Tilbage i aktion

After what feels like months, but turns out was only three weeks, I finally remembered I’m supposed to be updating this thing. I’d like to pretend my absence was due to our very exciting expat life, but in reality I just keep getting more and more spurious injuries that have led to some very boring and inactive weekends.

Before you start feeling too bad for me, I’m a lot more functional now, and being laid up on bed rest gave us a good excuse to watch our first Danish crime drama, Broen / The Bridge. I’ll admit the program caused some initial distress along the lines of ‘wait, is that character Swedish, or are we just much, much worse at Danish than we thought?’, but we worked it out by the end (hint: the ones saying ‘jo!’ all the time are the Swedes).

Anyway, a few weeks back, in the carefree days when I only had my deranged ankle to slow me down, we headed to the Uhørt (Unheard) music festival – a showcase of Copenhagen’s finest emerging artists. It had everything you’d expect: good music, erratic weather and a whole lot of painfully cool toddlers cutting sick in gumboots and earmuffs.

It was pretty much the perfect festival – cruisey crowd, interesting music, super reasonable ticket prices, and lots of big wooden blocks for semi-crippled people to sit on and get a good view of the bands. Five stars.

Also deserving of five stars is the summer-like weather that has finally reappeared after a few rainy weekends in a row. OK, it’s only about 22 degrees, but our definition of summer has been somewhat re-calibrated. The best thing is that everyone here seems to share my obsession with identifying and making the most of the ‘last nice days of the year’ and the consensus is that this week is it – the desperate need for the whole city to get out in the sunshine is palpable.

We dutifully structured our weekend to get in as much swimming and sunbaking time as possible, starting by spending Saturday lolling around at my favourite haunt, Svanemøllen pier. There were actually quite a lot of jellyfish, but because this is Denmark and not Australia they don’t seem to do anything nefarious. I have adopted Anna’s reassuring theory that lots of jellyfish must mean very nice clean water (don’t anyone disabuse me of this comforting notion).

I will never tire of the sight of so many people cycling to the beach/pier. It’s just so darn wholesome. Another highlight of the trip was this big dingo-looking dog that seemed to have no owner and was just running around the pier living it’s best life. For the record, it’s best life involved barking in the face of scared children, going for swims, and then hurdling over sunbaking people while still dripping wet. It was the best.

We also made a triumphant return to the bouldering gym (full disclosure: it wasn’t in any way triumphant – I was getting spat off the lowest grades like a clueless weakling). We did, however, seek out an awesome harbour bath right near the gym. There is nothing better than a refreshing harbour swim to de-chalk post climb.

Sluseholmen is kind of interesting – it’s a bunch of new build medium density apartments on the harbour to the south of the city. You have to go through a light industrial area to get there (hence the proximity to the climbing gym), but once inside the development things are pretty nautical. I’ve decided I would really like my own private jetty thing to loll around on, and Ant could finally get that Midnight Express powerboat he has always wanted. Failing that, there were also some very covetable houseboats… damn, I really should have done more research on how one procures a houseboat in Copenhagen before we settled in a land-based dwelling.

A note for Mum and Dad to wrap things up – I bet you are pretty jealous of those folk on the right who can go for a kayak straight out of their lounge room – new life goal? Maybe get the stormwater drains in Hamo Sth turned into a romantic inner-city canal? Get thee to the council and start petitioning for it ASAP.