke flawless English, but I still experienced that feeling of helplessness that I had at first in China. In fact, I think I felt better in the last half of the China trip, when I had barely enough Chinese to survive, than I do now.

I wore the t-shirt, but only got one comment, from the guy who sold me a postcard. He liked the shirt and said the Arabic had caught his eye. I overloaded on the beautiful scenery (Danes, Denmark, and sunshine in equal proportion) and headed home to conk out by mid-afternoon, while my hostess went to the beach. I slept for most of the next fifteen hours before heading to work.

Monday I beat everybody to the office at 8:30 am. I had a full, productive day, the first time in two years I can say that about a day spent in an office. As usual I'm sure I'm being too bossy and not shutting up, but then they did want a project manager.

I suppose this constitutes the first entry in my new travel journal. I'm still in Seattle, but I'm trying to leave. I've got a month-long trial contract in Copenhagen to do some open-source web development work, and I'm pretty excited. I've got a few blank pages left in my passport, a used laptop on order from ebay, and a lack of interest in staying in Seattle. What I do not have is an airplane ticket, and that is the topic of this entry.

I ordered a ticket from Travelocity. I refused to use Expedia when they were part of Microsoft, and now they're not Microsoft but they still have the Microsoft Attitude; Orbitz uses pop-up ads and doesn't book international flights. Travelocity has finally (years after the Internet and decades after it became technically possible) added a feature where you can see all (or rather, some) of the relevant fares; you then pick a fare and it shows you a calendar covering a few months, indicating the days for which that fare is available. It still has some glitches - picking a starting day usually causes most of the available return days to disappear - but those are glitches of the underlying system, not the web site. This system gives more visibility to the buyer, and while it still has a long way to go at least it's progress.

Speaking of progress. Or not. Travelocity wouldn't issue an e-ticket; they insisted on paper delivery. Which is fine, but they charged me 25 bucks for FedEx 2nd day. Package delivery gives me the heebie-jeebies, because I've had three or four consecutive UPS nightmares. They have several delivery options - they can leave stuff, they can let somebody else sign for it, they can let you let somebody else sign for it, they can let you sign to let them leave stuff, or they can insist that you sign in person. They refuse to specify even to the nearest day when they plan to deliver a package, so the sign-in-person option is pretty early-20th-century. The option that says you have to sign for it is worded similarly to the option that says you can sign the notice and have them leave it next time, so when I tried that once I got a second notice with a vigorous underlining of the relevant word or two differentiating the options. Since then, I've been careful to tell vendors to tell UPS to let me sign to have them leave it. This request has been ignored every time by UPS. UPS can rot in hell as far as I'm concerned.

Expecting more of the same, I put in my current workplace as the delivery destination for FedEx.

Two weeks later, on May 14th 2003 if you want to be exact, and I do because this time I've caught on early to the fact that I'm in the middle of a developing not-my-responsibility clusterfuck where the best possible outcome is merely losing a bit of money and wasting a few hours on the phone, and the worst possible outcome a $800 loss and serious jeopardy to my travel plans (having read the airline deregulation book, I'm now aware that airlines can basically take your money at will, and delivering a service such as the safe translocation of your corporeal form is done at their discretion if at all), I went to Travelocity to find out where my ticket was. I found the FedEx tracking number, and looked it up, only to find it had been delivered to an address in Bellevue (a suburb of Seattle) and signed for by a P. Curtis. Further detective work on Travelocity's site revealed that they had my ticket delivery address as the apartment complex where I used to live. A place where the office cheerfully signs for residents' packages. And perhaps, former residents?

I called them and left a message; they left a message in return saying that they had indeed signed for it, and then delivered it to the current resident of my old apartment, who eventually returned it to the complex office, where they returned it to FedEx. Nobody in the sequence apparently thought to try and contact me. (Salt in the wound: I visited friends at the same complex right in the middle of this sequence of events. I remember walking down the railroad tracks and realizing I hadn't even looked towards my old apartment.)

So I called FedEx and got a computer system that was very eager to interpret voice commands. I use hands-free headset when I know I'm going to be waiting a long time and thus need not one but both hands free for, for example, plotting the demise of my enemies, such as the inventor of voice mail. The combination of a sensitive microphone and a computer system as inventive as the Door in the Heart of Gold - well, it's a bad combination. When I reached the inevitable point of saying, "fuck you," it said, "I think what you said is, 'I want to enter another package number.'" Ultimately it hung up on me when I sighed loudly.

I called back and held my breath until I was transferred to a Mister Joey Iacovelli, who was able to give me a new fact not present on the web site: the package was in Issaquah, due to be returned to sender as of May 14 (today, for those keeping score at home). Nothing, he said, could be done.

I then called Travelocity (888-709-5983). Their voicemail was more polite and slightly more helpful, and when I said "help" it said, "I think what you said is 'help'." I was able to identify some of the Muzak, including Groovy Kind of Love, and Marvin Gaye's classic Piece of Clay. Not that the Muzak version was very classic, or classy, so I pulled up the real thing to listen to while I waited. And waited. And waited. They were experiencing unusual call volume, you see.

Eventually, Ronnie, Agent Sign ARW, came on the line. He insisted that I had typed the three-year-old address into the web site when I ordered the ticket and was not willing to entertain the notion that their web site might theoretically be at fault. When he made it clear that I would be paying the $19.95 charge to have the ticket sent a second time, I made it clear that I would try much harder to find palatable alternative vendors for future travel purchases. Ronnie asked if there was anything else he could help me with. I thanked him for his attentive service and twenty-three minute hold time. He apologized for the hold time. I then asked if they anticipated going out of business in the next six months or if they thought SABRE would kick in more money. Ronnie said that he wasn't a fortune teller. It's possible that may have been a sore spot for him.

So it looks like Travelocity's website bug (okay, to be fair it's only about 80 percent likely that it's their bug. It's possible that I only intended to have the ticket delivered to my current workplace, though that wouldn't explain my memory of digging online for the zip code. It's also possible that they just used the old address on file and never showed it to me, though I would consider that a bug as well. From Steve and Jessie's horror stories about the internal workings of Expedia, an outright bug where an address is gathered and then discarded would be unexceptional for the industry.) will end up costing me an extra $20 and an hour of hypertension. Why is designing a working computer so damned difficult? Clearly this species has access to technology that it's not yet mature enough to use. Anyway, now I can start worrying about visas and work permits. And how much fatter I'll get with steady access to Danishes. But they don't call them Danishes there, says Lonely Planet. Come to think of it, I'll bet they don't call hot dogs Hebrew Nationals in Israel. And never mind British-owned French's Mustard, made in the USA. But the USPS, bless their testicle-cancer-survivor-sponsoring souls, left my grandmother's latest package of chocolate on the doorstep, so if you'll excuse me, it's time for some food therapy. Next week we'll nationalize the airlines - I bet Halliburton wouldn't mind the work.