I ♥ KBH

Here are some sweeping statements about Copenhagen, all of which are probably entirely untrue and more about my willingness to buy into cultural stereotypes of Scandinavians:

1. Everyone in Copenhagen is gorgeous. I have been continuously agog at the constant flow of beautiful, healthy-looking blond people. Everyone is well-dressed in a clean-cut-with-a-funky-edge kind of way. Young Copenhagen men have good hair.

2. Everyone in Copenhagen is under 40, even the people over 60 who seem to keep fit by riding bikes everywhere.

3. Everyone in Copenhagen rides a bike. After a fabulous afternoon (and a boozy night) getting round easily and efficiently on a bike, I can understand why. This is a city that respects cycling and cyclists. Cycling all the time keeps everyone fit and gorgeous (see points 1 and 2).

4. Everyone in Copenhagen is pregnant or has a baby. There is a serious baby boom going on. Pregnant Danish women are all gorgeous and ride bikes, and gorgeous young parents ride their gorgeous young children around in box-carts attached to the front of bikes.

5. Everything is well designed and stylish – hotels, cafes, bars, the metro. The influence of mid 20^th century Danish design is everywhere. I even rode past a McDonalds with armchairs by furniture guru Arne Jacobsen.

Needless to say, my stay in Copenhagen has featured a number of visits to bars, which were fun in a fairly standard international-gay kind of way, except for the very special Café Intime – a tiny, over-decorated old piano bar. On arrival, a strong smell of 1970s perfume (Paco Rabanne?) mixed with cigarette smoke dominated. This may have been connected to the drunk 50-something straight couple at the next table spilling their drinks, or the hilarious, very happy and very drunk 50-something woman propping up the bar, haranguing the barman, and trying to sing along to the old-time French chansons playing on the stereo. At 10pm, an absurdly talented young guy started playing the piano and singing, hovered over by the drunk woman trying to find a rhythm. He too ignored her, but she seemed to be having a ball. Meanwhile, a couple of groups of 20-something hipsters turned up. In a place where the dark red walls are lined with mismatched plates and pictures and where miscellaneous bric-a-brac goes to die (including a faux-Grecian statue wearing a pink lei and a silver bead choker), everyone and everything fits in. I, on the other hand, felt oddly exposed; I finished my beer and made a quiet exit. It was, however, something of a highlight.

intangible outcomes

Three days left in Paris and once again I'm pondering where time goes and what I get up to all day. It's not like I've been doing very much work, having imagined I would use the six weeks here to finish the introduction to my book - at the very least. Nup. So what have I been getting up to all this time? Here are some highlights...

I've had visitors to entertain. Dave caught the train over from London for the weekend and we had a fantastic time eating, drinking, wandering, going to the Musée d'Orsay and Notre Dame. The first night, I took him to a cute little restaurant near Montmartre that Ro and co had taken me to, only to discover it was the very same place he'd been to randomly and loved on a previous trip. Having a visitor to show round made me feel much more connected to being here and reminded me of how much I love it. I've had such wonderful welcomes from a number of my friends here so it was lovely to share the love with my visitors. And there's nothing better than feeling like a local. As soon as Dave got back on the Eurostar, Andrew from Sydney turned up and so he and I launched into a somewhat different three nights of bar-hopping and a little naughtiness, plus some great meals with a couple of my Paris friends.

Just before these visits last week, I caught the train down to Avignon where I joined Tina and Renaud and some of their friends for a few days in the Provence countryside, which was just perfect. Apart from fabulous meals and conversation at the house, we had a couple of outings to some beautiful local places including the amazingly pretty stuck-on-a-hillside villages of Roussillon and Gordes, a Medieval monastery surrounded by lavender fields, and the Roman Pont du Gard outside of Avignon. All of this was well worth the expense of the last-minute train fare and the disaster at the station in Paris where crowds and inefficiency caused me to miss my train and almost storm home in a funk without going.

Otherwise, it's just been a continuous round of early evening apéritifs, late night meals, meeting all kinds of interesting people, going to bars and clubs and stumbling home late, shopping and promenading, some great exhibitions like the amazing Valentino retrospective today with Tina, a little bit of writing, and two positive work meetings which should yield some teaching for me to come back for in September. And so as the five-month odyssey comes close to its end, I may not have achieved quite the career goals that I was hoping for, but I've sure achieved enrichment and have tested out the benefits of letting myself have some of the experiences I spent years denying myself. Who wants a career anyway?