Just spent a four day weekend in Malmö and Copenhagen. We took a six hour train ride from Stockholm to Malmö and commenced to spend the rest of the very hot day drinking Carlsberg in beer gardens.
We stayed with Peter and Marlen, our very appropriately for the occasion Danish/Swedish friends. Peter is pretty fun to hang out with. He is a thirty something former rock musician who now pops nicotine pills instead of chain smoking. Every time I see him he mysteriously claims that Danes, unlike Swedes, can drink responsibly, and then proceeds to lay out an assortment of drinks that scares even me. When we got home from the bar we went through a case of beer, three bottles of wine, and a bottle of scotch. I actually wanted to stop and get to bed but he was determined to get to the bottom of every topic on the planet and every bottle of alcohol in the apartment.
The next morning the girls left early to go to a horse show (thankfully we men were spared) and we got to sleep in late. Every half hour I heard wretching noise coming from the toilet and that was of course Peter the responsibly drinking Dane. At eleven o'clock I scraped myself off the floor and took a shower, cracked the last remaining beer and started watching the Tour de France.
Michael Rasmussen, a Dane, was in a solo breakaway. Suddenly Peter comes in moaning about a stomach virus but excited about Rasmussen. Stomach virus? Yeah I hear there is one going around, I say.
We watch the breakaway and Rasmussen gets a few more points in the King of the Mountain competition and then we head into Copenhagen. We take the new Oresend Bridge across the bay... the one that is 10 miles long and costs umpteen billion Kronors and is special because the Danes and Swedes couldn't agree whether to make it a tunnel or a bridge so they built a hybrid of both... the Swedish half is a bridge and the Danish half is a tunnel. Somehow it works and looks cool.
It was my first trip to Copenhagen and the city is very continental unlike Sweden. The streets are a sardine sea of tourists, freaks, drunks, shirtless partying youth. This seems a much easier place to have fun than Stockholm. We spent the rest of the time exploring Malmö and Copenhagen, going to the beach, drinking, eating out, and visiting long lost friends. Thanks for Peter, Marlen, and Ann-Marie for putting us up and for buying us so many rounds.
Note to To the Danes--> I am sorry your government had to waste 100 million Kronors providing security for Bush. However, I feel it's a small price to pay for the worldwide proliferation of terrorism ;)
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